In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, Rolls-Royce Colours and Materials designer Michelle Lusby has just visited a purveyor of buttons. Not just any button shop. The best, a source that supplies Italy’s most revered couture houses.
“These buttons were the most ordinary things, and yet they were the most beautiful things,” the designer, 27, says. Lusby recently concluded a supplier trip through northern Italy, where she saw, touched and smelled swatches of leather and fabric, gauging their potential for Rolls-Royce’s customisation programme, appropriately called Bespoke. The button shop? It was just a detour on the way to the airport.
“You never quite know,” Lusby says. “The look, the texture and feel of them could inspire you to another application.”
Whimsy. Improvisation. Maybe a dab of humour. These are not qualities commonly associated with Rolls-Royce. With aristocrats, maharajahs,World War I officers and various personages of undisclosed net worth among its clients, the brand is best known for deep, unmistakably British stoutness and reserve. And yet the designs created by Lusby and her colleagues reflect a kind of freeform artistry rarely, if ever, expected from a contemporary car company.
A reminder came on 8 May in New York, where Rolls-Royce debuted a couture-inspired Bespoke effort based on its Wraith grand tourer, pictured above. Wearing a jasmine accent line on a coat of Andalucian White paint (the jasmine “catches the light really nicely,” Lusby notes), the car contains a silk weave in the door pockets front and rear, imparting “a certain iridescence”. Fabric welting runs atop the door panels. Stitching on the steering wheel is invisible.
A more emphatic showcase of Rolls-Royce’s playful side came at the 2015 Geneva motor show in March, where it debuted a one-off Phantom sedan, dubbed Serenity:
(Credit: Rolls-Royce Motor Cars)
The customer-commissioned vehicle evoked nothing less than aJapanese woodblock print, with delicately stitched silk flowers cascading from the headliner down the roof pillars. A marquetry masterclass played out on cherry-wood door panels, inlaid with mother of pearl blossoms. Bamboo accents heightened the Edo effect. A passerby could almost hear Madama Butterfly playing through the Bespoke-branded audio system.
(Credit: Rolls-Royce Motor Cars)
“I tend to look at natural forms for inspiration. That makes this by far the best place to be working as a Colours and Materials designer,” Lusby says. “What other brand would put silk in a car?”
Likely not Ford, builder of the Fiesta hatchback that Lusby drives to Rolls-Royce’s studios every day in Goodwood, England. “I certainly can’t afford to drive one,” she says of her employer’s wares.
Nobody said nature was always kind.