A Dashboard Clock, a Porsche 911, and the Louis Vuitton Art of Travel

It started with a dashboard clock. Singer, the Californian atelier known for its Porsche 911 commissions, asked Louis Vuitton for a timepiece. What arrived in Monterey today is two complete cars.

La Fabrique du Temps built the clock in Switzerland: detachable, mechanical, convertible into a desk clock, drawn from the Tambour and carrying twelve polished and engraved letters around the bezel that spell the name of the house. Once it sat in the cockpit, the brief refused to stay small. "It quickly became apparent to us that this collaboration with Singer could extend to the personalisation of every functional element of the vehicle," says Jean Arnault, Louis Vuitton Watch Director.

The instrument display alone took a year. Louis Vuitton's designers redrew the speedometer, rev counter and gauges to Tambour codes, down to the hands, the dial terminations and the index systems. Vivid cobalt blue, bursts of bright orange for the lettering.

The Classic Coupé

The first car sits on a Type 964 coupé chassis, running a 4.0L naturally aspirated air-cooled flat six through a six speed manual to the rear wheels, with carbon-ceramic brakes and a speed-activated rear wing. Singer restored it at the California facility.

Lightweight carbon fibre bodywork carries Saffron, a shade held in the Louis Vuitton archives for over a century and a half and used across the packaging for the last twenty years. It also lands close to Bahama Yellow, the hue attached to Singer's earliest commissions. The cobalt blue that runs against it traces to the travel trunks the house built for Citroën in 1924, which already used cobalt reinforcements inside. The yellow reads as the saddle-stitch thread on Louis Vuitton leather goods.

Colour has identified racing cars since the Gordon Bennett Cup introduced national liveries in 1900, so the choices are not incidental. The demonstration tyres run cobalt, pulled from the handles and ribbons on the house's packaging. The rear engine air intake grille hides a geometric motif formed from an L and a V. The fuel and oil caps use the typography Louis Vuitton reserves for watch components.

Inside, VVT-inspired leather lines the cabin, the same leather the house uses for handles, shoulder straps, edging and labels. Louis Vuitton's artisans specified the seat leather; Singer's team executed the work. The door handle edges take the edge-dyeing treatment from Louis Vuitton bags. Diamond embossing on the seats, front boot trim and rear engine compartment echoes the malletage lining of a trunk. Every ventilation eyelet is cut and finished by hand into a Monogram flower, a motif that returns on the sun visor and headrests.

Singer replaced every plastic fitting with hand crafted components. Knobs, switches, locks, pull tabs and vents in metal, predominantly rhodium plated, each one hand finished with polishing and satin techniques taken from watchmaking, the colours achieved by anodising or electroplating. "Every transition between materials, every metallic reflection, every knurled surface, every mechanical interaction and every graphic element has been meticulously considered, often at an almost microscopic level," says Octave Chany, Project Lead Designer at Singer.

The capsule around the car runs to a grained leather racing jacket with Monogram flower eyelets across the chest, denim in a cotton and silk blend, the LV Rally car shoe or the LV Remix Derby, perforated driving gloves, and a carbon and glass fibre jet helmet. A bespoke roof rack takes a trunk, a surfboard or skis. The surfboard is built in Angers, sent to the Atlantic coast for resin and fins, and inlaid with Monogram marquetry in blond oak and walnut. The skis come from the French Alps in wood, titanal and steel.

The Classic Turbo Cabriolet

Nicolas Ghesquière, Artistic Director of Women's Collections, conceived the second car once the coupé was finalised. Type 964 cabriolet chassis, 3.8L twin-turbocharged flat six with air-to-water intercooling, six speed manual, selectable drive modes, whale tail rear wing. Singer built this one in England.

The bodywork answers Calcaire Lutétien, the white limestone of Paris and of the house's own headquarters at Pont Neuf. Precious wood forms the bumpers and trim, which set a real problem for the engineers. "Automotive design is a passion that has always lived within me," Ghesquière says. The brief was a car open to the world, blending the nautical and the automotive.

Here the clock leaves the instrument binnacle and takes the centre of the console, on natural leather, ringed by warm golden gauges, its dial finished in the exact shade of the bodywork and matched by a golden ignition key. The gearshift trim beneath it evokes the Noé through a natural leather drawstring. The Louis Vuitton signature sits on the dashboard and returns after dark in the tail lamps.

The rear luggage compartment opens to reveal a teak-inspired deck built with the same varnishing technique used on runabout decks. It holds fitted luggage and the lightweight soft top. Wood panels the rear engine bay and the front boot, where a three part trunk slots together and lifts out as three individual cases. Leather straps with pin buckles hold the front and rear hoods, reading at once as motorsport, trunk making and watch straps.

Ghesquière's capsule answers the car rather than accompanies it: a made to measure parachute silk suit with the house's second initial worked into raised V seams, braided leather driving gloves, the LV Sneakerina, gold and acetate sunglasses. Time is kept twice. The dashboard clock finds its wrist echo in a 40mm Tambour Automatic in ceramic and yellow gold, and both rest in a paired Coffret Trésor, a case Georges Vuitton first made in 1896.

What It Actually Means

Read the release quickly and this looks like a livery exercise. It is not. Louis Vuitton has not put its colours on a car, it has specified how the car is built: which metal, which finish, which polishing technique, which typography on a fuel cap. That is a house crossing from decoration into engineering, and the two facilities involved tell you how seriously both sides took it, since the coupé was built in California and the cabriolet in England.

It is also less of a departure than it looks. In 1897 Georges Vuitton was already building trunks that bolted to car bodies, flat-packed for stacking, locked with patented mechanisms and skinned in Vuittonite canvas that could be dyed to match the paint. In 1909 Pierre and Jean Vuitton built their own car on a Stabilia chassis. Louis Vuitton spent forty years matching itself to the automobile before industrial standardisation ended bespoke coachwork in the 1940s. What is genuinely new is the co-branding. Neither house had ever put its name on a shared object until now.

The open question is whether this holds. Singer took the Central Feature Marque slot at Goodwood this year and does not need the association. Louis Vuitton has run Concours d'Élégance events, a design award and the Classic Run rallies before, all of which ended. Two cars is a statement. A programme would be a category shift, and nothing announced today tells us which one this is.

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