03 Jul Stories From the Stacks: Chevvie Bowtie
A regular series about the museum’s motoring memorabilia and behind-the-scenes activities, compiled and written by FMM’s Assistant Curator Sian Theron. This month, Sian goes back in time and dresses up with a bowtie…
A snippet of motoring history reaches a significant milestone this year as the Chevrolet ‘bowtie’ logo celebrates making its debut 110 years ago. There are a few possible theories behind the roots of the design, all of which make for pretty good ‘origins stories…’
Probably the most well-known of the origin stories comes from The Chevrolet Story which purports that William C Durant, one of the co-founders of Chevrolet, was on a trip in France and encountered a design on the wallpaper in his hotel room in Paris that caught his eye. As the story goes, he was so taken with the design that he ripped a small piece of the wallpaper off the wall and took it back to the States with him, where it was used to help inspire the design Chevy logo.
The other stories come from reminiscences of the Durant family. William’s daughter mentions that she remembers her father doodling at the meal table at home, sketching designs, until one day he created the now well-known bowtie design. His wife had another version that, again, came from a hotel stay, this time in Hot Springs in 1912. According to Mrs Durant, The inspiration came from a newspaper, wherein Durant noticed a design and thought it would convert into a logo nicely. Yet another version is that the bowtie shape was taken from the Swiss cross, although somewhat squashed and altered in recognition of Louis Chevrolet, who was born in Switzerland…
Regardless of how the logo came into being, the classic Chevrolet bowtie has been a staple insignia of American and global motoring for 110 years. The logo itself has remained largely unchanged from 1913 other than slight changes to colour, which has been gold since 2004.
The Franschhoek Motor Museum is fortunate enough to be in possession of a number of classic Chevrolets, as well as some great Chevy memorabilia that beautifully illustrates the bowtie. In particular, we have a lovely grille emblem dating to around circa 1938, which likely fronted a Chev Master 2-door Coach or Deluxe coach. The emblem has a slight curve to it, as it was designed to sit just below the tip of the nose of the bonnet and stretched down onto the grille.
Because wandering amongst the stacks and in the storage rooms is an occupational pastime for museum curators, I had some good fun looking for all the variations of the logo I could find in the museum’s collection of Chevrolets. We have a lovely example on a 1938 Chevy Coach Master and I was also able to find a blue-and-white variation on a 1927 LCV, a more modern iteration of the gold on a 1995 Chevy Suburban, as well as on the 2004 Chevy Brute. In between, while the bowtie shape does not change much, it has been either plain silver, blue or blue with lettering inside the emblem. Regardless of colour, the Chevy bowtie remains a motoring icon.
