Giorgetto Giugiaro: the century's pencil in the service of a young marque

At eighty-eight, Giorgetto Giugiaro has nothing left to prove to anyone. Which is exactly what makes his agreement so hard to obtain.

Who Giorgetto Giugiaro is

Born in 1938 in Piedmont, Giorgetto Giugiaro is the most significant living Italian car designer. In 1999 an international jury named him Car Designer of the Century, a title awarded only once. He had founded Italdesign in 1968, a studio that would redefine how European manufacturers conceive their cars: no longer a body drawn after the fact, but a complete project carried from the first volume through to industrialisation.

His catalogue runs past two hundred models, from which some sixty million cars have been built. The Lotus Esprit is his, so are the Lancia Delta and the DeLorean DMC-12, along with a long list of everyday cars that millions of drivers have owned without ever knowing who drew them. That may be his real distinction: having signed both collectors' objects and ordinary transport with the same insistence on proportion. Few creators in any discipline can claim to have had their work distributed on such a scale, and fewer still across such a range.

Bertone, Pininfarina, Giugiaro

The history of Italian design rests on three names. Bertone, the Turin house responsible for some of the most radical shapes of the post-war era. Pininfarina, which drew the Ferraris and shaped the world's very idea of what an Italian sports car looks like. And Giugiaro, the third, who took drawing into the factory.

Between them those three houses gave Turin a particular status: that of a world capital of car design, with its coachbuilders, its modellers, its subcontractors, a culture of the line handed down from workshop to workshop. It is no accident that Laffite Automobili is based in that city. A car of this order is not built just anywhere: it needs the fabric that goes with it.

A drawing does not decorate a race car: it decides what the car will be capable of doing.

GFG Style, and the trust granted

Giorgetto Giugiaro works today alongside his son Fabrizio at GFG Style. It is that studio which drew the Laffite Automobili cars, over a six-month design process. Six months, for a marque still being born, represents a considerable commitment from a studio free to choose its clients among the most established manufacturers on earth.

Because that is what is really at stake: a matter of trust rather than of contract. A designer of that standing puts his name on the line, and his name is worth more than any fee. Agreeing to draw for a young marque means believing the project will be seen through, that the car will genuinely exist, that it will be built to the level of the drawing. Bruno Laffite earned that credit, which says a good deal about the technical seriousness of the undertaking.

For Laffite Automobili the consequences go well beyond aesthetics. A body signed GFG Style places the marque immediately within a lineage, that of the Turin school, and sets a standard the rest of the chain has to meet. Coachwork of that quality obliges the chassis, the aerodynamics and the finish to rise to the same level. That is how an intuition carried for twenty years by a former racing driver found its final form, under the pencil of an eighty-eight year old man who is still drawing.