They were on the retro muscle cars from two Detroit automakers, the Dodge Challenger and Chevrolet Camaro, but even on design studies from foreign companies: the Hyundai HCD9 Talus, the Mazda Kabura and the Lamborghini Miura.

"Hips are about sexuality," said Joel Piaskowski, chief designer at the Hyundai Kia Design and Technical Center in California.

Hips are also about hipness, or youth - but these judgments are often made by designers and auto executives who are no longer young. Something may seem hip to them because it evokes their past; to young people, something may be cool because it envisions their future.

The Camaro, much anticipated, appealed to almost everyone. It was done by a group of younger designers working under a General Motors veteran, Tom Peters.

The interior, with its wonderful play of golden orange and rich browns, furthers the counterpoint of bright accents and buttery soft surfaces that has become a keynote of G.M. interiors under Ed Welburn, vice president for global design. The Camaro's interior was supervised by Christos Roustemis, the design manager who worked on the Nomad styling exercise of 1999, a lovely design that G.M. decided not to build.

Putting him to work on the Camaro was a better decision. Mr. Roustemis grew up learning the history of cars by running his hands over them at his family's car wash. He said he could not avoid taking the "four pack" of gauges on the console, beside the shifter, from the 1969 Camaro.

The Camaro seemed to impress even those with little patience for retro. Designers interviewed in the exhibit hall mostly agreed that despite its homage to the early pony car, the new design was "modern" - to use a word that many, including Chris Chapman of BMW's California studio, used to describe it. The test of modernity here, it seems, is whether the new car would have meaning and appeal even if it didn't carry a venerated nameplate.