Cars: Accelerating the Modern World


Confused exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at the design and influence of cars.

I admit I don’t drive and can’t really tell one car from another except by colour so I suspected this might not be a show for me. It covered so many aspects of the subject from the design of cars themselves, to their effect on marketing, how they changed the landscape with more roads, their invention of mass production and their influence on design. If it had focused on just a few aspects it might have worked better.

The design of the show itself was clever with the large cars around the edge and along the middle of the huge space and the display’s weaving their way around the rest of the space. I loved the way some of the displays were modeled on car bonnets and that any clothes were shown on crash test dummies.

There were some lovely snippets in the show such as the handbag shown here which was designed for the Doge la Femme in 1955, aimed at women with a pale pink interior and this bag and accessories. Very un PC but fun! I liked the section on mass production including a wonderful mural of the Model T Ford assembly line and a display of Fordlandia, the companies rubber plant in the rain forest abandoned in 1945.

Closes 19 April 2020

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