​​From Apple and iPhones to Ferrari and Fashion, Jony Ive and Marc Newson Accelerate in a New Direction

Ferrari might be globally renowned as Italy’s raciest carmaker, but this year the Prancing Horse, as petrolheads call it, seems to be embarking on a significant change of gears. First, three months ago, the Maranello-based company staged the first of its seasonal fashion collections by Rocco Iannone on one of its production lines. Then this afternoon, the company announced a new and intriguing hire: Ferrari has signed a several-year deal to collaborate with Jony Ive and his design partner, Marc Newson. Together the Briton and the Australian head up LoveFrom, a design agency they cofounded in 2019—previously they worked together at Apple. It appears that Ferrari’s fashion show—where both Ive and Newson were in the audience—seems to have been only one part of a broader strategy rethink by its owner.

That owner is Exor, the investment vehicle of the famous Agnelli family, today led by scion John Elkann. Exor has been exploring fashion with greater and greater gusto of late. Last December it bought a majority stake from Hermès in Shang Xia, which is just about to present its first collection at Paris Fashion Week. Earlier this year it invested more than 500 million euros for a reported 24% stake in Christian Louboutin. Added to today’s announcement was a sentence that could prove relevant to both investments: “Beyond the collaboration with Ferrari, LoveFrom will explore a range of creative projects with Exor in the business of luxury.”

What they make of this strategy over at financial papers like The Economist, whose largest shareholder also happens to be Exor, remains to be seen. From Vogue’s corner, it appears that Exor and Elkann have identified the wider luxury space as an area ripe with growth potential. The man in charge of reshaping Ferrari’s contours is chief diversification officer Nicola Boari. In a release earlier this year, the company described Boari’s mission as the preserving and growing of “its defining values of exclusivity, luxury, quality, and technology within an extended lifestyle concept…the project aims to create a brand experience that goes beyond Formula 1 and Gran Turismo cars.”

Today’s appointment also feels adjacently reminiscent of LVMH’s recent move to recruit Virgil Abloh to shape new projects across that great luxury conglomerate. The upshot? The barriers between the traditionally siloed and specialist fields of fashion, technology, hard luxury, automotive design, and beyond seem to be breaking down in order to allow for a new multi-category expression of luxury and design to develop.

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