Word: fad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Fake Wheels. To cash in on the sports car fad, Los Angeles' Calnevar Co. brought out a "simulated wire wheel," a stainless-steel, spoked disk which can be snapped on in place of the conventional hubcap. Good for any U.S. car (except Studebaker, Lincoln and the Nash Ambassador), Calnevar's sporty gadget covers the entire wheel, looks like the real thing. Calnevar has orders for 50,000, expects to sell 250,000 in 1953. Price: $99.50 to $109.50 for a set of four (real wire wheels cost $300 extra a set). But the company may find the competition...
Studebaker, hoping to cash in on the sport-car fad, will be designed along racy continental lines. Its smaller car will be only about 55 in. high (v. the present 61¼ in.); its larger car will be about 60 in. high...
Carlotta, says one of her friends, is possessed by "the Zeitgeist." For her, everything runs by fad: in the '30s she marched in Union Square, now she cultivates her ego. Still beautiful in middle age, her mind as sleek as her skin, shrewd in business, burning with vanity, oozing prefabricated charm, she personifies the glossiest in Manhattan nightclub and summer-resort society. One weekend, in the summer of 1950, while the radio hums with reports of war in Korea, Carlotta throws a party in East Hampton for a speculator in money and models, a fellow-traveling movie director...
...what the fashion-conscious Radcliffe girl will wear as both New York and Paris, miming modern living with styles the rage of a quarter and half century ago, are inflating hips, deflating waists, and elating connoseurs of costume. Skirts have shrunk, blouses have balooned, and poodles have passed. The fad follower will wear green and love leather. In a bucket hat, barrel coat, and a beer bottle silhouette, she will look like nothing so much as a walking Schlitz...
...insult everyone in sight, at sight. She told reporters that she couldn't remember whether she was married or not, but that she did have five children-"three of them colored." She wore a baggy sweater and patched blue dungaree pants (now a national fad but in 1932 a scandal), and read her mail sitting on the curb outside the studio...