My pen design road trip continues with two very cool designs by the legendary Giorgetto Giugiaro of Italdesign. Known for his ‘wedge’ aesthetic in styling Italian sports cars of the late 70s and 80s periods, it is perhaps ironic that one of his most recognizable works was for a now defunct American car company, the DeLorean DMC-12 from 1981.
Made famous in the Back to the Future movies as the fantastical machine that accelerated to 88 MPH to leap through time, the DMC-12 had all the requisite Guigiaro touches like a rakish profile, sharp lines and even gull-wing doors. But by the time BTTF was in production in 1984, the DeLorean Motor Company had already gone out of business. But… ! It had the looks that the art department wanted, and as Doc Brown said: “If you’re going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”
There are many cool miniatures of the movie versions, with assorted sci-fi bits bolted onto the original frame. But if you wanted the clean configuration, tough luck! In the end, I checked out several Hot Wheels editions, and gave up due to the exaggerated wheel sizes, oddball color schemes, and cartoony tinted windows. The one I ended up with was a 1/64 scale model made by ‘MJ Models’ as part of their BTTF line-up. I was sold by their brushed steel finish.
And as for the matching pencil? In a twist of fate, the Parker Itala was also a ‘dead end product’. Produced at a time when Parker was facing financial and market challenges, the Made-In-Japan plastic wonder was hated by George Parker II, who saw it as a disposable design and an affront to the brand’s legacy. He famously fired the CEO and the marketing agency and ordered stocks of the Itala to be destroyed. Somehow, many of them ended up in lower tier Asian markets in the 1980s, which is when I bought a grey one for myself as a teenage student in Singapore. Read more on Parker Pens Penography.
The Itala’s dart shape with the flared grip and sensible grooves was very comfortable in hand, and the twist-to-extend tip effectively made it a double-knock before I even knew about the term. I certainly didn’t mind at all that it was mostly plastic. It had a printed arrow on the clip, which felt cool, young and different. This was at the same time that Pentel released the BK-301 Flexiball by Emilio Ambasz, the bendy pen that you could wear safely in your pants pocket. Both bore the name of their designers and introduced me to the concept of ‘affordable designer goods’.
So although things didn’t work out for DeLorean or the Parker Itala, both of these designs left an indelible mark on my teen consciousness. Have you tried either one in real life?
