American Automotive Design Trends / The Couture Car: High Style for High Society

James Kaster seems to be the author to go to for easily accessible (especially in Kindle format) reading material on the 1970s and 1980s US car scene, with other publications covering the cars sold by the US car manufacturers in the 1980s ( Those 80s Cars - Ford , Those 80s Cars - AMC & Chrysler  and  Those 80s Cars - GM ) and some other US centric developments like opera windows and personal luxury cars ( American Automotive Design Trends / Opera Windows: Fashion over Function  and  American Automotive Design Trends / The Personal Luxury Car: Selling a Lifestyle ).In this volume he covers the so called 'Couture Cars', basically models with customized interiors / color schemes, co-developed by various fashion designers. While the trend kicked off with AMC, it is really Lincoln that followed this most persistently, all the way from 1976 to 2003.The book will come with pictures (inside and out) of every single Couture Car and provides readers with excerpts of the marketing text that went with them back in the day. This makes for quite interesting reading, especially in the case of several well known European designer brands, which initially appear to have benefited at least as much as the car manufacturers did - several early descriptions including paragraphs on whthe designers were and why they were 'desirable'.At the same time the materials ram home the point made by Brock Yates in his  The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry  - namely that US car makers sadly chose to focus on form over function, thereby slowly but surely surrendering their position in the marketplace (a customized paint / interior package costs very little to develop; at the same time it also eventually gets you out of the consideration set of younger buyers, who got used to higher levels of technical excellence that was increasingly lacking in US cars).The book does not cover technical details but if you are curious about 1970s Gucci branded AMCs or the long relationships between Cartier, Givenchy and Lincoln, or even the Lincoln supported entry into the market of Gianni Versace, the book is certainly worth a look.