INFINITI & Poltrona Frau Custom Cars
"INFINITI want to build 2 bespoke cars with Italian luxury leather designer and manufacturer Poltrona Frau, as a one-off design partnership... can you help?"
Wow, there's a brief. And also a challenge! The INFINITI design headquarters is in Hong Kong, the INFINITI car interiors design team for this project are in London and Poltrona Frau are in southern Italy. The marketing team (our client partner) are just outside Geneva and the cars...? one I am told is in Germany and the other is yet to roll off the production line.
Luckily, conception of ideas can and usually does come to fruition in an airport lounge or taxi transfer. At GARGOYLE we are naturally built to dream big and think things through to a logical end, covering all eventualities and pitfalls as we concept. The ideas can flow at any time of the day or night, at our desks or on the fly.
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The Q50 with it's eco-aware hybrid technology and cutting edge performance safety features we decided would be the GOOD. The iconic and muscular lines of the QX70 sealed its place as EVIL.
Through countless video calls, across various time zones and through several languages we pushed to hold onto the original concept as closely as possible. INFINITI Design teams would produce custom paint colours for two full complete body re-sprays, as well as accent colours for trim details. POLTRONA FRAU went to their leather stores with our brief to find two sets of opposing finishes - dark, heavily-textured for the EVIL QX70 and soft, smooth and refined for the GOOD Q50.
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As always, it was great to work with Cape Town based Photographer and Film-maker, Alan O'Connor at Content Machine.
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INFINITI & Poltrona Frau (Official Press Release)
Rolle, Switzerland. Two stunning new faces of INFINITI will be revealed tomorrow in a “GOOD and EVIL” pairing. Designed to shock and seduce in equal measure. The special INFINITI Q50 and QX70 models are the first one-off fruit of a creative collaboration between two exceptional premium brands: the luxury performance car maker INFINITI and renowned Italian furniture and leather specialist Poltrona Frau.
After the accolades received in Milan during the Salone del Mobile, the partnership between INFINITI and Poltrona Frau was presented at the Montecarlo race circuit. One of the two show-cars created exclusively for INFINITI, the “GOOD”, white car upholstered with white and light blue Pelle Frau® leather, was displayed in Montecarlo throughout the weekend of the Formula 1 Grand Prix, in front of Zelo’s Restaurant at the Grimaldi Forum on Avenue Princesse Grace, a highly visible location.