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LONDON—Audi has decided its latest pitch to premium buyers is better made in Shoreditch than Silverstone.
Over the weekend, the carmaker unveiled “Car Couture”, a campaign by BBH that ditches glossy mountain roads in favour of car parts arranged like a dressmaker’s flat lay. Timed to London Fashion Week, it is a bid to lean into Vorsprung durch Technik’s design credentials and place them closer to Vogue than Top Gear.
Illustrator James Carey and a professional pattern cutter turned axles and body panels into tailoring templates. The creative director, Uche Ezugwu, insists that Audi and fashion “share many principles, one of them is great design”.
Behind the spin lies a business logic. As electric vehicles spread, the brute metrics of power and speed are levelling out. Most premium saloons now accelerate like sports cars and cruise in silence. That leaves design, and provenance, as the terrain on which margins are defended.
Fashion Week provides the right theatre. Affluent, design-conscious audiences are already in town. For the uninitiated passerby, the image still works: a schematic of car parts cut and arranged like fabric pieces signals precision and craft even without knowledge of the runway calendar. It reads as design rather than salesmanship, a car company deliberately withholding the car.
Rivals have played this game before. Mercedes-Benz has its name all over international runways; BMW has partnered with Louis Vuitton. Audi’s contribution is more restrained, but the intention is the same, to lean further into design and provenance as a means of staying relevant with buyers who would never dream of reading a spec sheet.
The choice of timing is shrewd. Central London footfall rose despite facing tube strikes. Retail Gazette says, “London footfall remained resilient, with Central London footfall rising 1.7% last week from the week before and by 2.9% compared to 2024.”
Fashion Week continues to draw bodies, and brands, into the capital at a moment when attention is scarce.
The timing is not accidental. In the first half of 2025, Volkswagen Group reported revenues of €158.4 billion, a shade down from €158.8 billion a year earlier, while its operating result fell by one-third to €6.7 billion. Margins slipped to 4.2%. For a company battling pressure on profitability, looking good has never mattered quite so much.
The campaign will be featured in contextual Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising in London. Media planning was handled by PHD.
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