Louis Vuitton has extended its full leather and watchmaking savoir-faire into two Porsche 911s reimagined by Singer, turning a single request for a dashboard clock into the house’s first-ever co-branded object. Louis Vuitton and Singer, the California atelier known for its highly personalized restorations of classic 911s, present the results together: a Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer – Classic, and a Classic Turbo cabriolet led by Nicolas Ghesquière. Both mark a historic first for both houses — Louis Vuitton’s first co-branded object, Singer’s first collaboration of this kind.
The project’s origin traces back to a single request. “This unique and remarkable adventure began with a request for a dashboard clock for a car reimagined by Singer,” says Jean Arnault, Louis Vuitton Watch Director. What started as one detachable timepiece — inspired by the house’s Tambour watch, convertible into a desk clock — expanded into a full redesign of the instrument display, a process that took an entire year to align the speedometer, rev counter, and gauges with the Tambour’s graphic codes.
The Classic car’s livery pairs saffron with cobalt blue, a combination drawn from Louis Vuitton’s own archive rather than automotive convention. The saffron shade has sat in the house’s colour history for over 150 years; the cobalt reinforcements echo travel trunks Louis Vuitton designed for Citroën in 1924, which already used cobalt-lined interiors. Even the rear grille carries the detail through, discreetly working the initials L and V into its geometric pattern.
Inside the cabin, the leatherwork extends the same logic. Seats and trim are finished in a hue inspired by VVT leather, one of the house’s most-used materials for luggage and bags, with edge-dyeing techniques lifted directly from Louis Vuitton’s own workshops and yellow saddle-stitching throughout. The diamond-pattern embossing on the seats echoes the “malletage” motif found inside Louis Vuitton trunks, while hand-finished ventilation eyelets carry the Monogram flower onto the headrests and sun visor.
Every metal fitting, meanwhile, was treated as a watchmaking problem rather than an automotive one. Adjustment knobs, switches, and vents are rhodium-plated and individually hand-finished, with colour achieved through 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 Classic Turbo cabriolet takes a different route under Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s Artistic Director of Women’s Collections, who built the car around a fusion of nautical and automotive references — white Calcaire Lutétien bodywork, gold accents, and a teak-inspired wooden deck inside the rear luggage compartment. “Automotive design is a passion that has always lived within me,” says Ghesquière. “My collaboration with Singer has been a chance to reconnect with this fascinating world.”
Both cars extend beyond the vehicle itself into matching wardrobe capsules — a racing jacket, driving gloves, a jet helmet, and custom luggage sized to fit each car’s specific storage, down to a pair of front-trunk bags shaped to sit in the nose of the Classic coupé. The gesture reaches back to Louis Vuitton’s own history with motoring: the house was producing dedicated automotive trunks as early as 1897, decades before matching driver capsules became a category at all.
A comparable instinct for turning personal history into a bespoke commission runs through Porsche’s own 911 GT3 90 F.A. Porsche, built by Sonderwunsch to honour designer F.A. Porsche’s 90th birthday using details drawn from his own car. Where that project mines Porsche’s internal archive, the Singer collaboration imports an entirely external one — Louis Vuitton’s — onto the same platform.
That same idea of travel as an inherited identity runs through OMA’s Visionary Journeys exhibition for Louis Vuitton in Osaka, where the house’s 170-year history was staged around trunks, craftsmanship, and the same Art of Travel language driving this car. What stays with you here isn’t the livery or the leatherwork, but the fact that the whole project started with nothing more than a clock — and that clock still exists as an object independent of the car, ready to be lifted out, set on a desk, and read on its own terms.