Photo: Stefan Baldauf / Guido ten Brink
It’s been a rough year for models trying to get a job at auto shows across the planet. Thanks to, or because of the #metoo movement, this year carmakers have been much more cautious in sending female models to accompany their cars at different venues.
At the Geneva Motor Show in March, a bunch of carmakers - Nissan, Lexus, Fiat, Peugeot, Renault or SsangYong – decided to drop the use of the so-called booth girls, and publicly said they would do so.
They justified their decision using all the proper and politically correct statements required by all at a time when, for instance Ford’s North America president, Raj Nair, got kicked from the company for inappropriate behavior.
Luckily for the auto show industry as a whole, things seem to have winded down a bit and what was becoming a trend in the industry, including in racing.
For the Paris show, all those empty statements from automakers were absent. And we’re glad this is so, because, a modern trend as it might seem, hiring girls to advertise cars is a practice as old as the automobile, and separating the two might steal some of the glamour associated with such events.
Officially called promotional models, girls and cars have gone hand in hand for decades. Their presence alongside the hottest mechanical creations became so important over the years that they even got their own names, like “booth babes,” introduced in 1986, and “booth bunny” in 1989.
With very few exceptions, the two terms mentioned above were the only reasons that have at times been blamed for making models feel offended or degraded by advocates of various causes.
You can see some of the girls present at Porte de Versailles on behalf of the carmakers in the gallery attached above. Not all of them, of course, but the ones that couldn’t escape our photographers’ cameras.
They justified their decision using all the proper and politically correct statements required by all at a time when, for instance Ford’s North America president, Raj Nair, got kicked from the company for inappropriate behavior.
Luckily for the auto show industry as a whole, things seem to have winded down a bit and what was becoming a trend in the industry, including in racing.
For the Paris show, all those empty statements from automakers were absent. And we’re glad this is so, because, a modern trend as it might seem, hiring girls to advertise cars is a practice as old as the automobile, and separating the two might steal some of the glamour associated with such events.
Officially called promotional models, girls and cars have gone hand in hand for decades. Their presence alongside the hottest mechanical creations became so important over the years that they even got their own names, like “booth babes,” introduced in 1986, and “booth bunny” in 1989.
With very few exceptions, the two terms mentioned above were the only reasons that have at times been blamed for making models feel offended or degraded by advocates of various causes.
You can see some of the girls present at Porte de Versailles on behalf of the carmakers in the gallery attached above. Not all of them, of course, but the ones that couldn’t escape our photographers’ cameras.
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