At Monterey Car Week, Cadillac Takes a Page From the Couture Playbook
The automaker looks to fashion, architecture, and bespoke design as it transforms the Celestiq into something far beyond a car.
In Carmel-by-the-Sea on California’s central coast, fog settles onto the Monterey Pine trees and sprawling mountain ranges each morning. There are lots of fields in the forested, beachside town—where strawberries, lettuce, and cauliflower sprout easily. It’s a low-key, old-money enclave of the West Coast. And for most of the year, it’s quiet and serene.
That is, until Monterey Car Week comes roaring into town. The annual event brings thousands of car enthusiasts and showcases classic automobiles, racing events, brand activations, and more to the area. During Car Week, held this year from August 7-16, you’ll not only hear thunderous revving engines, you might also see a fleet of rare race cars zooming down the Pacific Coast Highway.
This was the picturesque environment in which Cadillac made its presence known at Monterey Car Week, unveiling multiple launches during the 10-day period. The American automobile brand was everywhere, releasing its new V-One Concept—a limited-production automobile based on Cadillac’s famed LMDh race car—and the introduction of the company’s bespoke Curated by Cadillac IQ program.
Dominic Najafi introducing the new V-One Concept at Monterey Car Week.
At Cadillac House—an invitation-only mansion rented out by the brand and filled with cars, a DJ, and a full bar—executive design director Dominic Najafi discussed the new personalization program, which allows well-heeled clients to choose every design aspect of their car, from the paint job to the interior leatherwork. The Celestiq—a sleek electric vehicle that looks like an incredibly stylish station wagon—is particularly conducive to customization. “The car is hand-built in Detroit at the artisan center,” Najafi, a Brit from the Manchester area, tells W. “There have been people coming with their own swatches, like, ‘Hey, could you match this material? Could you match this color?’”
A customization booth at Cadillac House.
“We do pay attention to trends,” says Alexandra Dymowska, who works on Cadillac’s design and brand creative side. To create the new Celestiq, she adds, the crew looked far outside the confines of cars and car culture for ideas. “Lots of inspiration came from architecture—like Zaha Hadid’s work—from fashion, and from lighting,” she notes. “Also, the sculptor, Armen Agop, who creates monolithic, very distilled sculptures. There’s a designer at Cranbrook Academy [in Michigan] who influenced the linear patterns of the car.”
The Celestiq at Cadillac House.
The fashion world also played a part, with Balmain being a prime source of fascination for the team, Dymowska says. “Balmain is a heritage brand, a legacy brand, that has completely re-envisioned themselves in the fashion world,” she says, noting that many “structural and graphic elements” of the French fashion house influenced the “brave silhouette and this magnetic presence.”
“When Cadillac was founded, the tagline was: standard of the world—the highest standard of design, engineering,” Najafi adds. “Celestiq was a part of the whole reinvention of Cadillac over the last seven to 10 years, putting the brand back in an elevated way again. If you think about those first cars, those first Cadillacs like El Dorados, they were very much the spaceships of their day; they were very progressive. We take that ethos and interpret it in a new way. We’re making a car beyond transport, and more of an object of desire.”
