Chichester, England
NCS
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By the time Rolls-Royce unveiled its one-of-a-kind Serenity Phantom at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show, it was already one in every of the most buzzed about debuts of the worldwide showcase.
Rendered opalescent with shiny mom of pearl paint and detailed with polished bamboo and smoked cherry wooden, it was instantly hailed as “the world’s most beautiful Rolls-Royce” and “fit for royalty.”
But it’s what’s inside that actually captivated: The total inside – from the seats to the headliner – was upholstered with pastel blue uncooked silk, sourced from Suzhou, one in every of China’s silk embroidery capitals, and woven in one in every of the UK’s oldest mills. Delicate flowers, a riff on Japanese royal robes and chinoiserie, had been embroidered and painted by hand all through.
This intricate magnificence befit an opulent palace front room, or a priceless couture robe.
“With the fabric, the beauty of it, you just have to stop what you were thinking about and enjoy the moment,” says Cherica Haye, the 31-year-old coloration and textiles maven who helped conceive the interiors. It was she who designed the distinctive floral motif and painted by hand the flowers inside.
“It brings you down from 100 to a normal level. With materials you can do that.”
Haye is a part of Rolls-Royce Bespoke, a studio of craftsman and artisans charged with designing the marque’s most formidable, and costly, customized fashions.
Initially educated in vogue at Central Saint Martins – the prestigious London school that counts Alexander McQueen and John Galliano as alums – she’s elevating auto interiors to new heights.
While learning textiles at Central Saint Martins, the Londoner had already mapped out her profession: she would grow to be a grasp of cloth innovation, after which take her abilities to the storied ateliers of Paris.
“I wanted to be head of material development and design at Dior,” she says, laughing, at the Rolls-Royce headquarters in the south of England.
“I don’t even know if that exists, but that’s what I wanted to do.”
It was solely when she began her Master in Fiber, Textile and Weaving Arts at the Royal College of Art, by then weary of the aggressive nature of the vogue trade, that she determined to shift her focus to automotive design, pushed by her dream of sometime proudly owning a Jaguar.
This is the way you hand-make a Rolls-Royce
Instead of interning, she developed conceptual textiles for the likes of Jaguar, Kia and Audi, submitting samples she’d developed as a part of her course work.
Her abilities ultimately caught the eye of Rolls-Royce design director Giles Taylor. Impressed by her graduate portfolio, which included distinctive woven horsehair blends and included conventional Japanese dyeing methods, he invited her to affix his group lower than a yr later, once they had been set to start work on their most beautiful mission but.
Band of outsiders
But Haye is fast to level out that she’s not the just one coming to vehicular design from an surprising background. Michelle Lusby, for instance, who labored along with her on the Serenity interiors, comes from an illustration background.
Other group members have been handpicked from the worlds of tattooing, sign-making, yachting, saddlery, and costume design. Cross-pollination and interdisciplinary collaboration, it appears, are the basis on which all initiatives relaxation.
“There’s a constant coming together of different disciplines, but what strings us together is that we’re all design,” she explains.
“You just have to have an eye, and that’s what connects… Not everybody’s taste is going to be the same, but you have to have that.”
If something, she finds that her background may need left her higher ready for her present place than individuals suppose. Like the luxurious vogue trade, bespoke auto design requires infinite creativity and problem-solving. And, as in a couture home, her present clientele is catered to in each method, their each whim and request met no matter the effort or expense.
And most importantly, each fields enable her to work with and develop distinctive textiles, which stays her true ardour.
“At heart, I’m a textiles designer that specializes in color, in material makeup, in material innovation. Not just the overall feel of it, but to the minute, micro level. I do color, I do material overlaying, material-making, designing,” she says.
“It seems pretty dreamy, eh?”