Matthew is on the cover of the new issue of Details Magazine. Click here to watch a video clip of the cover shoot and head over to the Lost Forum for magazine scans by the wonderful MWT.
In a nondescript garage on a dead-end street in an industrial neighborhood south of Los Angeles, a half-dozen motorheads gaze in reverence at the time-warped creature that sits before them, a visitor from a distant era when men were men and horsepower was the ultimate in masculine cool. “This thing,” says Fast Ed the upholstery guy, “is going to be a monster.” The man standing next to him, beer in hand, nods idly, but his mind is elsewhere. He’s here for only a few days, and there’s much to be done. The Grand National Roadster Show at the Fairplex in Pomona is less than three months away. The 502-horsepower big-block Chevy engine has yet to be installed, and the avocado-colored bull leather must still be stitched into the interior. Right now, Matthew Fox’s attention is riveted on the automotive artisan intently laying pin-striped tape in flowing flame shapes onto the bulbous ebony flanks of a sweetly sinister 1950 Mercury.
“They’re going to be ghost flames, pearl-green—you’ll hardly see them,” Fox says. “If you put a flame job on it that’s not right, it’ll fuck everything up.”
In a black blazer, white T-shirt, and black jeans, with touches of gray flecking the tops of his sideburns, he’s absurdly handsome in person, way too modelesque for the surroundings. But he’s supremely at ease amid the litter of the shop, the oil and machinery and half-restored carcasses of Studebakers and Porsches. On this day, his garage band of brothers seems to know him only as one of its own: a guy with the good taste—and sufficient funds—to restore a true Detroit classic.
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