The Pirelli Style: From the Economic Boom to the 2000s

In 1950s Italy, there was a great desire for reconstruction after the end of the war: production infrastructure, transport routes, goods, and services were all needed. The time had come for Pirelli to create a new headquarters in the centre of Milan, to reopen factories around the world, to launch a magazine of its own, and to present its products in a completely new way. Under the guidance of its director Arrigo Castellani, the company’s advertising department underwent an artistic and cultural renaissance, thanks to a group of young designers who pooled their energies in Centro, a single in-house agency. Starting from here, we can retrace the history of Pirelli’s communication with a look – as broad as possible – at the advertising campaigns now preserved in our Historical Archive.

Some of the advertisements are world-famous, while many others are still unexhibited but are now available on our website. We find the collective campaigns of the 1950s on the theme of travel, and then, in the 1960s, the arrival of advertisements that reflect the powerful style and personality of the top designers of the time. The 1970s gave a new role to both tyre dealers and customers in Pirelli advertising. And then, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, came campaigns that opened up to international markets, through to the era of the great athlete-endorsers, who were called in to portray one of Pirelli’s most iconic slogans: Power is Nothing without Control. Opening up to the world of cinema in the advertisements of the 2000s.