Working as the Feature Editor of the World's Leading Truck Publication, I review all the feature trucks that make their way into the pages of Truckin' from a pile of film to the finished layout. During the countless hours I spend at our office's giant light table picking the clearest, best-focused, and best-lit photography to please our widespread audience, lately my eyes have been glued on trucks featuring loads of retro styling. Like it or not, the trends developed in the '50s and '60s are making their way onto many current platform Bow Tie, Blue Oval, and Ram pickups, and the results are stunning. For many late-model truck owners, modifications like traditional flames with candies, flakes, and pearls take them back to their youth, when nights were spent hanging out at the local burger joint and girls on roller skates brought shakes, burgers, and fries right up to the windows of many '55-'57 Chevys and chop-top Mercurys.
Today, within the custom truck scene, we are seeing the past coming back, as many enthusiasts are taking the custom flavor of the '50s and '60s and building their current rides with old-school flames, lots of chrome, large-diameter billet wheels with a classic twist, and old-school pinstriping licking up the tailgates and hoods. Slowly, trucks featuring aggressive tribal flames, chrome wheels, and interiors using strange materials and graphic patterns are beginning to fade, and the theory of less is more is starting to play a role again in the way show trucks are being built and presented to the custom truck community. There is a reason these classic trends continue to live on. In our opinion, they are timeless and tasteful, and when striving to build a truck that will not have to be redone every few seasons, these are a few goals to shoot for.
Many enthusiasts in the current custom truck scenery are influenced by their fathers, who impressed upon their young ones the trends they used while building their cars and trucks growing up, and as a result, many newcomers to the custom truck culture are using old styling to build their trucks.
On another note, old-schooling your truck is significantly cheaper than going with costly current trends. Covering your hauler's body with a coat of DP 90 flat black while incorporating some pinstriping or flames over the top will definitely not break the bank, and rolling some old steel wheels contrasting the body color will help pad your wallet as well. Preserving the heritage of America's hot-rod past on today's trucks is an exciting thing, and we can't wait to see more examples of how today's enthusiast uses the timeless trends of the past to help shape the future of building custom trucks. Until next month, keep hitting those switches, cranking good tunes (such as Twisted Sister or Motley Crue), and cruising until your heart's content.