Who do you want to be? How do you get there? Let's talk to the people in those positions. On your journey to becoming you, welcome to the first episode of Becoming You. My name is Earl Stokes, and I have here with me Ralph Gilles. Two ways—some people say GS, some people say JS, but I believe it's JS, correct?
All right, I'm on track. It's JS.
Ralph, the head of design for Stellantis. Before we get started, I was just telling him that this is a meaningful episode for me because this is a guy that I looked up to growing up. When the 300 hit the streets, it was a cultural thing, and that's when I really started paying attention to you and your backstory. Pretty much anybody can accomplish anything—that's what this is to me. Even though you're still in the job, you're a living legend. I hope you know that—you're a living legend in the car community. You made automotive designer trendy. I don't know how you did it, but when you started showing up in blue jeans and all that stuff on TV when everybody else wore two-thousand-dollar suits... we're here to talk about his life and how it got to this point. He actually broke through the mold that we all face, even people of color. So before we get started, automotive is not just a career for you. What are some of your favorite things to do with vehicles outside of work—the pastime?
Well, for me, I've loved cars since I was seven years old. I noticed the aesthetic piece, but what I found out very quickly is the social piece. Even at school, just liking cars was a great connector—no one cared what you looked like or what your background was if you had something in common. A lot of TV shows were centered around car culture: Magnum P.I., Dukes of Hazzard, all that fun stuff, and movies left and right. So it was the start of this love affair, and then design eventually started to matter to me. I started noticing why I had an emotional feeling about one car and a different feeling about another, and started to think about all those dynamics.
Nice, nice. Like I said, your backstory—so many things were me. If I had something like this back when I stopped going to college and saw your story, I probably would have went back, but life took over. Let's start from the beginning. I know you were born in New York and raised in Montreal, if I can ask—what caused that transition?
My parents were immigrants from Haiti. They were just finding their legs in New York, which was a pretty hectic town. They witnessed a mugging, and my mom literally wanted to raise us in a safer environment. A lot of Haitians, being that French is the main language, Quebec was a natural choice. Montreal—they could find work rather easily at the time. So they said, what the hell, it's cold up there. They were cold in Detroit even. We grew up not knowing any better. I was only ten months old, my brother was a little older. They picked up and rooted it. It brought a whole different perspective. Montreal is a much smaller city than New York, but not as diverse. Right away I probably started feeling that I was a little different in some respects, so I was forced to adapt and learn to manage myself around very different types of people.
That's interesting. Did you learn—do you speak French?
Man, I got to catch up, man. I'm sure my wife will love me even more after that one. All right, so let's start from the beginning. This is about your life—we're trying to figure out what chemicals and everything got intertwined to make you this big-shot designer. Going to grade school, was there any automotive ideas in your head at that point?
Not yet. I was into art in general. I used to like to draw. During math class, whatever class it was, I was in the margins always sketching something. I joke I grew up in the ugly '70s—the cars were not so good. During the OPEC era, the gas crisis, cars were going from big V8s to front-wheel-drive and economy cars. Japanese cars were starting to become imported as entry-level cars. It was a really bizarre time, and I noticed that as a kid. I'd read magazines and see Porsches, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris, and then I'd look on the road and see Pintos and Gremlins and Datsuns. Like, what is this all about? If you watch movies from that time, you see the same thing in traffic.
Okay, I can see that. Nice, nice. What kind of kid were you—sports or hobbies?
Oh man, I was a nerd. I admired kids that could play sports. I was not big on sports. I spent all my time sketching. I couldn't play basketball—I was too short. Racket sports—I had no coordination. Running I was pretty good at, I could do track. My high school didn't have football or anything like that.
Okay, and you went to high school in Montreal?
So at this point, we'll leave elementary and middle school—pretty much the same story: nerd, no sports, none of that stuff. What did you do in the summer?
I drew. I drew a lot. I really enjoyed drawing. I would go around on my bike everywhere, just pick up things, hang out with my buddies. I liked to build model rockets—I got into that, lost a lot of rockets into trees and stuff. So I got a bit of a scientist side to me. I love making things. I made a lot of plastic model cars—that was my only favorite because it was about getting cars. I could build a Porsche 930, a Lamborghini, a '68 Charger—all Revell. I think Revell was the brand. I had tons of them, and then I put firecrackers in them and blew them up.
There's the guy that's coming out right there. There's the boy. Exactly.
That kind of stuff, but always around cars. My mother bought me model cars all the time, and I hated the way the remote-control cars looked, so I would take it apart—the die-cast cars. My mother's somewhat of an electrician, so I would definitely merge them. Oh, it needs the rim from my other car—I'd tear it up as soon as I got outside.
No, I love that right there. So coming into high school, I know you were really starting to notice how gifted you were in drawing, I should say—were you homing in on design yet?
Started to, yeah. What happened was I was just good at art—everything that had to do with art, I was naturally good at. I saw it as a creative thing. I even got into the yearbook—I found out those skills transferred into layout. I was part of the yearbook committee for three years. Back then the yearbook was like the holy grail—all the girls wanted to get to know me so we could get their picture in the yearbook. We didn't think about that. Then what happened was there was an exchange student from Japan who came in, and he could really draw. Back then I was the best sketcher in all of high school, and this kid comes along and he's on another level. I had never had any competition, so I thought I was pretty good. I saw his work and he was next level, and it motivated me to double down on my craft. I'd go home after school, do my homework, and then go to the basement and just start sketching and practicing. I got better and better, and eventually I showed it to him. The teacher saw us comparing, and they had an art opening at our high school—they put our work in the glass cabinets so everybody could see. Everybody was fighting about who was the better artist, but it turns out we just loved the fact that we could share a common passion.
Yeah, I was the same way. Mine was always in the glass cases. I was the kid in high school—I didn't have to do any of the art projects because my teacher knew. My first challenge with art was when my teacher had me enter the 2006 design competition. I was a junior in high school—that was a lot of pressure for me. I don't know what ever happened with that. For the record, I designed a Bentley truck that was fully—
You're of right—exactly, not on the scale of mine. Mine is a big Suburban-size, you know, Detroit in the background and everything. But man, the creativity here—I love it.
So in high school, I'm going to ask you the same questions: what were your hobbies, what did you do?
Like I said, the yearbook club—I did a little writing and stuff like that. The drama club—I enjoyed that, but really the yearbook club was my biggest thing. You're going to laugh again—being a nerd, I was on the badminton team. So we'd travel for badminton of all things. All the cool guys are playing cool sports, and I'm—um, I could say, in high school I wouldn't have known what that was. He said, what is that? A sport? Never heard of it. Weird, weird thing. The one thing I was mad about—our high school had phased out shop class, because had that been there, I would have taken it. I love to tinker, I love wrenching. Something I did my last two years of high school—I went to Oakland Technical Campus half the day, got certified in body collision, because when I became a car designer, I wanted to know every aspect of it. I'm going to design it, I went to college for animation, I'm going to animate it—I don't need the team to just fix everything. But as you get older, you realize team is everything.
Of course. Now, before we leave high school—cool cars. What was your first car?
My first car—you won't even know what it is. Maybe you'll find it on the internet. It's an Austin Marina, a British car that is ugly. An uncle had it rotting away in his backyard, and he literally said, if you need a car, once you try to get that thing running. And I did—I worked on it. And then my mom, out of sheer mercy, had it painted real quick for me—kind of a maaco job. They get rusted in place, terrible car. But I had no heat for two winters, and I couldn't feel my fingers in Montreal.
We complain about Michigan—we'd be scraping windows on the inside, not the outside, just so you could see. The things you don't think about—like I said, make you work harder. It's like, I don't want this to be my reality. I can't talk crap to anybody else about being cold in Michigan. That's an interesting insight. So now here we are in high school—was there anybody at this point that motivated you or that you were interested in?
Well, it was my aunt. In the summers I would go to New York—this might be out there, I know it's out there—but I spent summers at her place. I would sketch all the time. I worked at a local grocery store just to make the summer go by, and again when I got home I was sketching. She noticed my obsession with drawing and sketching and trying to design the future of cars, and she motivated me. She said, do you really love this? I always thought it was a hobby—I didn't think of it as a career. I really thought, hey, it's something fun to do. And she goes, why don't you do this for a living? Don't they have people? I didn't think that cars came from designers—I thought cars came from engineers. She said, yes, they do. Then why don't you do it? Yeah, when I was fifteen years old. She literally made me write a letter to Lee Iacocca, the head of Chrysler. Back then, the only reason she picked him was because he was on TV all the time making car commercials. He was one of the few CEOs of, 'Better idea,' or 'If you can find a better car by it.' That was an aggressive commercial.
That was an aggressive commercial. You ever seen that famous commercial? My wife over there—
Very, very aggressive. So she said, let's write a letter to that guy. She looked him up and we did, and they wrote back. This took about a month, and they wrote back and said, we see some skill here. They recommended some design schools to me. Again, at that time there was no internet, so I didn't know what they were talking about. Slightly before Montana—one in Detroit, one in New York, there was one in California. That seemed so far away from me, from Montreal. Just the U.S. period was cringe at the time.
Okay, nice. So was there anyone you admired at this point as a designer?
Yes, Giugiaro. I really loved his work because I was a big fan of the Lotus Esprit back then, and the Volkswagen Golf GTI, and Citroëns. I didn't know—I did some research, and I found this name kept coming up. All the cars I liked were by Giugiaro, who is still alive today. Great designer. He had his own firm, worked with Pininfarina—they would contract design, the way he works in Italy. The design houses and different OEMs come and ask them to do work for them. Then I found out about Gandini and all these other amazing designers—typically Italians, except those were the famous ones that made the beautiful cars I loved. Then I learned later about Virgil Exner from Chrysler and Harley Earl from GM, and started to really understand it. Wow, there are these people behind these cars—they don't just happen. Very inspiring for me.
Harley Earl—does he have a silver Cord? I believe that's on display somewhere.
Oh, he had several. He would make concept cars that he would drive home. When I see his name on a car, I actually make sure I take a picture next to it. This is my car.
The fact that the big-shot designers would create their dream cars and actually make them and drive them—that's cool, man. Really cool. That was the idea you had right there, a little bit.
Yeah, I wanted to be in that industry. I never thought for a mad day that I would be head of design of anything—I just thought I'd get to doodle for a living.
I mean, you have a great story. It seemed like it happened so fast for you.
At the time, yeah. And we talk about it, but yeah.
All right, let me stay on track here. So we're still in the high school stage. Now let's jump to senior year—what were your ideas, what were you going to do graduation?
Well, by then I had this in the back of my mind—the idea of being a designer going to school in Detroit was still there. Affordability-wise, we couldn't afford it as a family yet. So I actually decided to go to college in Montreal, Canada. I was going to pick sciences and try to become some kind of engineer, but I realized I wasn't doing so good. I didn't like it—I didn't like calculus and trigonometry at that level. I was okay in high school, but college was a different thing. I lost interest and dropped out. Actually dropped out of college. And you have to understand, I have two Caribbean parents that are hardcore education-first. My brother's in med school, two years ahead of me. They did all this work to get you guys over—exactly. I'm the black sheep of the family, dropping out of college, going to the basement and playing video games and doodling cars. They thought the doodling cars was just a silly hobby—they didn't really see any future in it.
So your auntie and your brother were pretty much the only believers.
Exactly. And I was lost, I have to be honest. I know a lot of kids go through that time in their lives—I was truly lost. I didn't know what I was going to do. I kept looking for work. I loved my job at the hardware store—I used to unload semi-trucks. Hey, I'll be a manager or something. I actually did that—within three months I got promoted to manager. And I saw, hey, I have a career here, let's go, let's get on and buy some car. So, and my brother came home from college. Again, my biggest fan was my brother. He was in med school—a real studious guy. He could play any sport he wanted to—six-four, muscle-bound guy, but he was really fascinated with education. And he said, you know why don't you—that doodling thing you like to do—why don't you try doing that for a living? I'm like, huh? That was it. That doodling thing you like to do. Just like that.
Wow. He wasn't artistic himself?
He didn't—I'm the only artistic person in my immediate family. Yeah, we have some cousins that do paintings and competitions on holidays—pull out a napkin and just fun stuff, yeah.
Of course. Okay, cool, cool, cool. So was there a point—now you can give me an age right here—where the hardware store, sitting in the basement, just wasn't enough?
It was starting to be, yeah. So we're talking about April. I dropped out pretty much right away in October of—I think 1987 I dropped out. I worked a solid four or five months at the hardware store, and already I was starting to feel like, I don't know, I could do this the rest of my life, but is it really? I need something. I've been joking that I created the gap year before it was a thing. Now it's fashionable to do these gap years—that's standard nowadays. But I needed... I do say with my daughters and whoever I talk to—it's okay. I think people need time to figure out what they want to do, and I needed that time. Today you have the internet, obviously, you can kind of figure it out. But I had a hollow feeling in my stomach that this wasn't my destiny—to work at a hardware store. So I needed that nudge. I needed that support from my brother to finally do it.
Gotcha. So CCS, I guess that's the next topic. Sitting at home drawing—now from what I know, your brother—you just said your brother came home. Take it off from there.
He was on spring break. Now he could have gone with his buddies to Florida and had fun, but he decided to go home. He wanted to engage me. He was on a mission to figure out how he could help. So my parents were telling him, your brother's lost. My parents hadn't given up on me necessarily, but just didn't know what to tell me, because I didn't want to do engineering. So he said, let's go find that letter. I had kind of put the letter aside that I got from Chrysler. We looked at it, and it had those schools. We actually called up the school in Detroit—CCS—which I ended up going to. They called back and said, we'll fax you over. So my mom used to work at a place and she brought it home. She said, this is what you need: ten pieces of art that demonstrate your abilities. I only had maybe one or two pieces that I would be proud enough to send to them, so I had to make new stuff. My brother goes, well, deadline is this Friday and it's Tuesday—what are we going to do? So we started. First time in my life I ever had coffee—what is this stuff? We're going to make coffee. He literally brewed me coffee. He went to the store with me, got supplies and paper, and we just started sketching. He played music for me and just kept pumping me up—every time I wanted to fall asleep, he was, 'Get up, boy, get back on it.' Boom, military. Oh yeah, he was quite a guy, big guy too. So yeah, we just had fun, actually. We bonded over it. I did those ten pieces, we rolled them up, put them in a tube, overnighted them. And I got an answer back in a couple weeks, and that changed my life. I remember opening the letter, shaking—it was not that thick of a letter. I'm like, I think it's a rejection letter. And it turned out to be an acceptance.
So you're cool, because you're automatically—rejection? Yeah. Then you saw the price.
Yeah, then I saw the price. I'm like, what? It was like seven thousand nine hundred US a year. At the time, that was a mind-blowing amount of money, because education was free in Canada. So here I had another decision to make—I stay in Canada and get free college, or do I go to the U.S. and take the piggy bank, or whatever I got to do. It was a big deal at the time, and we were a lower-middle-class family. We didn't have that much, because they were putting everything into my brother's career. So I asked for every piece of overtime I could find at the hardware store, started banking every penny, and I actually saved up enough to pay for my first year of college.
Oh wow. So you pretty much did overtime at that store until it was time to come to America, I should say.
I worked right to the end, and I put in my resignation, and I got in the car and my grandparents drove me to school.
So you need your own Coming to America. That's what's time for—a Coming to America documentary. So okay, cool. Now even with all that being said—how old, how much older is your brother, by the way?
Two and a half years. You said seven thousand dollars—and I went off to college in 2007, and man, it was a lot higher than that. That's why I wanted to go straight to CCS. I had done half my submission, my five drawings, and it's like, you know what, I'm not going to make it. So the goal was to go off for two years and come back home, but like I said, life takes over.
It's great that you had that one person, your brother, that said that. Where would you be?
I don't know. Don't get me wrong, your parents care, but like you said, they didn't know how to get to you.
I think I would have been doing something else in Canada, most likely.
Okay. I'm the oldest of my siblings, so I wish I had a big brother. That's cool. So now we're going off to CCS. Are you fully mentally invested in automotive design at this point, or are you just going with the wind?
CCS was a reality check. What I mean by that is, it's one thing to get to a school like that, just to be accepted, but it doesn't mean you're going to be a car designer. You're now thrown into a pool of a hundred and sixty kids that all want to be car designers, and all want to be—exactly. At the time, they said to us, well, if all of you here, only maybe fifteen of you will graduate as car designers. And I'm like, whoa. I use this analogy all the time—it's like, you know, if you're a fan of Marvel or X-Men, imagine going to the X-Men mansion and seeing all these people that have superpowers. All of a sudden you feel—I'm not that kid in high school who's the best anymore. I'm just another typical design student. So it really made me step up my game. But that's actually the best thing about going to schools like CCS and Art Center and those kind of colleges—you're now competing with the best of the best, or at least you're in the big leagues, but you have to earn your way beyond that. What happens in those schools is some end up staying in automotive design, some become product designers, some become fashion designers or sci-fi movie set designers. There's all these different fields I didn't even know about, and I learned it. I started to think, should I be a product designer instead? But again, the love affair with cars just kept pushing me.
Now speaking of all those different fields—fashion design, was that pretty new when you got to CCS?
Yeah, I didn't know. I knew it was out there, but I didn't know the school did that. It's even bigger now. You have interior design, you got exhibit design—there's all kinds of types. CCS, I didn't know it was that much variety. It's incredible. The school is really—even from when I've gone there, there's so many more things they offer. It's fantastic.
You're part of a board there, right?
So you're there pretty much for every graduation?
Well, that must be nice—to keep going back to your roots. Does it ever—I mean, do you ever just sit back and get humbled, like, I was that guy in that seat who wasn't sure if I was going to make it?
All the time. Every time I sit and retell it, or I meet someone who's on the other end of it dreaming—I'll even have a memory. I sit there going, wow, my life could be very different. So it makes me very grateful. To this day, I never take it for granted. I don't walk around like a peacock, you know what I mean?
Right. There's millions of people that wanted those same shoes, and you happened to accomplish it. I can imagine that almost brings a tear to your eye if nobody's watching. So here we are—you're in CCS. By the way, before we move on, do you have a favorite piece in your ten-piece design collection that you sent off?
Yeah, somewhere in there. I think it's a car I did—actually named it. I used to dream about my own car company. The name of the car was my last name, Gilles. And it was so funny, first... it's cool, this car is doing a drift. I look at it now and it's actually a lot of work, but it's a terribly proportioned car.
