Slather your Fiesta with bacon!

Today, trends have little in the way staying power. In fact, we're astonished that the default image-meme typeface is still Impact. The recent MTV VMAs inspired much hand-wringing about Miley Cyrus' tweakoid performance, but the truly startling thing was that *NSYNC was pretty much as close as the show got to a legacy act. Then again, today's tweens weren't even born when Lou Perlman put Timberlake, Fatone, Bass, Kirkpatrick and Chasez together. A few years after that group's breakup, San Francisco-based poster artist and rad dude Lil Tuffy began hosting a night at some divey joint where bacon was served as part of the proceedings.

This was not necessarily the beginning of bacon's new-found cachet, but it was your author's first awareness of it. Not long after, his fellow autojournalists began swooning over Bacon Salt. Soon, baconic allegiance was being claimed everywhere; it'd crossed the line from a, “Hey, you know? Bacon's underappreciated and really pretty good,” sort of thing to a full-blooded cultural phenomenon.

Trend pieces began running in the mainstream media, spinning tales of bacon luring vegetarians back over to the side of the carnivore. We'd reached maximum bacon-grease saturation. Bacon remains bacon, but any illusion that it has any sort of hip cachet is akin to the belief that Lana Del Rey is in any way edgy.

It's perfectly reasonable to enjoy the savory meat-treat, but its time as a cultural signifier has passed, which makes the timing of Ford's bacon stripe and wrap packages for the Fiesta an interesting one.

The automaker's made no secret of its desire to target twentysomethings with the Fiesta. And perhaps Coldplay fans still high on the bacon craze have more disposable income than poster artists or kids throwing basement shows for 60 friends and that one old guy who's kicked around the scene forever; the one who stands in the back, arms crossed, curtly nods his approval when something's good and leaves when the set's over.

What's more, given bacon's long history as a staple foodstuff in America, it seems less cloying and ridiculous than Chevy's new MyLink skin, which offers the driver the option of swapping the infotainment system's standard icons for a bunch of cartoony faces of broad, hip-kid stereotypes. Were said kids actually part of the target demo for the Impala, anyway? At least Coca-Cola had the sense to throw a pile of money at Dan Clowes to do the OK Soda graphics 20 years ago. And, um, that still flopped.

The factory bacon stripes and wraps, on the other hand, are sold through Ford's Custom Graphics department. For a couple hundred bucks (plus installation), you can festoon your Fiesta with factory-official rasher stripes. The full wrap will run you precisely $3,347.00. Once again, installation is your own responsibility. (No word as to whether Ford ever plans to offer a Pogues wrap).

Bear in mind, the bacon trend is a bit under a decade old. It took Pierre Cardin over 20 years from the opening of his own fashion house until he scored his very fender badge on the AMC Javelin. By that metric, Dearborn's practically cutting edge. In fact, given the shorter and shorter timeframes we're seeing for trends to render themselves retro-chic, Ford may actually be slightly ahead of the curve.

Ford's offering the graphics in celebration of International Bacon Day. We don't expect the 17-model-year run Ford's Lincoln unit gave Bill Blass, so if you're desirous of a bacon Fiesta, you'd best act now. Regardless, 30 years from now, somebody will undoubtedly pull a mint bacon-striped Fiesta into a car show. People will ooh and ahh. A few will remember. Others will be inspired to think, “Hey, remember that weird period in the aughts and teens where for some reason, we decided that bacon was the neatest thing ever? Maybe we should have breakfast for dinner tonight.”

By Davey G. Johnson