Harper\'s Bazaar UK - 12.2019

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk

n 1906, the ‘fastest girl on Earth’, Dorothy Levitt, drove her

100-horsepower Napier K5-L48 to a new world speed record

of 91 miles per hour. Three years later, she published The

Woman and the Car, in which she advised her fellow female

drivers to carry a pair of clean gloves, a mirror to ‘see what is behind

you’, some ‘soothing’ chocolates and, most surprisingly, a ‘small

revolver’. Even in 1909, cars offered women a potent cocktail of

power, liberty, glamour and danger.

A new V&A exhibition, ‘Cars: Accelerating the Modern World’,

charts the 130-year history of this revolutionary machine. Divided

into three sections – Going Fast, Making More and Shaping Space

• and featuring 15 cars and 250 objects, the show explores cultural
  rather than technological stories. The curators Brendan Cormier
  and Elizabeth Bisley wanted to open up a conversation about the
  automobile at a moment when its future hangs in the balance.
  ‘We’re interested in using the car as a case study to look at how an
  object of design has both intended and unintended consequences,’
  says Cormier.
  Cars were an early catalyst of female autonomy and power.
  Bertha Benz, who stepped aboard her husband’s invention in 1888
  and broke the long-distance record for driving, was the first person
  in history to take a road trip. Another pioneer, Olive Schultz, used
  her ability to drive to launch a taxi service in New York in the 1910s,
  specifically to give lifts to women in the suffrage movement.
  ‘Suffragette now runs a taxicab’, exclaimed a New York Times head-
  line in 1913. As Bisley explains: ‘Cars were a useful tool for gathering
  t o g e t h e r f e m a l e a c t i v i s t s a c r o s s b i g d i s t a n c e s , p a r t i c u l a r l y i n t h e U S .’

RACING

AHEAD

A new exhibition at the V&A

explores how the invention

of cars accelerated female equality

and fuelled the rise

of free-spirited fashion

By MEG HONIGMANN

EXHIBITIONS

I

A photograph by Bill
Silano for the March
1967 issue of Harper’s
Bazaar. Above: from
the June 1955 edition
of Bazaar