What Does the Chrysler Logo Mean? The Pentastar and the Wings

The Pentastar is built from five separate triangles arranged so their bases trace a pentagon. None of them touch. The star you see is the white space left between them, which is why the mark is hard to sketch freehand. The corporate version used the blue the page calls Pentastar Blue, with heavy black capitals underneath.

It dates from 1962. Chrysler wanted a single symbol that could sit over all of its brands, and the New York design firm Lippincott & Margulies produced it. Account executive Robert Stanley is credited with both the design and the name Pentastar. It replaced the seal-and-wing badges of the previous decades.

The first Chrysler badge appeared in 1924 on the Chrysler Six, the first car under Walter P. Chrysler's own name. It was a wax-seal design. Over the next decades the badge was reworked repeatedly, adding wings in 1928, dropping them in 1930, bringing them back in a different form in 1936, and in 1955 switching to a minimalist abstract mark.

So the Pentastar was not the start of Chrysler's identity. It was a break from a long run of seals and wings, and it stayed the corporate symbol until the company's own reorganizations changed it.

Nothing in the sources reviewed here says why wings were chosen. Chrysler did not publish a meaning for them. What can be documented is the timing: wings appear in the late 1920s, when winged hood ornaments and aviation imagery were common across the car industry, and the Airflow of the mid-1930s carried a winged ornament above a seal badge, as in the photo at the top of this page.

Because the company has been silent, it is safer to call the wings a styling convention of the period than to attach a grand meaning to them. The same wide, outstretched wing shape appears on other luxury marques, and that is a visual family resemblance, not evidence of a shared origin.

Around the 1998 merger with Daimler-Benz, Chrysler introduced a badge with a wax-seal-style center inside a pair of silver wings, a deliberate echo of its early emblems. The Pentastar was enlarged and paired with the wordmark in 2008.

The 2009 badge dropped the standalone star in favor of elongated silver wings with a small blue banner carrying the Chrysler name, with larger block lettering above. The photo shows the winged style on a PT Cruiser tailgate. The wings in the 2009 version are metallic rather than a flat color, which is why the Chrome Silver swatch on the brand page is a metallic gray.