The history and mystery of the Chevrolet Bowtie

As Chevrolet approaches its 100th anniversary on November 3, 2011, it has still not managed to solve the mystery behind the most recognizable automotive emblem in the Middle East – the iconic Chevrolet bowtie.

The Chevrolet bowtie logo was introduced by company co-founder William C. Durant in late 1913. But how it came to be synonymous with the brand is open to wide interpretation.

The official version of how the logo came into existence is well-known. The story, as confirmed by William Durant himself, is that it was inspired by the wallpaper design in a Parisian hotel. According to The Chevrolet Story of 1961, an official company publication celebrating Chevrolet's 50^th anniversary, 'It originated in Durant's imagination when, as a world traveler in 1908, he saw the pattern marching off into infinity as a design on wallpaper in a French hotel. He tore off a piece of the wallpaper and kept it to show friends, with the thought that it would make a good nameplate for a car.'

However, there are conflicting accounts on its origin including, intriguingly, two from within the Durant family itself. In 1929, William Durant's daughter, Margery, published the book My Father. In it, she told how he sometimes doodled nameplate designs on pieces of paper at the dinner table. 'I think it was between the soup and the fried chicken one night that he sketched out the design that is used on the Chevrolet car to this day,' was her story about the birth of the bowtie.

Over half a century later however, yet another tale emerged, this time recounted in an issue of Chevrolet Pro Management Magazine from 1986. Interviewed 13 years previously, William's wife Catherine recalled how she and her husband were on holiday in Hot Springs, Virginia, U.S.A., in 1912. While reading a newspaper in their hotel room, William spotted a design and exclaimed "I think this would be a very good emblem for the Chevrolet" Unfortunately, at the time, she didn't exactly clarify what the motif was, or how it was used.

That nugget of information inspired Ken Kaufmann, historian and editor of The Chevrolet Review, enough to go searching for its validity. What he found out was fascinating. In a November 12, 1911 edition of The Constitution newspaper from Georgia, USA, he came across an advert placed by the Southern Compressed Coal Company for its Coalettes product, a refined fuel for fires. The Coalettes logo was a slanted bowtie very similar to the shape that would soon become the icon of Chevrolet. Was this the same – or a similar – ad that William Durant and his wife would see the following year, a few states to the north? The date of the paper only adds further fuel to the fire, if you'll pardon the pun, for the Chevrolet Motor Company was incorporated just nine days previously.

Within a few years though, the bowtie would begin to emerge as the definitive Chevrolet logo; an October 2, 1913 edition of The Washington Post seems, so far, to be the earliest known example of the symbol being used to advertise the brand. 'Look for this nameplate' it proclaims above the emblem. And customers all over the world have been ever since.

However, the legends don't end there. Yet another explanation attributes the design to a stylised version of the cross of the Swiss flag, Louis Chevrolet having been born in the country, at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Canton of Neuchâtel, to French parents, on Christmas Day 1878. 

Whatever the truth – which will probably never be fully-known now – one thing is certain; that the Chevrolet gold bowtie stands just as much today for quality, reliability and affordability as it always has done over the past 98 years.