Rolls-Royce has revealed its latest one-off creation which is being touted as “the most technically complex Bespoke Phantom ever produced.” Called the Rolls-Royce Phantom Syntopia, the highly-complex commission was undertaken by the Rolls-Royce Bespoke Collective in partnership with renowned Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen. In fact, the one-of-a-kind Phantom gets its name from van Herpen’s landmark 2018 collection which was inspired by patterns and shapes found in nature. According to the British luxury automaker, the project took four years of continuous development.
Calling it an Haute Couture-inspired masterpiece, the Rolls-Royce Phantom Syntopia is based on the Phantom Extended model which is described by the British marque as the ultimate blank canvas for personalization. The Dutch fashion designer says Syntopia’s bespoke design is inspired by the beauty of fluid motion in solid materials, calling the theme “weaving water.” While the overall exterior design is unchanged, the one-off is finished in a bespoke Liquid Noir color-shifting paint with blue, magenta, and gold undertones.
The automaker developed a brand new technique for applying pigment to the clearcoat, which required more than 3000 hours for testing and validation. Additionally, the hood also features a subtle rendering of the Weaving Water motif that appears throughout the interior.
It’s the inside where the Rolls-Royce Phantom Syntopia truly shines. It features Weaving Water-inspired designs that were made by the Rolls-Royce Bespoke Collective in Goodwood and van Herpen’s team members in Amsterdam. The best example is the custom headliner that was crafted using a single sheet of leather selected from over 1,000 hides. Calling it the most technically challenging component of the car, the headliner features a 3D design achieved with the use of woven nylon fabric that looks like a silver “liquid metal” texture.
Furthermore, it has 162 “delicate petals made of glass organza” that took van Herpen’s team nearly 300 hours at Rolls-Royce’s Goodwood factory and around 1000 sparkling fiber-optic “stars” inside. The headliner alone involved approximately 700 collective hours of work, which shows how incredibly complex it is.
Another highlight of the Rolls-Royce Phantom Syntopia is its bespoke scent which was developed with input from the client who commission the build, making it the first Rolls-Royce to get its own scent. It uses a patented scent-releasing mechanism in the headrests. “For this special collaboration, I was inspired by the concept of ‘Weaving Water’ and transformed the sense of being in movement into an immersive experience of fluidity inside the Phantom. I wanted this to become a state-of-the-art experience being overwhelmed by the forces of nature.
The powerful movement of the Phantom is woven into the shifting three-dimensional waves inside the car to embody the ingenuity of nature,” said van Herpen. As expected, Rolls-Royce has chosen not to reveal the identity of the one-off’s owner, and neither has it revealed the pricing; but we won’t be surprised if it’s well beyond $2 million.
