Every Car Brand Wants A Fashion Collab, Now China Has Joined The Party

IM Motors has handed the keys to Jimmy Choo. The Shanghai brand has named the shoemaker bespoke design master of its L6 electric sedan, which gets you a faceted crystal badge, crystal camera covers, mother-of-pearl inlay work and a cabin trimmed in Haute Couture Blue pearlescent leather, the blue being a nod to the satin heels Choo made for Diana, Princess of Wales.

First batch is capped at 1,000 cars and it is China only. We get the L6 here as the MG IM5.

My first instinct was to bin it. Then I noticed it had landed inside a fortnight that also gave us the fourth chapter of Kith and BMW, and Louis Vuitton sharing billing with another brand on a finished product for the first time in its 172 years. True story.

That last one was a pair of 964-generation Porsche 911s reimagined by Singer and shown at Monterey Car Week, a saffron and cobalt coupe alongside a limestone white Turbo cabriolet overseen by Nicolas Ghesquière. Purchase is on application. One Singer insider reckons they are the most expensive cars the workshop has ever built.

Three deals in a fortnight is enough to make me wonder what is actually going on here.

Most of this category is merchandise, and merchandise is where it falls over. A BMW souvenir jacket is still a BMW souvenir jacket.

Kith’s 2026 BMW range is built on Inka Orange, the shade BMW put on the 02 Series in 1971, which is a genuinely good bit of archive digging. It also includes co-branded floor mats for the X5, a licence plate holder and a pack of car fresheners.

Ronnie Fieg gets away with it because he has the credibility to, and because he had a 1972 3.0 CSi stripped to bare metal and rebuilt, then dropped a V10 into an E53 X5, rather than picking swatches off a chart. But nobody is buying that sweatshirt for the roundel, and BMW has bigger problems to solve than apparel. They are buying Kith.

Louis Vuitton and Singer started in 2023 with a request for a dashboard clock and grew, in Jean Arnault’s telling, into personalising every functional element of the car.

There is malletage leather in the cabin, instruments rebuilt in the visual language of the Tambour, gearshift leather that nods to the Noé, plus reworked knurling, yellow saddle stitching and ventilation eyelets in the seats.

None of that is a logo. It is a house applying its own material language to hardware, which is a far harder thing to fake than a t-shirt, and it is why the restomod world keeps producing more interesting objects than the options list ever does.

Which is why the Choo car is more interesting than it looks on the press release. Crystal and mother-of-pearl in a Chinese EV will not be to every taste (not in Australia, anyway) but the fashion is inside the thing rather than stuck on the outside of a hoodie.

Aimé Leon Dore has been doing this properly for six years and did not wait to be asked. Teddy Santis started with a 964 Carrera 4 in January 2020 and has worked through a 911SC, a 356 and a 944 Turbo since, most recently a 993 Turbo in custom Mulberry Green with brown leather, lambswool and a brass Unisphere gear knob.

Santis is not a carmaker hiring a stylist. He is a designer commissioning cars and selling a capsule off the back of each one, and by late 2025 Porsche was co-signing a full ALD range.

For fifty years the carmaker was the client and the designer was the rented name. Santis and Fieg have turned that around.

BMW is buying a 24-year-old. He cannot finance an XM but he can afford the sweatshirt, and brand monitoring on the Kith work suggested it pushed BMW conversation into female audiences the company’s own marketing was not reaching.

IM Motors is buying the opposite thing. It was founded on Christmas Day 2020 as a joint venture between SAIC, Alibaba and Zhangjiang, so it has no archive colour from 1971 and no founder myth to lean on. It has gone out and rented one.

Fashion gets access to wealthy men who are already in a spending mood, which is the demographic luxury has spent a decade failing to crack.

Ford wheeled out Bill Blass, Givenchy, Pucci and Cartier on the Lincoln Continental Mark in the late seventies. Cadillac went with Gucci, Lamborghini with Versace, Bugatti with Hermès and Subaru with L.L. Bean. Almost all of it amounted to a name stitched into a headrest.

Then there is Pierre Cardin, who licensed his signature to hundreds of manufacturers until it was worth nothing at all.

So ask one question of any of these deals. Did the fashion house change how the car was made, or only what colour it is?