Measure Of Success (II)
Only one car maker seems capable of exploiting today’s main pop cultural trend, finds Christopher Butt
Read Part I of this article here.
Trying to encapsulate today’s pop culture is akin to making sense of a dotcom behemoth’s accounting. It is, in plain terms, a convoluted mess.
Unlike the post-war years (up to and including the 1990s), there is no one overarching pop culture any longer - as betrayed by the absence of a clear decennial aesthetic over the past two decades. Globalisation and the waning dominance of the West - cultural and otherwise - all play a role in this, as does digitalisation, all of which enable extreme individual diversification and general creative stagnation at once.
Despite this fragmentation, certain phenomena still manage to exert a greater pop cultural influence than others: the Gangsta, of course, but also - increasingly so - the Legacy Remix.
Similar to Retro insofar as it rests upon a foundation made of nostalgia, the origins of the Legacy Remix are found in fashion, the movies and television. Rather than a straightforward update, Legacy Remix is about interweaving nostalgic, postmodern and original threads into one intricate pattern. Hence the simultaneous popularity of ‘70s nerd style, ‘80s big-shouldered glamour and ‘90s sports attire - not to mention Ready Player One, Cobra Kai, Top Gun - Maverick and Stranger Things.
Netflix’ Stranger Things serves as particularly insightful an example of the Legacy Remix phenomenon: Combining inspiration ranging from The Goonies to John Carpenter, its nostalgia is used as a tool, rather than an end in itself. It employs a (visually) strong past Zeitgeist on behalf of a narrative told in up-to-date fashion. This pick-and-mix approach is perfectly in keeping with a time bestowed with an overabundance of choice and a dearth of novel ideas, since it ignores the weakness of today’s mainstream pop cultural symbolism in favour of an established aesthetic, while fully benefitting from progress made in other fields (visual effects, serial storytelling).
In the automotive realm, only one car maker has so far managed to understand and capitalise on Legacy Remix on a regular basis. That this car maker is Hyundai is no coincidence, but a consequence of the South Korean company’s own recent past and its home country’s pop cultural approach.
One of the basic conditions for Hyundai designs’ recent success is the manufacturer’s lack of historical pedigree. Just as otherwise aseptic Tesla was free to reinvent Giugiaro’s DeLorean DMC-12 as a nihilistic armoured vehicle, Hyundai wasn’t bound to the style of its original Pony when envisaging the Ioniq 5 EV. Rather than strictly evoking its actual ancestor (which hardly was top-drawer ‘70s Giugiaro fair, anyway), Hyundai picked, mixed and amalgamated some of the most striking elements of il maestro’s output from that period (most obviously the Lancia Delta) with wilfully naive dot matrix graphics and other ‘80s retro-futuristic touches. As a consequence, the Ioniq 5 ended up a highly unconvincing retro take on the Pony, yet an outstanding Legacy Remix effort.
The Ioniq 6 saloon goes even further, as it owes more to Saab, Tatra and even Infiniti’s respective design legacies than Hyundai’s own back catalogue, thus lending past futuristic visions of long-gone (or irrelevant) brands a new lease of life. This, once again, is only possible because no particular forms or images are strongly associated with Hyundai’s design legacy - an absence of history providing plenty of scope to play with it.
Hyundai’s most recent N Vision 74 comes closest to being a Retro, rather than a Legacy Remix design, since it does pay more than lip service to ItalDesign’s ’74 Pony concept car. Having said that, the race car addenda, not to mention more than fleeting nods to other Giugiaro origami designs once again elevate N Vision 74 above the status of mere pastiche and straight to the apex of current pop culture.
Anno 2022, this case of design leadership could only ever be achieved in South Korea. For the East Asian country is finding itself at the forefront of several pop cultural aspects, from the movies over nightlife to food. This is the result of a concerted, governmental long-term effort to export not just goods, but Korean culture abroad - resulting, for example, in Kimchi being to today’s hipster what raw fish was to ‘80s yuppies. Yet alongside propagating its own culture, the Republic of Korea has simultaneously never secluded herself from foreign ideas, trends and talent - Peter Schreyer being a notable, but hardly exceptional example of this phenomenon.
Just as Legacy Remix blends the old with the new to create a remotely familiar, yet stimulating flavour, South Korea has mastered absorbing the existing and combining it with influences of her own - be they traditional, cutting edge, or a combination of the two.
To find such a playful, liberal stance expressed in an automobile is a rare pleasure. Maybe reports of automotive design’s creative death have been exaggerated, after all.
Image credits: Fiat Auto, Hyundai, ItalDesign, Netflix, Warner Bros.