ROME – Giancarlo Perini, automotive journalist and great popularizer of car design, has died. Born in 1944 in Limbiate in the province of Milan, he graduated in Economics and Commerce and, after experiences in fields other than engines, he approached the automotive sector by collaborating at the end of the 60s as a PR with Giorgetto Giugiaro, with Sirp which later became Italdesign.
His contacts with companies and the Japanese press began during that period. “With his skills Giancarlo played an important role – Giorgetto Giugiaro recalls – in making Italian design and companies known in that market”. At the beginning of the 1970s Perini collaborated in the birth of the Japanese periodical Car Styling, founded together with Akira Fujimoto and which has represented the academic and informative reference for generations of designers from all over the world. Fujimoto himself remembers Giancarlo Perini as follows: “We didn’t know how to speak to each other because of the language barrier but we were in great harmony. We have been so for the whole life of his creature Car Styling. A creature adopted by me with love and passion and never neglected. I’m sure he now rests in peace. I want to remember him with his sweet smile and the style of a serene teacher. A friend of hundreds, thousands of students who have become automotive design professionals over time “.
From the important experience with Car Styling, Perini’s activities extend to the Italian press (including La Repubblica) and to the USA (first Crain Group, Automotive News and then Ward’s Auto) with a growing following of the public in Japan, so much so that its image becomes a manga in a series of cartoons dedicated to the world of exotic cars and supercars.
Perini also becomes one of the promoters of the Designer’s Nights, events dedicated to the professional world that still take place today in every part of the world, in conjunction with the Salone and other international events. Through his activities first in the print world, and then on the web, Giancarlo Perini broadens his knowledge of automotive design activities to still ‘peripheral’ countries and launches teaching and training courses, through which many great professionals in the sector have passed.
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