The Lincoln Premiere show car was designed to capture the excitement of an opening night at the theater, but it was the name that stuck around.

In 1953 and once again in 1954, the Lincoln-Mercury division of the Ford Motor Company—rather uncharacteristically—sent out entire fleets of specially prepared cars to decorate the auto show circuit in Chicago, Detroit, and elsewhere. With a few notable exceptions these cars were closely based on production vehicles, but they were full of novel ideas.

Benson Ford, the middle brother of the three Ford grandsons, was then head of the Lincoln-Mercury division, and he worked closely with L-M chief stylist Bill Schmidt, designer of the famed Lincoln Futura, to lead the effort. With its formal black/white color theme, this show car was intended to capture the glamor and excitement of an opening night at the theater, according to the press materials. It was called the Lincoln Premiere.

The major attraction of the Premiere, based on a ’54 Capri, was its Rohm & Haas Plexiglas roof panel, a feature already in production that year on the Ford Skyliner and Mercury Sun Valley. (Check our feature on the glasstop Ford and Mercury here.) Why production Lincolns didn’t get the plastic roof, we don’t know. The back half of the hardtop roof, covered in padded white vinyl, was custom as well, with a delta-shaped C-pillar and a unique wraparound backlite. The one-off upholstery was white vinyl with inserts of pinstriped gray in worsted broadcloth.

Looking closely at the very few available photos, we can see that some of the Premiere’s elements, including the tail lamp treatment, foreshadowed the production ’55 Lincoln. Where all these ’53 and ’54 Lincoln-Mercury show cars ended up is unclear. A few have survived, but mainly they simply disappeared. With the Premiere, the latter seems to be the case. But the Premiere name continued on, becoming a full model in the Lincoln lineup in 1956 and remaining there through 1960.