Top five: When cars and fashion don’t mix

Luxury fashion houses and prestige car manufacturers are drawn together by their meticulous efforts to lure the perfect customer – namely, those with an eye for quality and deep pockets.

It’s a seemingly perfect opportunity for a two-pronged attack, with endless collaborations as proof. But it’s not always as easy as it sounds. Often it’s hard to figure out who the headline act actually is.

Here are our top five examples of when cars go couture and crash the fashion show.

Louis Vuitton is a name synonymous with style – high-end, luxurious and very expensive style. From humble beginnings in 1854, Vuitton started his journey making trunks.
Decades later, following a merger with coveted French brands Moët et Chandon and Hennessy, the LVMH brand sits as one of the worlds most valuable luxury companies - $A27.3billion at last count.

Pertaining to such obscene levels of monogram consumerism is the LV Series 1 Third Opus ad campaign by Juergen Teller. It features the striking and angular one-off Maserati Boomerang.

Designed as a concept car in 1971 and inspired by the Bora, the Boomerang came to life in 1972, sharing the same 4.7-litre V8 engine. For all intensive purposes, the Boomerang was better suited to the concours than the open road - and that is where it has spent most of its life.

Anyone with a penchant for luxury goods spent equal time learning about the Boomerang as they did planning how they could afford anything from the LV range. The Maserati Boomerang last sold at auction in 2015 for a touch over $A4.6 million. At that price, you could no doubt afford a little something the monogrammed icon has to offer.

Nice match, but the car wins.

You can’t swing a baguette on the Champs Elysees without hitting a Chanel-clad local.

Coco Chanel is, was and will forever be fashion - a luxury design house of unfathomable proportions.

Chanel made history in the most unassuming form: the little black dress (LBD) dating back to the 1920s. Not the first to make one, nor the last, Chanel made it OK to wear black in an age where colour was king. The rest, as they say, is history.
Givenchy’s iconic little black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is undoubtedly the most famous example.

At this time, American magazine Vogue dubbed the LBD ‘Chanel’s Ford’, drawing parallels specifically with Ford’s Model T – motoring’s ubiquitous simple, accessible and affordable model.

At the time, the Model T represented a sense of longevity and versatility that is synonymous with the little black dress. It was suggested that the LBD in its many forms would become the uniform for all women of taste. The sole, undefeated fashion item in any woman’s wardrobe, it transcends age, social status and occasion – something few cars can do. The dress wins.

Italians know style. And Italian manufacturers have a reputation for building the most aesthetically-pleasing vehicles in the world. Some believe it is pasta-fuelled passion that brings the Italians’ creative vision to life, to which low-carb countries cannot compare.

When luxury fashion house Gucci celebrated its 90th birthday, starchy greatness unfolded. The clever people at Fiat allowed Gucci’s creative director Frida Giannini, in partnership with Fiat’s Centro Stile, to customise a Fiat 500 as a limited-edition production offering.

As such, just 101 examples of the Fiat 500 by Gucci were marked for Australia, offered in both hatch and cabrio bodystyles.

Gucci design flair featured on the car’s gloss pearl glass paint treatment, alloys featuring the interlocking ‘GG’ logo, the Gucci signature on the hatchback as well on the door pillar.

There were even Gucci green brake calipers and the Italian fashion brand’s signature green-red-green stripe on both exterior and interior.

The collaboration showed beautiful restraint.

Conversely, the pint-sized Fiat is stylish and far more practical than featured model Natasha Poly’s ‘travelling in style’ leather ensemble. Everybody knows a jumpsuit creates world-class havoc in the bathroom. The perfectly-pimped 500 wins.

Kill a Porsche, suffer the consequences. Undoubtedly one of the more controversial car-meets-fashion campaigns was created by New York-based label, Rag & Bone.

In their FW15 campaign, Rag & Bone created a mini-cinematic catastrophe in the name of fashion - dropping a graffiti-covered concrete barrier on top of an unsuspecting black 1979 Porsche 911SC. The slow motion movie shows the senseless destruction from everyangle, as a waif-like model casually exits the scene of the crime.

The Porsche community was not happy. Modern tailoring and understated urban style may win hearts with New York’s fashion set, but it was no match for the German brand’s staunch devotees and their slightly psychotic, but highly creative response.

Classic car specialists Hagerty took a stand on behalf of distraught Porsche owners and a sequel soon hit our screens. Hag & Chrome is the ultimate revenge story, where a Rag & Bone silk slip dress is burnt on the hanger while a display of Porsche vehicles poses in the foreground. Porsche wins.

American model Gigi Hadid may well be a legend and business entrepreneur in the making, but she’s clearly no match for BMW’s motoring legend of Kardashian proportions.

We can only guess that American fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger underestimated the impact of using a BMW with supermodel lines and a cult-like following when it posed Hadid and the iconic E9 3.0 CS together in 2016.

The TommyxGigi capsule collection is the result of a design collaboration between Hilfiger and Hadid. We believe reaction to Hilfiger’s recent campaign is as much a testament to the beauty of BMW’s iconic E9 3.0 CS as the fashion itself.

In fact, much of the online commentary overtly praised the car, the real eye-candy in this instance. Surely?

Featured in advertising campaigns worldwide and on display to Hadid’s 30 million-plus Instagram followers, this can’t be a bad thing for BMW. But so help me, if I see a millennial driving a pristine E9… I’ll cry. BMW wins.