STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

Nostalgia was once defined as a psychosis. Certainly it’s an emotional disorder, because the sufferer believes the best is in the past, whereas ‘desire’ presumes that pleasure is to come in future. As the sensible among us believe it will. Morris Dancers and people who thatch roofs are, for example, nostalgic. So that’s the end of that argument.

Is there any more nostalgic term than ‘coupé’? Today it evokes a lost world of indulgence, a world where functionality is sacrificed and glamour promoted, where the profile of your car was more important than its passenger capacity. There never was a rational reason for wanting a coupé. But who wrote the rule that we must be rational?

The word coupé is French for ‘cut’ and, like cabriolet, berline and limousine, derives from the old carriage trade. A cut carriage was one reduced to having no rearward-facing seats and room for just two, brave, forward-looking passengers. This sense survives in the American hot-rodders’ argot, where a Ford Model A might be ‘cut and shut’, meaning lowered and shortened.

We still, perhaps pedantically, pronounce it koo-pay, but Americans, strangers to anything Gallic other than French Toast, prefer koop. And that’s the way designers tend to say it nowadays. As if to demonstrate how romance has been leached from our troubled world, ISO 3833 defines a coupé in terms of doors and windows. But then you cannot define style. And in the US, the Society of Automotive Engineering (founded by Henry Ford) has a definition that the interior volume should not be greater than 33 cubic feet. I can imagine the dazzling creative brief to the studio from the marketeers that would result.

What were the most beautiful coupés? I have a soft spot for those American cars of the 1930s known as ‘business coupes’, which meant two-door hardtops with the back-seat stripped out so as to provide space for the travelling salesman’s samples. An Edward Hopper aura of melancholic glamour attaches to these cars: you’d find one parked near the Nighthawks diner, I’m certain.

But coupés don’t have to be two-doors. The sub-genre of four-door coupé was established in David Bache’s wonderfully cut Rover P5 Coupé of 1962, for which the word ‘handsome’ might have been coined. It has more recently been taken up by the Germans. But the Germans never had a Noël Coward-like figure.

Yet the Germans did make the finest coupé ever: the BMW 3.0 CS, which ended production in 1975. Sharp corporate elbows attributed the design to studio boss Wilhelm Hofmeister, but anyone with eyes to see can detect in its sculpture the very sure hand of Turin’s Giovanni Michelotti. All its signature features established the winning BMW design language… until the Bangle Butt gave elegance the bum’s rush in Bavaria.

Now there is a BMW 2-series Gran Coupé, our latest four-door koop, a fine Post-Modern Industrial product but a car with muddled semantics. You could use it as a case study for young designers: a coupé must be elegant, but it is impossible to bestow elegance on a small car. The bargain between proportions and ergonomics does not work.

Historically, coupés gave manufacturers the opportunity to charge more for less: fewer doors, fewer seats, less metal. But with the BMW 2GC, there has been a peculiar Kunstwollen (which art historians use to mean the defining style of the age) to give rather more than is necessary, at least aesthetically. Its post-Bangle butt looks like an anthology of morphology.

My first prolonged BMW experience was over 40 years ago, when I was planning London’s Design Museum. I spent time researching in Munich’s Neue Sammlung fur Angewandte Kunst and got to know its director Wend Fischer, and his BMW, well. I admired Wend’s erudition as much as I admired the clarity and restraint of the car’s design. But in 2020, a BMW coupé interior is a dizzying blur of swooping lines and irrational shapes. Beautifully manufactured but artistically confusing. Its bizarre trim with back-lit cross-hatching would have had Walter Gropius reaching for his gun.

And in the rear there are strangely sculpted doors, busy details (those nets for magazines no-one will ever read!), while a sportlich roofline speaks of joyful travel that has no connection with the drab routine of everyday traffic, an experience more about tedium and endurance than elegance and style.

Maybe that is the point. I felt it was rather like kissing my sister. I don’t actually have a sister, yet I can imagine the curious equation between daring transgression and familiar custom. I think maybe the coupé idea is redundant.

And I can see now that it’s making me feel nostalgic.

‘BMW’S TRIM WITH BACK-LIT CROSSHATCHING WOULD HAVE HAD WALTER GROPIUS REACHING FOR HIS GUN’

STEPHEN BAYLEY SB is the individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined. He was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.