...long before pimping meant anything to do with vehicles, apart from generating the money to buy one — a couple of imaginative lads started playing around with extra decoration to tart up the cars and bikes of the day.
This started the movement that specialised in elegant pinstriping and stunning graphics, developing a particular focus on skulls, dragons, mythology and scantily clad beauties.
One of the legends of the early art form was Kenny Howard, a hard-living, eccentric biker mechanic who famously said he “made a point of living right at the edge of poverty. I don’t have a pair of pants without a hole in them.”
Ironically, his heirs sold his trade name, Von Dutch, to a clothing company and it has since been marketed into a multinational collection worn by people who have no idea of its gritty origins.
Which just shows how fashion can cannibalise anything.
And fashion in cars is no different. While the heyday of pinstriping and airbrush art came and went (and yes, it did go, once people started realising how much harder it was to repair a $2000 custom paint job over which somebody had scrawled `I love Mum’ with a coin edge) the urge to personalise transport has never died away. Sadly.
Fortunately for the public eye, most of the decoration over the past few decades has been in the form of highly visible application of literary text, intended to say something deep and significant about the personality of the car’s owner.
You’ve probably enjoyed reading some of them while following the vehicles through traffic. Rumpig: signifying a stumbling incipient alcoholic who should have the keys to their weaving car ripped from the ignition before they finally veer completely into your lane. Or 0-to-`Bitch’ in 60 seconds (0-to- `Use The Indicator’ in about the same time if you’re lucky). And our particular favourite: Baby On Board – which usually also means Mobile in Hand and Fag in Mouth as a complete expression of concern for child safety.
There’s also been a sideline in old vans being covered in lurid graphics and text — that often need some careful explaining to curious children in nearby traffic — then flogged as rentals to unsuspecting backpackers.
Then there’s been the spreading weedpatch of flower stickers. It started with a frangipani or two, and now it seems every second car needs a decent dose of Round-Up before we’d consider being seen in it.
And now car fashion has turned full circle with the launch of Cruzeink’s range of stick-on decals that the press blurb describes as “edgy graphic designs and art which is too good to be hidden behind closed doors”.
And what’s on offer? Cruzeink managing director Wayne Smith reckons the company expects to see “a great demand for our dragon tattoos from the boys and the girls going wild for some stunning flower graphics.”
So are these just more car stickers? No, Cruzeinks says. These are “car tattoos” – because of course tattoos are much edgier than stickers.
And the range on offer? Well, there are skulls, dragons, stripes, waves and swirls, bubbles and some tribal designs blatantly stolen from Pacific island cultures.
So, no L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E scrawled in prison style across the knuckles, or roughly penned heart with MUM, then? Von Dutch – had he survived his lifestyle — would be shaking his nicotine-wreathed head in despair.
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