Michelin in America

Marius Rossillon (1867-1946) created the rotund Michelin brand character, Bibendum in 1898, the same year that the French tyre manufacturer began selling its products in the USA. Rossillon was a professional cartoonist who signed his work with the pseudonym O’Galop. In 1911, O’Galop’s images of Bibendum would famously adorn the London HQ of Michelin, rendered in stained glass. These examples of advertising to an American audience come from 1920 by which time Bibendum had become more animated - more jovial, less sinister, no longer a deflated armadillo.  We are introduced to Bibendum as a man of the people, wrapping a protective arm around a snappily dressed customer, towering over a roadside billboard with a cigar between his lips or gazing benignly from on high as vehicles queue outside a Michelin workshop.  Elsewhere the product occupies centre stage while Bibendum, in miniature form, does a lot of gesturing and pointing. The overriding priority was that the public should accept Bibendum as an all-American and never mistake him for a cheese-eating surrender-monkey.  All Michelin advertising in 1920s America was produced in-house by locally recruited advertising managers. Some vintage postcards follow.  First is Bibendum en Famille on parade at the Nice Carnival followed by a view of the original Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand. After this is a hand-drawn card showing Bibendum en avion, taking part in an aerial targeting contest organised by the Michelin company in 1911 to support a campaign to prepare for future conflict. Last is a card and pamphlet featuring Michelin’s attempt to enter the railway market in 1933 with a diesel powered railcar that ran on rubber tyres.

Follow this link for a 2008 post about the splendid Michelin Building in London’s Fulham Road.

 

Bibendum en famille

This is a scene to warm the heart. An exuberant celebration of family values to inspire the hedonists of the French Riviera to forgo their licentious ways in favour of the simple pleasures of domesticity. The slightly flaccid family Bibendum gesture expansively to the adoring crowd from their precarious position on the roof of an oversized motor car, drawn by a team of patient horses. The carnival in Nice continues to thrive to the present day and has expanded to an entire fortnight of events. Bibendum continues to dedicate his existence to marketing Michelin tires and his story has been told in detail in a number of books. So great is his hold on our collective imagination that there are even those who confess that they have surrendered to his warm embrace in their dreams. A final bonus is a postcard view of the great Michelin factory in Clermont-Ferrand.

Nunc est Bibendum

About ten minutes walk south from Albertopolis is the wonderful Michelin Building at 81 Fulham Road. In January 2011 it will be a century since its inauguration. But despite its great age it remains in excellent condition with virtually all the original decoration intact. It was a remarkable conception to design a building that, in its entirety, functioned as an enormous permanent advertisement for Michelin products. In doing so it had one great advantage over all its rivals in the existence of a uniquely successful brand character, Monsieur Bibendum, ripe for exploitation. The image of Bibendum is everywhere on this building in two and three dimensions plus, spectacularly, in stained glass. Every facade and every feature is designed to reinforce the Michelin brand and embed it in the public consciousness. In this sense it has a clear affinity with the Victorian tradition of narrative architecture typical of nearby Albertopolis. It could even be argued that the intensity of commercial imagery begins to take on transcendent or religious overtones. The prominent stained glass feature and the chapel-like frontage on to Fulham Road possess an almost spiritual fervour.

According to Olivier Darmon’s book, ‘One Hundred Years of the Michelin Man’, the character made his debut in April 1898, his form having been inspired by a stack of tyres. The artist responsible was the splendidly named O’Galop. Images of Bibendum rapidly proliferated in poster campaigns and public appearances to the point where it very quickly became one of the best known characters of the century. Rotund, bespectacled and non-threatening, Bibendum was ideally equipped to achieve an extraordinarily high degree of public recognition. The Michelin company was relentless in the deployment of its mascot in the service of publicity; it has been estimated that more than 20,000 images of Bibendum were circulated between 1898 and 1930. The unique brilliance of this character is that it can be inserted into virtually any situation and a humorous response is guaranteed.

When I was a student in this part of London in the 1960’s this building was much admired, I suspect, in part, because its playful air matched the prevailing Pop Art sensibility. It was riotously eccentric and also contained echoes of the Art Nouveau tradition which was being rehabilitated at the time. The building survives resplendent in its present incarnation as Food Hall and Restaurant. The only disappointment of my recent visit was discovering that contractors have surrounded all of the Fulham Road frontage and part of the Sloane Avenue frontage with a gigantic excavation making photography extremely difficult. So most of these views are of details and the bigger picture will have to wait for another occasion.