Chevrolet’s Bow Tie Turns 100

General Motors The logo from Chevrolet’s 1936 truck lineup. Chevrolet first used its bow tie logo in 1913 (only two years after the marque’s formation), for the 1914 model year lineup. Essentially a cross with the horizontal bar italicized and longer than the vertical one, with the word CHEVROLET written in all caps inside, the basic shape hasn’t changed over the last 100 years.
As long as you aren’t someone who’s been mistreated in some way by a Chevrolet product, the logo looks cool and has become one of corporate marketing’s most recognizable shapes. The big question is, where did that shape come from?

General Motors The Chevrolet bow tie was introduced in 1913 on the 1914 H-2 Royal Mail and the H-4 Baby Grand. The truth is, the Chevy bow ties’s origins are somewhat murky. Growing up, I always figured that because the Chevrolet brothers were French Swiss racecar drivers, the bow tie emblem I saw sitting atop the hoods of Caprices and Malibus must, like the fleur-de-lis, be a French symbol.
Of course I was wrong, but whether the Chevrolet bow tie was imbued with deep meaning for William C. Durant, the co-founder of Chevrolet with Louis Chevrolet (probably not), or was an arbitrary this-looks-cool-and-will-help-me-sell-cars sort of thing (probably so) isn’t important. After 100 years representing a brand that’s gone through many ups and downs, the italicized Swiss cross, or whatever it is, has one meaning now: Chevrolet.

General Motors The 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air saw the same Chevy logo as the original, albeit sans letters and with an upgraded background. If you wore one of these things in front of your collar as an actual bow tie, you would look silly. But at the front end of a Chevrolet, well, there aren’t many (if any) people left on Earth who can remember looking at a Chevy and not seeing it in some form or other. And there are a lot of Chevy bow ties floating around. According to General Motors, there are 60 million bow tie-clad Chevrolets on the road and about 215 million have worn it since 1913.
So where did the symbol come from? There are a variety of answers, and at this point, so long after the company’s deceased founders – themselves wrapped in layer after layer of enigmatic, self-promotional image building – there’s no one around who can say for sure.

General Motors The 1974 Chevrolet Imapa. The prevailing myth for a number of decades was that Mr. Durant had seen the bow tie shape on wallpaper at in a hotel room in Paris. But a 1929 book by his daughter, Margery, said that Mr. Durant had doodled it on a napkin at the dinner table.
Margery’s mother, Catherine Durant, had a different memory: her husband had seen the design in the paper when they were vacationing in Hot Springs, Va. She wasn’t more specific than that, but Ken Kaufman, a Chevrolet historian, deduced that the inspiration could have come from a nearly identical cross shape for Coalettes – “The Little Coals With the Big Heat!” – that Kaufman found advertised in a 1911 edition of The Atlanta Constitution.
Whatever the case, Chevrolet needn’t be concerned about Coalettes filing a trademark infringement lawsuit. According to a search through the Internet-based trademark search engine provided by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Coalettes probably didn’t register the odd bow tie symbol as its trademark. Also, Chevy’s isn’t quite the same. Coalettes italicized the entire cross, while Chevrolet has always left the center section stovebolt upright.

General Motors The 2014 Chevrolet Camaro SS.