A creator, designer, and insatiable observer of the contemporary world, Hubert de Malherbe has been exploring the realms of style, movement, and desire for over fifty years. With Dandy Crush, he offers a personal narrative in which the automobile becomes an object of memory, blending personal experience with the collective imagination.
At the heart of this story lies a legendary car: the Jaguar XK120, a legendary model produced between 1948 and 1954, which was in its day the fastest car in the world, and which, seventy years earlier, had belonged to a young American named Harlowe Rowe. With just over 12,000 units produced and now coveted by thousands of collectors worldwide, it embodies a mechanical ideal that has become rare. Between aesthetic fascination and sensitive inquiry, the car becomes the central thread of a meditation on time and transmission.
From the 1950s to the present day, the book spans the decades, retracing the story of a young man through a succession of visual and narrative tableaux. Photographs, drawings, calligrams and memories compose a nostalgic landscape in which the Jaguar appears as a talisman. It is the symbol of an era when speed, sensuality and elegance formed a modern mythology.