Euro metal and Eurotrash girls

Posted by Tom Ford at 4:55PM on Tuesday 06 March, 2007 0 Comments

Cars and girls.

Yep, I get it. It's a sex thing and cars have always had a relationship plaited tightly around the increase of sex appeal proportionate to the cost/speed/slickness of your chosen ride.

But I'm still surprised by the number of cars here in Geneva propped up by a set of plastic boobs. I thought this stuff went AWOL in the late seventies but no, it seems that the very sexist world of motoring is putting the official leer back on the agenda.

Get this. I've just looked at four cars which all had ladies attending to them. Ask them a question about the cars however, and once you've worked through the heavy Dutch/Parisian/Eurotrash accent and the swollen lippage, you find that these ladies are the salad garnish to the main metal meal. They serve no actual purpose.

I know, I shouldn't be surprised. But I am.

I'm not naive. I'm have to put my hands up and say that I do find a car more interesting with a pretty girl in it - in the same way that I tend not to smile at builders in transits vans in the same way as I do as a group of Hawaiian Tropic models in an Audi Cabrio.

But I can't help but feel that the steel buns on offer are here to distract from the certain shortcomings on the cars. Nobody here has noticed the flaky paint on the Alfa stand, mainly because the ladies standing in front look like the kind of women that appear in specialist videos.

Everyone is trying to inveigle themselves onto the Ferrari stand for the lemon-scented and swathed beauties, even there's very little new metal to play with. And as for the Tramontana stand with its leatherette hotpants, well, you're wading through sticky ropes of drool just to get home.

The other slightly disturbing issue is that nobody ever tells you how hot it is at these shows. Man, it took about an hour before I started melting, but worse than that, it's hot and there are thousands of middle-aged men sweating to death in dark suits leering over models sprawled suggestively over bonnets.

Sex might be selling in the pictures, but here in the flesh, it's not quite as spectacular as it looks.