Rest In Peace Giorgio Armani. You Cooked With This Special Edition Mercedes-Benz CLK 500

It’s a sad week in the fashion world, as Giorgio Armani has died at the age of 91. The legendary Italian fashion designer, who elevated Milan in the global consciousness and built an empire on cloth, is largely remembered as an industry pioneer for selling everything from suits to jeans and branching out to pursuits like hotels and nightclubs. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he also lent his name and sense of style to a couple of cars.

Just last year, Fiat announced the latest special edition 500e electric city car, and it came wearing a familiar name: the Giorgio Armani Collector’s Edition. Considering Fiat has been treating its latest model like a fashion line, offering limited-edition drops based on seasonal trends, it’s a collaboration that simply makes sense.

However, if you were hoping for something bright and extroverted, you probably aren’t an Armani person. Like the label, almost everything here is understated. Low-saturation green or “greige” paint, satin trim, subtle neutral cloth, dark-stained open-pore wood on the dashboard. Classy, certainly, but not likely to rock the boat.

There is one exception, though, and that’s the style of alloy wheels fitted to the Fiat 500e Giorgio Armani Collector’s Edition. They don’t have normal spokes as such. Instead, they’re giant monograms, bold and brash and unrepentant in repping Armani’s initials. They don’t exactly whisper, but I suspect the sort of person buying a 500e to match their outfit probably wouldn’t want them to.

While the Fiat 500e Giorgio Armani Collector’s Edition is front-of-mind for anyone with an irrational fondness for relatively short-range EVs, Armani did lend his name and eye to at least one other car, and it was ahead of its time. Back in 2003, Mercedes-Benz’s Designo division, the personalization wing that once clad the inside of a CL with granite, collaborated with Giorgio Armani on a one-off CLK convertible concept car. As it turns out, this was so well received that 100 examples of the drop-top CLK 500 were plucked off the regular production line to become something a bit special, virtual copies of the earlier concept. While about a year passed between concept and production, you could still say that the Armani edition predicted the future.

It starts with the paint, a neutral hue called Sabbia that wouldn’t be so groundbreaking if it weren’t factory matte paint in 2004. This was way before matte wraps were a thing, before Ken Block’s trendsetting matte black CLS, and way before Mercedes-Benz let customers choose matte paint from the standard options sheet. Matching the low-gloss hue was satin trim, like we’d later see in models like the S63 AMG coupe of the 2010s, and the fitment of the Sportline kit pointed toward a broader desire for more aggressive styling.

On the inside, it’s much the same story. Stitched leather panels effectively replaced wood as the dominant dashboard panels, like we saw in the previous-generation S-Class. Interesting weaves of cloth filled space in the door cards like you get in some automakers’ current vegan interior options, and everything apart from the black dash pad and carpets was finished in two-tone saddle tan and off-white. The CLK 500 Designo by Giorgio Armani was easily a decade ahead of the curve when it came to colors, materials, and finishes, even if it did come at the princely sum of €86,884 (around $104,000, going by 2004-era exchange rates).

So, rest in peace to Giorgio Armani, a fashion pioneer who sure knew how to spec out a Benz, and whose strange monogrammed Fiat 500e wheels have already earned their spot in the pantheon of interesting alloys. One for the Emporio Armani set, and one for people with Armani Exchange T-shirts, when you think about it.

Top graphic image: Mercedes-Benz

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