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Gaudy expressions of wealth are nothing new at Monterey’s Car Week, starting with the teardrop-shaped Figoni-bodied French bolides that annually glide onto the concours lawn to vie for the top prize. No doubt some tongues were clicked disapprovingly back in the 1930s when those cars were built, and any owner would have had to be a committed show-off to drive one around, especially back then in the depths of the Great Depression.
Well, here at Monterey, where literally anything can be a thing, the Porsche reimaginer Singer Vehicle Design showed off the first fruits of its collaboration with LVMH’s Louis Vuitton luxury brand with two cars that broke the internet by raising (or lowering, depending on your perspective) the bar on Pebble Beach ostentatiousness. The two Porsche 964-generation 911s, an ’89 coupe and a ’91 convertible, have gone to the proverbial hairdresser with drastically overhauled interiors and exteriors intended to show off the design flair and artisanal leatherworking of Paris-based Louis Vuitton.
Though born in Germany, these two sons of Stuttgart have become très très français under the needlework of Vuitton; the coupe a riot of color, pairing saffron and electric blue hues, and the convertible getting dramatic wood accents inside and out rendered in swaths of real American walnut. Both cars are sold, we are informed, but more cars should come from the collaboration in the future.
Finished in a hue resembling clotted cream interstitched with spears of gold-plated trim, the convertible features a gold shifter sprouting from a facsimile of a Louis Vuitton handbag and is targeted at “the world’s most powerful woman,” according to Singer designer Octave Chaney, a Frenchman himself who was charged with executing the LVMH collaboration.
The centerpiece of the convertible’s wood dash (and a fixture in the coupe’s instrument cluster) is a scaled-up version of a Louis Vuitton watch from its La Fabrique du Temps division. The windable clock in the convertible is removable to become a desk clock for when the car isn’t being driven, which will likely be most of the time for this million-dollar-plus art piece.
Woodworking is a relatively new field for Singer, which has built a thriving business on reimagining (restoring, they say) vintage Porsches with a unique design ethic that generally leans towards more modern materials. Executing trim in walnut or silver rhodium or gold plate means completely re-engineering the car’s factory trim so that these materials will be durable enough to survive life on an automobile.
The upper dash on the convertible was CNC milled from a solid block of wood, which gave designers the chance to experiment with some new ideas, such as opening up the space behind the instruments so that light comes in behind them. Though factory-looking, the air vents are also milled from solid blocks of aluminum for precise tolerances. A movable wood cover for the rear compartment reveals luggage bins instead of the stock rear seats, and when closed, it gives the convertible the look of a teak boat deck.
In the coupe, adding blue (LV calls the shade “cobalt”) to the tires and rubber gaskets proved to be an enormous challenge. Rubber can’t be coated because it’s always outgassing, which is why the rubber bits on your car age and eventually harden. So the color must be molded in. But that changes the performance and elasticity of the rubber. Chaney said Michelin is still working to perfect the process and thus the coupe comes with two sets of tires: a conventional set to drive on and the blue set just for display.
Besides the beautiful but questionably utilitarian wood skis affixed to the rear of the coupe, a nod to California where one can theoretically surf in the morning and ski in the afternoon, another interesting feature of the coupe is the embossed LV logo in the windshield’s upper shade zone. Apparently, a complex process involving multiple painting techniques, the subtle easter egg is yet another over-the-top feature of these well-over-the-top cars.
Judging from the internet reaction, these cars are clearly not everyone’s cup of pastis, but they did sell and likely there will be more attempts to push the limits next year at Monterey as a host of companies try to apply Singer’s extreme customization model to other hot cars (re-imagined versions of the ‘80s Ferrari Testarossa and aughts Ferrari 550 Maranello were on display this year with order books open). Insert dedicated show-offs here.