I've long been an aficionado of white-wall tyres.
This could, partly, be because in Britain they are hardly ever seen: but also that there is a touch of the deliciously disreputable - the spiv, the cad or the jazz musician - about them which takes the vehicle to which they are appended beyond the realms of the ordinary and work-a-day.
I admit I've worn white-walls on a couple of cars I owned in the past. Okay, so the tyres weren't bona-fide white-walls; I had just painted the walls with proper white-wall tyre paint - because of the rarity of white-walls in the UK, getting hold of any is a fools errand. But it worked relatively well, given that the tyres I had painted had not got the correct decorations for such an exercise and I was forced to make arbitrary decisions about where, exactly, the paint should have its boundary.
What looks "right" is very often a function of what's familiar - it may be a truism that familiarity breeds contempt, but the opposite of contempt is often fear and loathing - or at least an itchy discomfort. Part of our attraction to certain people is because they remind us of other people to whom we have some form of attachment: there is very little that is objectively ugly or unsightly, save for what betokens disease. So when we see a car of an era or a type where white-walls are more-or-less common, the tendency is to feel there is something amiss when there is no such decoration. Non-sports cars of the 1950s, for instance, look more complete with a white wall of a good thickness going around the tyre, and Rolls-Royce cars somehow look naked without their white-walls, although on later cars the band will generally be thinner in relation to the wall of the tyre.
By and large, anything with a sporting appeal isn't usually suited to the white-wall treatment. Such cars - if they have any tyre decoration at all - wear raised white letters, which are more Marlon Brando than the white-wall's David Niven. The cars of which I had decorated the tyres were a 1977 Austin Allegro and a Mini van of 1974 vintage; not exactly the prime candidates, possibly, and very probably my actions would have been seen by others as "polishing mud", but nonetheless, such a consideration was not the highest of my priorities.
I have seen white-walls on an Aston Martin DB6 as road tested by an American magazine in the late '60s. The city-scape of SanFran was very pleasing on the eye, as was the car itself. But one thing niggled - well, four things, actually: those white-walls were unbecoming on a car looked capable of breaking the sound barrier. On an early '60s Volkswagen Beetle, too - which, considering the car was originally designed at the behest of Adolf Hitler as everyday transport for citizens of his "thousand year Reich", does not readily fit the decadent mode which white-walls portray, they shouldn't have worked, either. And yet they looked completely in keeping with the character of the car.
Then again, given that the car luxuriated in a two-tone colour-scheme of powder-blue-and-white, it looked in keeping to wear a set of jazz-man's two-tone brogues.