By Suzanne Vanderhoef

There’s a new exhibit in St. Louis that’s literally roaring into town, but it’s probably not what you have in mind when you think of visiting an art museum. Welcome to “Roaring: Art, Fashion and the Automobile in France 1918 to 1939” at the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM).

“This is an exhibition that looks at the transformative role of the automobile and interwar France,” explains Genny Cortinovis, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at SLAM. “And I think at its core examines the relationship between art, design, fashion, and the automobile. Considering how designers are impacted by the automobile and how they impact the automobile.”

This is not the first time a major art museum has put classic automobiles on display, but it is the first time in the Gateway City and it’s the only one to examine the relationship between cars, fashion and design.

The design of each car is based on the style of the coach builder. For example, “And so these cars, for instance, are completely one-off. They are somewhat based on each coach builder had their own sort of style that they were known for. The teardrop shape, for instance, was typical of Joseph Fegoni, the coach builder behind one of the cars on display. That gives it a much sleeker line, almost like a boat, giving the impression you could glide across the road.

The ”Roaring” exhibit also features a car by the designer Desloge that is the same model as St. Louis native Josephine Baker owned and that she presented at the 1935 Concorde in Paris and was featured in one of her films.

“We really wanted to sort of celebrate her as a car collector,” says Cortinovis. “She was one of the few women that owned the cars that she presented at the Concourses.”

Even the paint schemes played an important role in the overall look and design of the high-fashion cars on display.

“It’s a design element to sort of emphasize certain aspects of the body, but in some cases it’s also used to sort of trick the eye into thinking that there’s less mass on the car than there is. There’s this kind of designer’s way to create a really smooth, aerodynamic streamlined,” says Cortinovis. “And really each car was kind of a bespoke work of oftentimes called rolling sculpture.”