Christmas, which I celebrate, is coming up in just a few short days, and I’ve been thinking about gifts and celebrations from years past. Growing up in a household in which I was the middle of three sons, there was often a whole lot of sharing going on. There wasn’t an equal amount of distance in age between my two brothers and me. The eldest Dennis brother, being over six years older than me, was kind of in his own world and category, and was treated as such. My other brother was three years and change younger than me, so he and I were often lumped into the same category, often being referred to collectively as “the boys”.
Clothing styles for young men don’t seem to change as much or as frequently as do fashions for their female counterparts. Part of my perception of this is, I’m sure, due to my somewhat relaxed dress code these days relative to when I was more conscious of what was popular or considered cool. Even so, looking at pictures of my nephews and nieces from over the past decade, my premise seems to hold water. Aside from the rapid, annual growth in kids from birth through their teenage years, it’s clear that even though the clothes worn by the young boys and girls in my extended family were different from year to year as they grew physically larger, the guys generally dressed in the same manner within, say, a three-year span of time. The girls, however, showed a more perceptible style evolution over the same stretch.
Over the course of six years, however, it’s a different ballgame. By the time I had neared the end of my elementary school years in the mid-1980s, I was suddenly being presented with my older brother’s used clothing which my mom had deemed acceptable substitutes for actually buying me all-new attire. “It fits, doesn’t it? Those slacks look great on you! You look bustin’.” That last word was one attempt from my very conservative, middle-of-the-road, non-urban, very White mother to use some of the street slang she had heard us kids use around the house. What I couldn’t understand is how my older brother had managed to keep those old clothes looking so great, and also how my mom had managed to preserve them, as if cryogenically. Didn’t he ever roughhouse with his friends? I thought for sure that I had witnessed this. All three Dennis brothers used to “wrestle” all the time in our living room before getting yelled at and warned not to break anything. This whole clothing thing felt like a conspiracy.
My older brother had graduated elementary school in the late ’70s. Needless to say, there was a world of difference between what kids were wearing around the time that Deney Terrio was hosting “Dance Fever” on Saturday nights, and the high-tech mid-’80s. I suffered through brown, bell-bottomed corduroys and country-themed plaid shirts with pearlescent buttons and silver threads woven in. I might even have tried a bit of sabotage by casually being less-than-careful with those ’70s relics by “accidentally” falling off my bike or sliding on the grass during a game of “tag” played on our front lawn, but I learned very quickly that all this usually ended up doing was earning me a mismatched patch of fabric on the knees of whatever trousers I was subconsciously trying to dispose of. You can’t blame a kid for trying. The irony is that my younger brother, who was much closer to me in age, never had to go through this with my old clothes. There’s no justice.
I was one of the legions of people who thought the new-for-’89 Ford Thunderbird looked more than a little like a BMW 6-Series. I mean, come on… Ford even copied the “Hofmeister kink” in the rear quarter window. It has been said that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, but what would one call this form of straight-up plagiarism? Worship? I also thought it was odd that Ford would find its aesthetic inspiration for its tenth-generation Thunderbird in a BMW design that had been on the road for over a decade, starting all the way back in 1976. For those of you who don’t remember, the concurrent, seventh-generation Thunderbird looked like this:
1978 Ford Thunderbird. Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois. Sunday, October 27, 2019.
…Which looks not at all like a BMW, even in its purest form without the custom wheels and accoutrements shown on this example.
Using a license plate search, I was able to determine that our featured car was an ’89, a final-year example, which would have been sitting at the BMW dealership at the time the new, tenth-gen Thunderbirds had just been introduced. It was originally manufactured in Dingolfing, Germany, and has the 3.4L six-cylinder engine with 208 horsepower under the hood. It weighs just north of 3,500 pounds. One source showed total 635 CSi production for ’89 being a hair over 1,000 (at 1,012), with an additional 52 “M” high-performance models that year. Total production of the 6-Series (E24) was just over 86,000 over its fourteen, official model years.
The external dimensions between the 1989 Thunderbird and 635 weren’t close at all, despite their similar profiles, with the Ford being 9.1″ longer (198.7″ vs. 189.6″), 4.8″ wider (72.7″ vs. 67.9″), and an inch lower (52.7″ vs. 53.7″). The Thunderbird also had a much longer wheelbase of 113.0″, versus the 6-Series’ 103.3″ footprint. The ’89 T-Bird seemed to have the appearance of a “Super-Sized Six Series”. Here, though, is where my clothing metaphor falls apart. While my wide flare-leg Wrangler jeans inherited from my older brother looked hopelessly unhip on me in my classroom full of kids sporting Bugle Boy trousers rolled tightly at the cuffs and Kangaroos footwear, the style of the E24 still looked pretty good in ’89, even if it was no longer at the cutting edge. The funny thing is that when the bigger BMW 8-Series came along for 1990, it ended up looking at lot like an even larger Thunderbird, down to its giant taillamps.
Everything comes full circle. The style of all of those ’70s clothes that used to cause me so much grief as a kid are now pretty much all I wear in my own time, and even sometimes at the office. The context is now completely different, given the passage of time and my ownership of the aesthetics from the decade in which I was born. Anyone with siblings will tell you accounts of fights started with the war cry of, “Stop copying me!” Ford and BMW were never “relatives”, so to speak, amid all of the different changes in ownership and acquisitions that are bound to happen with large corporations, but I still have to wonder what E24 stylist Paul Bracq thought of the ’89 Thunderbird. Whatever his thoughts, I hope they were taken as validation of his original, brilliant design.
Andersonville, Chicago, Illinois.
Sunday, July 25, 2021.
The 1989 Thunderbird print ad was sourced from the internet.
The BMW E24 is a copy itself: The Opel Commodore Coupe (1972) was still a prototype in GM’s Opel Design studio, when Bob Lutz transfered to BMW. In BMW he initiated the E24 based on the Commodore#s proportions. This is rather unkonwn in the US, since the Commodore (V-platform) has never been sold in the US.
The BMW E24 is a copy itself:
Yes, but of its predecessor, the E9 coupe, and not the Commodore, which of course was a copy of the E9. You’ve got it backwards.
I absolutely love the Chuck Jordan era of GM car design. This Commodore is a beautiful machine from all angles.
Another shot
Joe, thank you for validating my eternal happiness for being the eldest child in my family. However, while I did avoid hand-me-downs, I had to endure a mother who attempted to dress me like she dressed my father. But that’s another story for another day…
Perhaps somebody around here will know, but I am truly curious about the differences in driving dynamics between the BMW and the Thunderbird, primarily the Super Coupe. Vastly different no doubt, but as the former owner of a ’96 Thunderbird with what Ford called the “Sport Option” (which consisted of four-wheel disc brakes, 16″ wheels, and the then-discontinued Super Coupe suspension, all for $450) it would be an interesting contrast. From having driven my Thunderbird and a few regular suspension T-Birds, there was little commonality between them, which makes me curious how mine have would compared to the Bimmer.
With so few of the CSi variants produced, this was a very nice catch.
I once got to drive a BMW 733 or 735 from the early 80s, so I suspect they were close. The BMW was very teutonic – the structure was absolutely rigid, the doors closed with solid authority that sounded expensive, and there was nothing that felt like anyone anywhere in the design or manufacturing process ever asked what any individual part cost. It drove down the highway (at really high speed) without a hint of vibration.
The Thunderbirds and other Fords I have driven from that era could do some of those things, but there was always a feeling that there were compromises in the process. The switchgear was nice but not great, the doors sounded good but not great when they slammed shut, and there was always a little more need for steering corrections in even the best of them. Anyhow, that’s my 2 cents.
I regret that I never had a chance to drive one of these Thunderbirds, not even as a rental, back when they were newer cars and most were in reasonably good shape. I lack this frame of reference many of you have with actual seat time in them.
Wait… Jason, you had both ’76 and ’96 Thunderbirds? Did you write about them and I just missed that? If you did write up a comparison between the two Thunderbirds separated by twenty years, I need to go back to search the CC archives!
It wasn’t until I started writing this essay that I put two-and-two together that this was a final-year ’89. I thought it was a fitting find, as this example doesn’t look like it has received the absolute best care this far into its life – but it’s still going.
I couldn’t wear my dad’s old 70s clothes once I had developed a taste for them, as as he and I were built completely differently. I tried, though, once.
Yep, I had a both ’75 and a ’96 version of a Thunderbird. Owned the ’75 from 1993 to 1999 and the ’96 from 1996 to 2003. Both were wonderful but completely opposite in their personalities.
I haven’t written about the ’96 but I have the ’75.
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/cars-of-a-lifetime/coal-1975-ford-thunderbird-learning-to-fly/
I now feel like the most unobservant guy in the entire world, as I had never put the 6 series BMW coupe and the 89 Thunderbird together. But there they are, and when you put the two in the same context, how could the similarities possibly be missed? Even worse, I had known what the BMW 6 series was from around 1983 when they guy in charge of my law school’s placement office drove one. It stood out in the parking lot, and was evidence that unlike most law professors (who drove quite plebian cars) he had come from some money. Anyway, I vowed that one of those would be my first new car – until I found out what they cost. Ouch!
I was also really excited about the new 89 Thunderbird. I have no doubt that the car mags made the comparison, but I must have missed it. So wow, my eyes are now open.
I had the good fortune to be an oldest child, who only rarely got hand-me-downs from older cousins. There were 3 rough and tumble boys in that family, so not many clothes made it out of that house alive. Nevertheless, I feel your pain.
It was widely known and disseminated at the time that Ford benchmarked the E24 when they developed the NM12. It’s also why the program became a disaster, since Ford got too ambitious in trying to meet that standard, and as a result, development costs spiraled out of control, and it ended up being heavier (to try to equal it in rigidity and such) but most crucially, too expensive to build.
Ford mistakenly assumed that buyers would pay a premium for it; they didn’t, and Ford ended up selling gobs of low-end LX versions at a loss.
Hubris. And the polar opposite of the Fox-Tbird predecessor, which was dirt cheap to build and “good enough” for its real (not imagined) buyers.
The MN12 program was a huge black eye for Ford, which showed how out of control its development process and cost structure was. The polar opposite of Chrysler at the time.
You hit the nail on the head with the “imagined buyers”, the product planners legitimately seemed to be building a car to compete head to head with BMWs, and not the Thunderbirds actual competition actual buyers would cross shop – other domestic PLCs like the new W bodies.
Still, the platform had potential to amortize its development cost, underpinning the Continental would have been a natural move, (Continental and Mark were platformmates from 80-88) and it likely could have been adapted to underpin the Mustang(and was explored in short wheelbase test mules).
I immediately noticed the BMW/Thunderbird styling cues similarities.
As the drivetrain and interiors improved on the Birds, the exterior became more clunky with stuck on restyles.
One thing the Bird had that the BMW never had: an excellent air conditioner. SO very needed and desirable here in Hot & Humid New Orleans.
I do agree that the earliest examples had the nicest stylistic details. The minor design changes toward the end didn’t really improve the looks of the car, IMO, even if the overall look of the cars was perfectly fine.
As the current owner of a 1995 Thunderbird, I fully approve of the BMW 635 analogy! I do see the similarities, and my wife, who bought the T-bird new, remembers reading back in the 1990s that her T-bird mimicked the BMW in many regards (the dashboard slanted towards the driver being one of them).
Since my only sibling is a sister who’s 5 years older, I was spared the hand-me-down rite of passage, but I had plenty of friends whose moms said similar things about out-of-fashion clothes being “cool, or something similar.
It seems to me that the 635 could be considered the clothing equivalent of someone’s Sunday Best, rather than everyday schoolclothes. And classic fashions in more formal attire change more slowly. After all, a 10-year-old suit still likely looks current. My own current “good suit” is one that I bought about 20 years ago, and no one has (well, to my face, at least), mocked me for it. BMW designed a classic with the 635, that still manages to be classy and fashionable today, despite its age.
Even now, I’d gladly accept some decade-old hand-me-down suits from a wealthy and discriminating donor – maybe that’s why I like our Thunderbird so much!
An interesting observation about the change of pace of men’s fashions, Eric. That’s what I’ve always thought. Looking back at historical photographs there hasn’t been a whole lot of change over the past century except for the height of the collar, the width of the lapels, and the width of ties.
I wonder how much of that is because men, by and large, are less interested in fashion than women? When we have been anywhere on holiday, and go shopping, my wife always checks out the dress shops; if there are menswear stores I don’t even notice them unless they are pointedly drawn to my attention, accompanied by the introductory words “You need new…..” . Hardware and bookstores, yes, but clothing is sort of beneath my notice until something has to be thrown out. Or so I’m told. 🙂
I’ve been thinking about my “good suit” today, since I wrote the comment above. Neither my wife nor I are terribly fashion-conscious, but I remember her dress clothes from the late 1990s (my suit’s era), and they inevitably became dated quickly. I recall a few mauve and seafoam green outfits, for instance… styles that were popular in the US Midwest back then, but not exactly fashionable any longer. Meanwhile, my dark-gray suit soldiers on, and will probably be retired only if/when it becomes too tight for me…
Eric, you make some very good points about men’s formal / semi-formal wear. Like you, I think my “good” suit is probably at least 10 years old. I think that especially now, with dress codes relaxed for many things, places, and situations, suits simply don’t get as much use by us average guys.
I’ve worn a suit to weddings, funerals, and job interviews. And I think that’s basically it.
And to your last point, classic styles endure. Your 635 metaphor is a good one.
I also saw the similarity and was enthusiastic about the plagarism, though I’ve never been in a ‘bird of any generation.
But pointing to the origin of the species as being the Opel Commodore misses the earlier E9, which points to the E24 as being the glorious refresh of a 20-year old design.
My parents went from a 1982 Volvo GLE to a 1987 Ford Thunderbird LX. They couldn’t stomach the feeling of cheapness in comparison and traded it in after a few weeks at a big loss for a used 1984 Volvo 760 GLE Turbo, which they loved.
My ex and I had a ’94 T-Bird, and when we split up, I traded my ’88 T-Bird on a ’97 T-Bird, the last of the MN12 ‘Birds.
At the time, I never noticed this similarity, as BMW(s) were never really on my radar. When I heard others say things like the “Thunderbird [was] America’s Bimmer”, I thought that maybe they were talking about the independent read suspension, which was quite nice. I was kinda bummed when I went back to Ford after a decade with the Grand Prix, and realized that my Mustang’s suspension had a live rear axle. “Hadn’t Ford moved on from that?”, I thought, as my Mustang hopped around its first bumpy corner.
As to clothes? I was lucky enough to be the oldest, with my only sibling being a younger sister. However, I wish I could say that I feel for you Joseph, but it may’ve been worse for me…
You see, my Mom was a manager of a JoAnne Fabrics store. Sewing was her hobby. While you were enjoying vintage seventies clothes, I was given homemade clothing to wear to school. While my Mom was really good at sewing, other kids noticed I was dressed in far from the latest fashions. And junior high school was a brutal time for me, as I was the bullied, not the bully. High school was much better, as were my Mom’s talents at the sewing machine. I proudly wore the suit she made for me to my Junior Prom. I was stylin’!
Oh, man – RS Rick, I can only imagine what it must have been like with the homemade clothes. And this was probably decades before shows like “Project Runway”. I’m glad your mom progressed to clothing you were proud to wear. I do not knock clothing design and sewing skills – this was something I was also interested in for a future goal as a kid, before changing courses.
I was an only child but I got handmedowns that came from my oldest cousin from Wisconsin. I had no idea until one of my friends pointed out a sizeable number of the shirts I wore were for the Milwaukee Brewers, and I never faced even the slightest interest in sports, and my parents weren’t baseball fans.
The MN12 Thunderbird was much like the Taurus in its shameless aping of a German car, the biggest issue was only the base 3.8/AOD powertrain was carried over from the Fox but in a chassis over 200lbs heavier, and the supercharged version was only available as part of a lofty premium package in the SC. The performance and handling of the latter is quite good for a large heavy American coupe for its time but the lower grade LX model is very clearly a decontented version of the SC and it shows, softer springs, smaller sway bars, underpowered V6 and the interior has a lot of tells like “this is where the fog light, suspension switches and handbrake would be slot” in the standard center console or the unusually flat bucket seats that look just like SC seats but without the large inflatable bolsters.
Sadly the Taurus was arguably peak Taurus right out of the gate in 1986, or maybe 89 with the addition of the SHO, but the MN12 took a few years to get a V8, took a few more years to get a better transmission, took a few more years to get the SC handling package as an option on LXs but by that time the car was outdated in appearance and the bottom fully fell out of the coupe market. Shame since the cars were fairly remarkable, any larger RWD coupe available today has similar mechanical packaging, when the S550 Mustang started making the rounds I swore pictures of it’s “all new” IRS was straight off of a MN12.
Matt, I was actually hoping for your weigh-in, as you had a Cougar of this generation and seat time in one. And as you and Paul N. had pointed out, I guess I hadn’t realized just how decontented the LX models were relative to the goals of the initial project.
I also agree that first Taurus was the best Taurus. I’m glad those other CC reruns about it got posted today.
Still have the Cougar!
Mine’s a 94, the spec equivalent to a Tbird LX, where they were pretty well fleshed out by then. Ford underwent a changeover in options/packages in 1993 across most of their lineup called one price shopping that consolidated a lot of higher options to standard equipment that vastly improved the percieved content with the cars, and with the new drivetrain, 4.6 engine and interiors in 94 largely closed the gap with the SC for anything but all around performance, which is probably more analogous to how the Foxes were in the line
Once again a fabulous essay by Joseph Dennis. The car connection is almost superfluous; and for what it’s worth, while I am quite familiar with both these cars (and in fact saw a nice 635 last week), I never made a connection between them. As for clothes, I fortunately have only one sibling, an older sister, and didn’t have to deal with many hand-me-downs past toddler age. And I found the comments about suits interesting. I worked in the tech industry, up to fairly senior management levels including many meetings with C-level execs at multi-billion dollar Asian suppliers, and I haven’t owned a suit for 40 years.
Thank you for the kind words. As I read through your comment, I was trying to remember the last time I wore a suit for business purposes. It was probably during business travel just over two years ago. Before that, though? Probably again the year before…for business travel.