Packard Clipper - Style Identity

Style Identity

A full envelope body of genuinely modern mien was a long time coming at the Packard Motor Car Company. Cadillac was wearing pontoon fenders and flowing lines by 1934 and had adopted all-steel bodies by 1935. In 1936, Lincoln announced the Zephyr, with an all steel unit-body and a shape so advanced that derivations of it were still in production twelve years later. By comparison, Packard adhered to tradition if crisp, conservative styling. Its main acknowledgement of new-era styling was the skirted fender which appeared in 1933. Packard, like Lincoln and Cadillac, had survived the Depression by building medium-priced cars: the One Twenty, Zephyr and LaSalle, respectively. But unlike its rivals, Packard styling had remained arch-traditional. Unlike Lincoln, Packard followed its medium-priced One-Twenty with an almost-low-priced car, the Six (later briefly known as the One Ten). Unlike Cadillac, Packard refused to market its cheaper models by a different name and remained wedded to them long after prosperity had returned. By 1941, the year the Clipper debuted, the cheapest Cadillac cost $1,445; the cheapest Packard sold for only $927.

Arguably its conservative design philosophy had stood Packard well in the years leading up to the Clipper. The company was able to advertise—and sold quite a few Packards with—styling continuity from year to year. There was a family resemblance between a 1939, say, and a 1932. In 1939 comparison of its One Twenty with the LaSalle, the company declared that: "Packard has style identity...Packard styling is consistent..But look at the 1938 LaSalle! About the only similarity is in the name, and who can be sure that a sudden fanciful style change won't make the 1939 a style orphan?"

Mercedes-Benz and Rolls-Royce survived for years with very expensive obsolete designs. Packard also survived with limited styling change for at least eight or nine years up through 1940. What's more, Packard hallmarks were very good ones: the chiseled frontispiece; the grille recalling classic Greek architecture; the ox-yoke radiator/bonnet shape that harked back to the noble Model L of 1904. What's more, the pelican mascot, red hexagon hubs and arrowhead side-spear were a combination at least as recognizable and timeless as the stand-up hood ornament and meshwork grille of Mercedes-Benz. Together, these consistent hallmarks unmistakably said "Packard" to school children and bankers alike and had been the adornments of the chosen transport of moneyed America since Packard's Boss of the Road Six and Twin Six of the Teens and early Twenties.

To create a modern envelope body while retaining those famous hallmarks was no small undertaking. It is still one of the chief accomplishments of automotive industrial design that the people who created the Packard Clipper were able to do so flawlessly. Advertising invited America to "Skipper the Clipper" in 1941. It was showing the country an obviously brand-new, up-to-date, in Packard's words, "Windstream" or "Speed-Stream" automobile, yet one that was undeniably a Packard. Though it did not owe a curve or contour to any previous model, the milestone 1941 Clipper carried the same inimitable radiator and hood shape, the same arrowheads and red hexes, the same long hood and close-coupled profile of great Packards of the past. The smooth styling transition was a stroke of genius. When the Clipper debuted in late spring, 1941, many thought it more successfully avant garde than the 1936–37 Cord 810/812, more offhandedly elegant than Lincoln's Zephyr, which many wags called a "Ford and a half." Faced with the same conundrum of appearing modern, an envelope body at odds with a mandatory trademark, a vertical radiator grille, Rolls-Royce could do little better in autumn, 1955 than offer a razor-edged 1941 Packard Clipper, albeit with a curved, one-piece winshield, as their new Silver Cloud and concurrent Bentley S-series.