Marketing term used by Chrysler
Corinthian leather is a marketing term coined by the advertising agency Bozell in 1974 to describe the leather upholstery used in certain luxury vehicles of the Chrysler automobile company. The car advertisements conceptually developed the term "Corinthian leather" to suggest a premium product of foreign origin denoting "something rich in quality, rare, and luxurious". The upholstery was in fact a domestic product made by the Radel Leather Manufacturing Company in Newark, New Jersey.
The term "Corinthian leather" first was used in the advertisements for the 1974 Imperial LeBaron, yet the featuring of that leather upholstery usually is associated with the introduction of the 1975 Cordoba, a personal luxury car of intermediate size. The success of advertising the leather upholstery associated the spokesman, the actor Ricardo Montalbán, with linking the term "Corinthian leather" as exclusive to the Cordoba model. In promoting the Cordoba car, Montalbán described a car interior that featured thickly-cushioned, luxury seats upholstered in grades of fine, soft, or rich Corinthian leather.
When asked on "Late Night with David Letterman" what the term denoted, Montalbán said that "Corinthian leather" was a marketing term. Montalbán credited commercial writer Jim Nichols for the term. In promoting the Chrysler New Yorker in 1988, Montalbán described the Corinthian leather as a "rich" leather. In the event, the leather term came to include the vinyl upholstering for interior surfaces, such as the backs of the front seats and the head rests, and the lower parts of door facings.
In the book "BAD — Or, The Dumbing of America" (1991), the literary scholar Paul Fussell said that the term "Corinthian leather" was chosen "because a reference book suggested that "Corinthian" connotes rich desirability" and so appeal to modern people who love luxury, as much as did the people of Ancient Corinth. That love of luxury of the Corinthians, Fussell noted, was “why Saint Paul selected them to receive one of his loudest moral blasts. He told them, ‘It is reported that there is fornication among you. . .’. ” Fussell concluded that whoever coined the term "Corinthian leather" would have to admit that the term itself "is just words" and that the leather in question "never saw Corinth at all."
In the episode "Full Leather Jacket" (season 2 episode 8) of The Sopranos, the character Richie Aprile mentions that a jacket he gifts to Tony Soprano is made of Corinthian leather.
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