It’s like unfinished project night around here. Hermes unveiled its reskinned a 1989 Citroen 2CV6 Special at the Paris Auto Show to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Deux Chevaux. Not that anyone needs a reason to luxe out a 2CV, of course.
All the plastic dash and door panel elements have been outfitted in stitched Hermes leather; the rubberized roof has been replaced with Hermes canvas, and the seats–which are removable, remember, and could thus be used in a pinch as picnic or beach furniture–were recovered in leather and canvas. The whole thing was given a paint job that probably cost as much as the donor car itself.
This is pretty close to what I planned to do when I bought my 2CV Charleston in 1995. At the time, I was a pretty heavy Ghurka customer, and I had become friends with the executives and owners of the Connecticut-based company. They had just begun a furniture upholstery sideline a couple of years before, so they were pretty amenable to my request to redo my 2CV seats in Ghurka saddle leather. Rather than bring the seats–or the car–from France to Connecticut, we figured it’d be easier to ship the hides to an upholsterer in France.
Which is where the project died. Ride-pimping culture was not too prevalent along the Cote d’Azur. The carrosserie folks I contacted in Monaco were extremely uninterested in working on an insignificantly scaled project on a dumpy little car like a 2CV. But the Citroenistes were even worse. “No. A Charleston seat is grey, quilted tissu,” said the indignant Citroen upholstery specialist when I asked him about recovering my seats.
So I kept the seats I had, but I added a bamboo sunshade on the roof, which, I’ll point out, the Hermes 2CV does not have.
Paris 2008: Citroen 2CV6 by Hermes [autoblog]
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the making of, by greg allen