Vehicular lighting has long been a signifier of status, dating back to the earliest days of the automobile. In fact, I seem to recall some exchange from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man that involved an argument about acetylene vs. electric headlights on a car, and the relative status each affords, though I can’t seem to find any references to it online. Was it some other book? It’s driving me crazy. Well, still, the point holds: lighting design has always done its best to convey status, from the early days of those strange, slitty Woodlites to the elegant or elaborate LED strips of light used on modern cars in ever-more ornate ways and designs. But for most of the 20th century in America, the options for headlights were incredibly restrictive; from the 1940s to the 1950s, it was just two round sealed beams; then, two or four round sealed beams. Finally, by the 1970s you could have round or rectangular lights, but that was about it. So designers had to get clever. Sometimes, they had to get downright weird.
In 1961, Chrysler’s Imperial designers had a big job ahead of them: They had to design Chrysler’s luxury flagship, something that unmistakably conveyed wealth and class, even if you were seeing it from across a crowded parking lot or through multiple panes of leaded glass. The Imperial’s styling had a very specific job to do; it had to do the equivalent of sending a fervent man in an expensive suit out to everyone who sees the car, grabbing them by the shoulders, and explaining to them, loudly and forcefully, that they do not have nearly as much money or taste as the people in that Imperial do, and they never will, but by feeling intense envy for the Imperial owners, maybe they can find some shallow meaning in their tragic, shabby lives.
That’s what is expected of the look of the Imperial. And yet, somehow, the designers of the Imperial were expected to accomplish this task using the same shitty round headlights that any dirtbag in a Velveeta-stained T-shirt would have installed in his Chevy. These things:
Yep, the same basic round lamps that have been around since the ’40s. Well, these were the slightly smaller dual ones legalized in 1957, but the idea is the same. So, how did Chrysler’s designers solve this problem? They looked to the past!
By “they” I mostly mean the legendary Virgil Exner, who was in charge of Chrysler’s Foward Look designs, which included the 1961-1963 Imperial. To get the sort of classiness and elegance demanded by the project, Exner made the unusual decision of designing headlights that were not integrated into the bodywork, something that had fallen out of favor around the later 1930s.
Exner’s love of the details of early 20th-century automotive design, before all of the expected elements of cars became integrated into a cohesive whole, was a persistent theme in his career. In 1963, he designed some “revival” cars for a 1963 Esquire magazine feature, bringing back some long-gone but legendary marques like Stutz, Mercer, Packard, and Duesenberg. Then, in the 1970s, Exner took another shot at reviving Stutz with the Blackhawk, a car that was owned by both Elvis and Evel Knievel. These cars featured large headlamps, not integrated directly into the bodywork. But before all of these, Exner first tried this strange and bold concept on the Imperial.
Just take a look at this:
See what’s going on there? They look like the lights you’d see on a Meyers Manx or some other VW-based dune buggy. The bodywork, otherwise quite modern (well, early 1960s modern) has some large volumes scooped out to allow for the placement of a pair of gumdrop-shaped chrome headlamps, the sorts of things you’d see mounted on a car from the late 1920s or perhaps a dune buggy or even a Citroën 2CV (which, being built until 1990, had to be one of the last holdouts of this sort of headlamp design): 
I’m not sure I can adequately convey how deeply weird this was. The 2CV at least had an archaic 1930s body style with separate fenders that was actually the sort of environment these kinds of lights existed in. The Imperial wasn’t like that at all; it was almost like Exner’s team took an ice cream scoop to the previous generation car and just gouged out material (the red area below there) until they left little caves for the chromed lights to exist in.
It’s just so strange and perhaps even a touch misguided? I mean, I love Exner and his unhinged exuberance, and I do think these bizarre headlamps did bring some drama and gravity to the Imperial. I mean, let’s look at this thing again, in all its painterly-enhanced glory:
I mean, say what you will about the inherent absurdity of designing a car with weird headlights in funny little caverns, but I do think it worked. This thing has some drama. And, in case you think this may be some clever sheet-metal illusion, here are some images of old Imperial headlights for sale on eBay to confirm that these are indeed independent, gumdrop-shaped lights – though, interestingly, they are paired units:
This is a trend that seems to be very, very dead, as far as I can tell, though with all of the advances and freedom offered with modern composite lighting design, perhaps some daring designer will choose to throw some LEDs into stalked, chromed lollipops and refer back to this strange and exciting period of automotive lighting design.
