Louis Vuitton's first co-branded product with an outside company is a Porsche 911, built with restorer Singer

Louis Vuitton has produced its first-ever co-branded product with an outside company: two custom Porsche 911s built with Singer Vehicle Design, the California restoration house known for its reworked air-cooled 911s, under a shared theme the two companies call "Art of Travel." The cars were unveiled Aug. 13 in a joint statement, announced in Japan by Cornes Motors, Singer's official partner in the country.

The project began, according to the companies, with a narrower request: Singer asked Louis Vuitton to design a dashboard clock. The maison's Swiss watchmaking workshop, La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, built a removable clock modelled on the case of its Tambour watch, with "LOUIS VUITTON" engraved twelve times around the bezel in place of hour markers, so it can double as a desk clock once removed. From there, the brief grew into redesigning the entire instrument panel — the speedometer, tachometer and gauges reworked around the Tambour's dial language — a roughly year-long undertaking that Louis Vuitton watch director Jean Arnault and Singer project lead designer Octave Chany both described as without precedent for either company.

The first car, the Classic, carries a saffron, cobalt blue and yellow livery and a roof rack built to carry trunks, surfboards or skis. Louis Vuitton said saffron has featured in its archive for more than 150 years and in its packaging for more than 20, and that the shade nods to a 1924 Citroën travel trunk in the house's own collection as well as to Singer's "Bahama Yellow." The cabin is wrapped in the house's VVT leather, with door handles edge-dyed using the same technique as its bags, seats embossed with the diamond-quilted "Martelage" pattern taken from its trunk interiors, and hand-finished ventilation eyelets carrying the Monogram Flower motif; the dials, switches and vents are rhodium-plated and finished using watchmaking techniques.

The second, the Classic Turbo, is a cabriolet designed by Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton's womenswear artistic director, built around the marque's 3.8-litre twin-turbocharged flat-six engine. Ghesquière described the brief as a car open to sunlight and the sea, and its white body — a shade the companies call Calcaire Lutétien, after the limestone of Paris and of the maison's historic Pont-Neuf headquarters — is trimmed in wood and leather with gold accents. Inside, the dashboard clock sits at the centre of a leather-wrapped console, the gearstick trim carries a leather pull-cord that echoes the silhouette of the house's Noé bag, and the rear engine cover and trunk are panelled in varnished wood using techniques drawn from classic motorboat decks; the front trunk holds a bespoke three-piece luggage set.

Neither company disclosed pricing or how the cars will be sold. Cornes Motors, led by chief executive Seigo Hayashi and representing Singer in Japan, said its role covers customer communication, media relations, purchase support, and maintenance and servicing for buyers in the country — the practical route by which a Japanese collector would actually acquire and run one.

Louis Vuitton has worked with outside creatives before — artists, architects, other designers on individual collections — but never, by its own account, put its name on a jointly branded product made by a company it doesn't own. That the debut is a car, not a bag or a watch, says something about where the maison thinks its brand still has room to extend: into a category adjacent to travel and craft, rather than a new line meant to sell at scale. For Cornes, and for Japan's overlapping base of Porsche collectors and Louis Vuitton clients, the more concrete news is simpler — there is now a local address for a car built this way, even without a price attached to it yet.