Rolling tires
Why is this woman snuggling with a radial tire on a loveseat? A look at another advertising trope, this time for tires.
Read time: 5 minutes and lots of pictures! This week: Advertising trope with tires, one of the world’s most boring products. But interesting images. Next week: I go crazy because I read an article about a piece of music whose performance lasts 639 years. It’s currently gone over two decades quite nicely, thank you very much.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote about “MoToR eyeglasses,” the curious and amusing use of the Motor magazine name to adorn ladies’ faces with fashionable eyeglasses. The habit was shared by several cover page illustrators, and was almost always a feminine affair. The only male eyeglasses-wearer I found was Santa Claus. The eyeglasses pattern formed a trope I think was intended to build a brand identity for the magazine early in its life, though I don’t think the eyeglasses trope lasted much longer than into the 1920s.
There are other habits of print advertising, too, and today’s post explores one of them. It has to do with rubber tires and the items that whirl around in them. It’s an interesting topic for a couple of reasons: it allows me to scratch the car itch I have and it relates to the development of associations that have become “natural” for today’s treatment of cars and car-related items. Many of those, of course, have to do with women — an association of sex and feminine beauty that arose early and stuck firmly to automobile culture and “automobility.”
We have become inured to the association of ladies and their tires. Together, they set a scene that seems, well, plausible enough. Nearly all of us have swung in a tire suspended from a tree branch like the Continental flapper; probably no one has shared a loveseat with a radial tire, though. Still, we accept the image and hardly note its absurdity.
Of course, tires are actually quite boring products, and tire vendors sought to make their advertisements graphically appealing or placed them in settings that associated the round rubber things with excitement. Many tire companies highlighted their wares in racing scenes or plausible and serene scenarios — a car picnic or outing, for example.
Several manufacturers used the tire as a frame. I was struck by the tactic, and below I’ve grouped some examples by “space” with the tire serving as a portal to a scene, “grace” with the tire encompassing women, and “pace” showing winged human forms. Animals and company mascots came into the picture, too.
Space …
The scheme is simple: use the circle of a tire to frame (or target) a scene, a place in space. But the marketing tactics steer what appears in the tire. The English Dunlop and the French Continental posters invite the viewer into a new world, and humans bridge the space “outside” the tire from what is pictured inside its frame. Dunlop shows a driving gentleman, neatly caped and fashionably booted, step into a countryside where a car awaits. Continental promises flirtation: A man, standing fully in the colorful world beyond, tickles the nose of a woman sleeping, as if in a hammock fashioned from the curve of a Continental tire.
Two posters, both from companies that are no longer in existence, frame the origins of their tires. Baudou bicycle tires were made in a factory near Bordeaux, France; Peter’s Union Pneumatic tires came from Frankfurt am Main. Their poster ads frame the factories in tires, and the Peter’s Union image includes a tunnel of tires with a race car barreling through it. (I cropped the Peter’s Union image.)
Both of these uses ground a narrative, telling a story of origin or placing the tire into a story involving some human activity — driving or flirting.
… Grace …
The Pirelli advertisement is striking: a rolling tire encloses a woman with a red coat and a black scarf. The scarf covers her eyes, and she holds her head as though she’s sleeping, her arms folded atop her coat. The Pirelli woman is the only one in the group who isn’t smiling, but her face is contented, her lips relaxed and her neck extended. The overall effect of the poster is both motion — the tire rolls on a road — and comfort or at least a curved, hammock-like relaxation. The message is easy to pull out of the image: Pirelli’s are comfortable to ride.
The rest of the group doesn’t tell a story as the Pirelli poster does. They are women emerging from tires, which of course is strange enough and makes the Pirelli narrative complex by contrast. As if to make up for the lack of story, three posters name the ladies. The Kelly-Springfield magazine ad even provides a virtual family album of images of “Lotta Miles” from 1894 to 1944. Goodrich’s “Miss Safety” wears a round brooch adorned with Italian and US flags.
Here, I risk a humorous rabbit hole. “Lotta Miles” has an interesting and convoluted history with a surprising connection to the Marx Brothers and … Cleopatra and Xantippe. Cleopatra? Xantippe? Noah Diamond discovered that when the woman who adopted the name Lotta Miles was 22 years old, “a 1916 item in Photoplay included Lotta Miles, along with Cleopatra, Xantippe, and Eva Tanguay, on a list of ‘Notable Women of History.’” Groucho Marx even said she was the most beautiful of women. That Lotta Miles was also at one time a model for the Kelly Tire “Lotta Miles.” The character was in some respects a media construction like Shell Oil Company’s “Carol Lane,” whose story has been delightfully “reanimated” by Melissa Dollman’s recent study. But Kelly’s Lotta was a phenomenon of print advertising, at least more than Shell’s Carol, and the name “Lotta Miles” had other relevance in show business — perhaps even more than in tire advertisement. To make matters of research interestingly messy, there was actually a company named “Lotta Miles Tire Company” and Kelly-Springfield Tire Company sued them in the 1920s for reasons I don’t quite completely understand.
… and Pace
The tire may not completely surround the god-like or angelic beings, but the encircling tire appears in these images, too. All include winged creatures, some with mythological heritage. The easiest to identify is Mercury rolling two tires for “Pneu Dunlop”; his winged helmet and sandals are the dead giveaway. He is the messenger god, fleet of foot. Goodrich’s “souple cord” tire is led by a figure invoking the Nike (or Winged Victory) of Samothrace whose statue (in the Louvre since 1866) sits on top of the ship’s bow. The “cult of the Great Gods” at Samothrace promised safety at seas to its initiates, and the famous statue likely commemorated a naval battle. In the tire poster by Jean d’Ylen she sits atop a tire, wisps of her being swirling around its foremost bend. Does the Nike of Goodrich quell road hazards and promise safety on French roads?
Other things in tires
Rolling tires, stationery tires — they seem to attract critters, too.
The trope of tires framing things doesn't appear today as much, but it may have established a familiarity of seeing tires with quite unrelated objects, including people. The association of women and tires has continued and has been oftentimes quite forthright about sexual innuendo and objectification.
Coda on posters in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertising
One of my happy discoveries as I went through the stacks of images was the artistic flair and creativity of poster advertisements. Many are strikingly effective and beautiful, depicting an energy that scarcely can be contained in the rectangular frame. “Vintage posters” have high values on the art market.
I wouldn't mind having a couple of them hanging at home.
Tags: automotive industry, automobile, cars, tires, rubber, advertising, early history of the automobile, marketing, poster, illustration
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Kelly Tires and “Lotta Miles”: Diamond, Noah. “Marxfest: Isn’t She a Beauty? The Elusive Lotta Miles.” Marxfest (blog), March 29, 2014. https://marxfest.blogspot.com/2014/03/isnt-she-beauty-elusive-lotta-miles.html.
An example of an animal in a tire last week — crocodile freed: BBC News. “Crocodile with Tyre around Neck Freed after Six Years.” Accessed February 9, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-60305402. Includes a video.
Lotta’s kinda like Carol: Dollman, Melissa. “Changing Lanes: A Reanimation of Shell Oil’s Carol Lane.” Ph.D Dissertation, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2021. https://carollaneproject.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=578aad3d851746909c6c5a83da691f13. The interactive work is completely digital and freely available on the web. Very well designed and innovative.
More interesting information on the Nike of Samothrace: Herring, Amanda. “Nike (Winged Victory) of Samothrace.” Smarthistory, August 11, 2021. https://smarthistory.org/nike-winged-victory-of-samothrace/.
Some additional results from my Pinterest spelunking: “My Saves” group of “Tires” on Pinterest (https://pin.it/EX1O41n). Lots of examples that have popped up on Pinterest. I do wish that Pinterest would develop some means of recording the provenance and, especially, the ownership of the images on the site.