Ed Roth decals

Ed Roth decals

Few car cult figures are as renowned as Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. Born in Beverly Hills in 1932, Roth came of age in post-war Southern California, the cultural epicenter of hot rodding. During the 1960s, Roth was a celebrity, a larger-than-life character with a beatnik beard who spoke in hep-cat lingo and was always hamming it up for the camera. More than his contemporaries Von Dutch and the Barris brothers Sam and George, Roth grasped the marketing potential of the trappings of the custom car counterculture and understood how to promote them to teenagers. In 1959, he opened Roth Studios in Maywood, a suburb of Los Angeles. Roth conceived a highly recognizable corpus of automotive and monster iconography that was printed on shirts, decals, and virtually anything else that could be sold by mail-order or at car shows.