Supercars Are Now Officially Fashion Accessories, Thanks to Social Media

More than ever this year at Monterey Car Week, I noticed automobiles masquerading as haute couture fashion accessories. Now, sure, in Los Angeles the supercar industry long ago started capitalizing on tangential social signifiers of taste, wealth, and exclusivity. But from the swankiest debut soirees to crews of Koenigseggs cruising down 17 Mile Drive at barely 17 miles an hour, the 2024 Car Week took the cake.

How else to explain the borderline unbelievable auction results at RM Sotheby’s, Gooding & Company, Broad Arrow, and Mecum, which fell just 3 percent year over year against 2023 despite pre-1981 cars worth $1 million or more dropping from a 63 to 52 percent sell-through rate? Total sales still reached $391.6 million, in an unprecedented election year chock-full of political and economic uncertainty.

Or what about the increasingly obscene spate of million-dollar Porsche one-offs from custom coach builders including Singer, Gunther Werks, Tuthill, Kalmar—truly too many Porsches to list, including a dubiously restomodded 993-generation 911 Speedster fresh off the Porsche factory floor.

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Car Spotting Gone Viral

As I wandered the Monterey peninsula test-driving Lambos and Ferraris and Broncos and, yes, Porsches—and even a 1971 Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.3 from the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center in the hopes of understanding why Steve McQueen’s car sold for $148,400 this year at RM—the whole concept of status symbols reverberated in my head. Mostly, I think, since every single time I parked in a sweet car, a swarm of Instagramming car spotters immediately descended on my pitiful attempts at peaceful photo shoots.

I do admittedly call one of the of the world’s most prolific car spotters my friend, though, and as spoiled or jaded as a career in automotive journalism has left me, I almost miss the excitement factor of seeing some random rare car in the flesh for the first time. So when I spotted LA Car Spotter himself, aka Cody Lewis, shooting some Reels at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, I quizzed him on how he sees the influence of social media on automotive culture.

“With social media came the rise of car spotting,” Lewis told me, “I think social media has definitely made the automotive industry a lot smaller. It's a generational thing; there’s a generation of people who use social media, and more people see that there's an outlet they could potentially go viral on. So from an owner standpoint, I would say that where they used to try to buy the coolest, most expensive cars, now it's become more and more important to have something that’s different than everybody else. The only one in this color, with these wheels, and things like that.”

Inexplicable Auction Action in 2024

This year’s auctions included some strange trends. Because I always spend most of my time at Monterey outside of the auction houses, I caught up once more with vice president of Automotive Intelligence at Hagerty, Brian Rabold, on the pristine lawns of Pebble to suss out why modern machines started gaining momentum, rather than the expected blue-chip 1960s Ferraris that typically attracted old white guy collectors in blue sport coats and khaki pants. 

I mentioned the generational gap between those seasoned types and social media users who might want to find a way to stand out online with any newfound disposable income. Rabold agreed, but not wholeheartedly.

“There seems to be a split where the old classics are not pulling the interest and the newer classics, or newer modern enthusiast cars, are,” he said. “But I don't think it's accurate to assume that whoever is buying the GT1 Porsche, for example, is necessarily a GameStop guy.”

Instead, Rabold speculated that the increased values and improved sell-through rates for newer cars come from the more traditional collectors wanting to wait and see where the market goes in the near future. This allows bidders perhaps new to collecting cars to harbor hope of winning something special at the lower end of the market. Which would explain why cars below the half-million mark held steady or even gained momentum.

The Porsche Restomod Debacle

On the other end of the spectrum, though, the market for insanely expensive restomods continued to expand. Literally to laughable levels, as my friends and I joked via group chats on—you guessed it—social media. What about a Tuthill impression of a Singer based on a 1990s Porsche GT1 with a former Singer employee working over the futuristic interior? And parked on a pedestal about 20 yards from Singer’s own display.

But one of the wildest Porsches came from Kalmar Automotive, the brainchild of a Danish mad scientist named Jan Kalmar, whom I spoke with before he debuted the gob-smacking 9X9 at The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering. Kalmar is generally hilarious, self-admittedly far from politically correct, and an absolute expert on everything mechanical in any Porsche. His take on today’s industry puts even his own company into perspective.

“When the GT4 RS came out,” he recalled, “I was invited to a cars and coffee somewhere, a big one in Denmark, and this guy came in with his GT4 RS and people almost got quiet. Like, OK, now there's a GT4 RS. And then within five minutes, there were five of them. So he really went from from hero to zero in no time.

I laughed then, and now, as I revisit the conversation to write up this story. In hindsight, doesn’t that sound like the modern-day precursor to people speculating which cars might one day be valuable winners at Concours d’Elegances like Pebble? 

When the highfalutin politics of who knows who and restoration costs and rarity all combine to produce the ultimate fashion statement: A Concours Winner of Indisputable Taste and Class.

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Ticking the Right Boxes with the Bugatti Tourbillon

Certainly very few buyers of the Bugatti Tourbillon that made its public debut at The Quail will take a deep dive into how the world’s most spectacular gauge cluster, a combination of rare jewels and milled metals, actually functions. Or what about how the new hybrid V16 pumps out low-end torque to render quad-turbos bolted onto a W16 entirely irrelevant, with the improved packaging of electric motors contributing to aero and crash structure engineering, too? Instead, as with certain watch owners, the point here for so many customers will instead be the rarity, exclusivity, and over-impressive styling.

Sure, they may learn a few stats and parrot a few details to impress friends. And yet, having driven a Chiron Super Sport, I can attest to exactly how well Bugatti’s styling matches the performance of the world’s most opulent automotive creations. Entirely unexpected, you might say, but also a challenge that, to me, represents the saving grace of an industry that I so often belittle openly. Because no matter how much the styling creates a first impression, or a second or third even, the engineering also needs to withstand the scrutiny of those few who do actually care about driving dynamics.

The prospect that a Tourbillon buyer might only put a few miles on such a stunning hyper-car bums me out. These machines are meant to be driven, and short of a natural disaster sending a McLaren P1 floating downstream in Miami, the neglect of sitting around parked is the worst possible thing for a car’s mechanical, driving condition.

What Cars Mean Mentally

Automobiles always occupy so very many variegated roles in the human psyche, after all. First as a means of conveyance, from horseless carriages to today’s toaster EVs that we journalists love to bemoan. Engagement came second, when racing performance and enthralling sounds and smells caught hold. How to differentiate an enjoyable drive from an errand in an appliance or tool originally fell to the world’s wealthiest, with not just the means but also the time to do the enjoying.

So I suppose the same can be said for the upper echelons of automotive culture today, as fashion increasingly fits into the mix. Ruf, the former Porsche modification and restoration firm turned genuine OEM, took that concept to the max this year with the scene-stealing Rodeo off-roader.

“I believe that style is something that comes from within and comes with an attitude,” Aloisa Ruf, granddaughter of founder Alois Ruf Sr., told me. “If you you're confident in whatever you wear, you will be stylish in one way or the other. Now when it comes to combining that with automotive, I don't think that people necessarily see their cars as an accessory more than they see them as an extension to themselves.”

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The Ruf Rodeo might occupy a generally 911-ish profile but is built on a custom carbon-fiber monocoque and roll cage, with inboard pushrod suspension and a screaming twin-turbo flat-six capable of pushing 610 horsepower to all four wheels through a six-speed manual transaxle and electronically controlled all-wheel-drive system. Yet most of the social posts disseminating from The Quail necessarily focused on the orange paint and the cowboy-themed leather interior, of course.

“When it comes to the interplay between our design and the colors that we pick, we always focus on the storytelling,” Aloisa Ruf added. “The exterior is in Signal Orange, inspired by the Midwestern sunset. The interior almost has this Navajo touch from many, many different elements that were also very heavily inspired by Ralph Lauren himself. I think that the future of our company also lies in the lifestyle aspect and in the fashion aspect of our cars.”

Finding Hope in Sartorial Engineering

So often in a city like Los Angeles, the difference between style and fashion leaves true sartorial expression sacrificed on the altar of haute couture. Instead, the latest clothes and watches and purses and flat-brimmed hats worn by dilettantes only seem to attract attention by way of compensating for the lack of anything interesting to think or say or do otherwise. At Pebble, this translates to five-figure watches and feathered Kentucky Derby hats and only the finest handbags on the planet.

Lambo toes a fine line in that regard, and in fact the Revuelto and now the Temerario unveiled at The Quail both dial back the styling a few notches, perhaps to allow the insane twin-turbo V8 and hybrid powertrain to do the talking and appeal to a more more tech-savvy, avant-garde owner base. Similar to the suave suits of CEO Stefan Winkelmann.

Hope springs eternal, not just from GMA and Ruf and Lambo but also at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance itself, where a roughed-up 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports won overall Best of Show in the preservation class—a first in the history of the esteemed Concours, and hopefully not the last.

Monterey is about more than the cars that park in the big shows or make the biggest social media impact in flashy debuts. It's also about what the public drives to witness the spectacle. This year, the number of Tesla Cybertrucks and Lotus Emiras I spotted blew my mind. Talk about two ends of the spectrum, the former perhaps the ultimate statement of supposed style over substance and the latter an unfortunately delayed driver’s delight finally given a chance at the end of an era, yet still styled perfectly to appeal to the more aesthetically attuned supercar buyer.

So in the end, just as we all use social media to stay in touch with family or proliferate memes among our friends or even build a new brand, it turns out that how automobiles are used as fashion accessories comes down to the owner as much as the automaker, and how they choose to wear or show off their latest and greatest find.

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