Lincoln unveils swanky Aviator Shinola Concept

The best designers find inspiration outside their bubbles. For Kemal Curic and his team at Lincoln, that means everything from visits to NASA space labs to local artisanal galleries. These field trips paved the way for Lincoln’s latest project: a collaboration with Shinola, a Detroit-based company known for its watches, bicycles, and leather goods.

“We often go to inspirational places and this one felt like a perfect fit,” Kemal says of his team’s visit to the flagship store in downtown Motown. “Shinola opened up their doors and shared their entire collection with us. The craftsmanship really spoke to us as a design team. The attention to detail and things that are hand finished, those are the things really shared between the two brands.”

Shinola, founded by the same entrepreneur behind Fossil watches, has capitalised on nationalist sentiment – or more specifically, Detroit pride – to position itself as a symbol of revived American industrialism and “attainable luxury.” The name stems from a defunct brand of shoe polish made in the US between the 1870s until the 1960s, though for people of a certain age, the word is more likely to evoke a popular insult of the twentieth century: “You don’t know sh*t from Shinola, and that’s why your shoes don’t shine.” Today, Shinola is a hip brand that started with quartz watches and has grown to include dog leashes, US$200 power strips, and even a hotel in Detroit, where guests can borrow Marvin Gaye records from the front desk and play them on Shinola-branded turntables in their wood-and-leather appointed suites while sipping Detroit-made beer from the mini bar.

Translating this to the Lincoln brand meant designing something eye-catching, yet not ostentatious. “We didn’t want to create something gaudy, but tasteful,” Curic says as we sit in the front seat of the show car, the smell of fresh leather polish filling our nostrils even through face masks. The two-tone cabin is wrapped in tanned cognac leather and cream coloured fabric with dark blue suede piping. A ribbon runs down the centre of each seat, scaled up from Shinola’s brand stripe, which is found on its watch straps and the lining of its handbags. “I love the seats, the way the leather and the patterns were broken up, it really complements the shape,” Curic says.

Woven metal mesh trim adorns the centre console and runs across the width of the IP, which Curic says emphasises the horizontality of the cabin. It’s contrasted with copper trim inspired by Shinola bicycles on the IP, air vents, console, and speaker grilles. The exterior paint is a nod to the mother-of-pearl watch dial, and the same copper from the interior can be found on the front grille’s star-patterned mesh, rocker panel, roof racks, wheels, and bezels around the headlamps.

The Lincoln Aviator Shinola concept will be shown on 15 August at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, alongside some new Audis and more. While there are currently no plans for production, Curic tells us, “This was really an exercise for the design team to test the water on the interiors and to draw inspiration from something non-automotive.”