Alright, Which Rich Dipshits Commissioned These Rolls-Royces

Because I used to be an automotive journalist, I still get press releases from mailing lists that people have forgotten to remove me from. Usually I ignore them, because again: I used to be an automotive journalist. Today, however, I got Rolls-Royce's version of their Spotify Wrapped, or as they call it: "BESPOKE 2025 TRENDS & INNOVATIONS".

I came across this in my inbox while stewing in furious anger because my society is collapsing into an orgy of fascist violence. Unfortunately for the comms folks at Rolls-Royce, I've decided this press release is going to serve as my vent valve for the black bile currently hitting critical pressure inside me, so I do not explode. Luckily for me it's a pretty good vent valve, because the whole existence of this email is a scathing indictment of everything wrong with our society!

For those of you not up to date on the $500,000-and-up car market, Rolls-Royce's "Bespoke" program allows you to go off-menu from the traditional lavish appointments you can find in the encyclopedia-thick options catalogs. For an if-you-have-to-ask-you-cannot-afford-it wad of cash on top of the MSRP of a new Rolls, the artisans at Goodwood will indulge every whim of the richest people alive so they get a one-of-one personalized car. It's the automotive equivalent of the tweet about the teeth and the chairs, you know:

This desire to stand out from the other Rolls-owning assholes at the valet line for 432 Park Place with a Bespoke customization is a substantial reason for the stunning climb in price of a Rolls—from roughly $300,000 to $500,000 over the past decade.

According to the press release, 2025 was yet another strong year for Rolls-Royce, with 5,664 deliveries of new cars, roughly a third of which were bound for North America. Americans also drove "strong growth in Bespoke commission... despite market volatility". Yeah man, that's one way to put it I guess.

Chris Brownridge, chief exec of Rolls, stated of the Bespoke program that "our clients’ increasing interest and engagement in more ambitious commissions is realized in our joint pursuit of perfection." What, you may ask, did the world's wealthiest people see fit to commission in their pursuit of perfection with perhaps the world's most storied automaker?

Well, SPECTRE BAILEY, a one-off Rolls-Royce Spectre (base MSRP $422,750), features a rear centerpiece art installation made from "an 180-piece marquetry portrait crafted from nine veneer species". Now, because this car is Bespoke, I would like to note all of that veneer does not have any "artificial stain or treatment"; that's right, it required nine separate kinds of tree to pull that off. Oh yeah also Bailey's a dog.

Rolls-Royce is proud to note that "Bailey’s tongue alone was crafted using four veneers never previously employed by Rolls-Royce", including one species of wood (louro faia) that I shit you not solely grows in the Amazon rainforest. The car is painted in two-tone "Crystal Fusion over Beautiful Bailey" paint to match the Labrador-Golden Retriever mix's fur, and was commissioned by "U.S.-based clients" (wow who could have guessed!).

The wood inlays and car's coachline are adorned with cartoon pawprints not unlike those magnets that say DOG IS MY CO-PILOT you could expect to see on an atheist lesbian's 1996 Ford Ranger, except these probably cost $45,000 instead of $4.99 with Amazon Prime.

Now I could maybe forgive this level of white people shit if the dog was deceased but in this image right here you'll notice the goddamn dog sitting in the car next to his own portrait. If you have ever seen a golden retriever/lab mix in an automobile I guarantee you they cannot tell the difference between a $700,000 Rolls with their portrait made out of endangered forests and a $2,000 Craigslist Jeep Cherokee, so this seems a little indulgent, but I guess that's why I'm poor.

On a more serious note, this commission really illustrates the uncanny valley that rich people so often find themselves in. It's charming to love your pets; it's one of the truly universal human experiences that binds us all through time and place and culture. And yet where a beat-up 2008 Hyundai Santa Fe with a happy dog riding in the back and a "My Labrador Is Smarter Than The President" bumper sticker is delightful sight, this feels almost twisted, like an alien tried to understand what makes loving a pet charming in an attempt to grasp human culture and way, way overshot the mark.

Next up we have PHANTOM DENTELLE, out of the Dubai office. This four-door Phantom (base MSRP $520,000) uses "the medium of embroidery" to stand out from all the unembroidered Rolls-Royces and can be "regarded as an authentic expression of haute couture."

The front dash panel features a multi-layered floral composition of lace and satin and pearl that comprises over 160,000 stitches in colors like "Rose Gold, Sunrise and Oatmeal", and pays homage to a couture lace made by a "rare 'Leavers' loom". Now that is a somewhat odd way to characterize those things because we had 730 of them in America alone by the end of WWII because they were good at knitting mosquito netting, but I digress.

The rear seats feature another 70,000 stitches in a floral design. This is very pretty and all, don't get me wrong, but I do believe my grandmother had something like this hanging in her living room next to the table covered in lace doilies to prevent coffee-cup rings from forming. Maybe I should have asked her if those were made by a Leavers loom.

The exterior is finished in "Crystal over Arctic White" on the bottom and "Crystal over Palais Nemasker Dawn" on the roof—a color which Rolls-Royce eagerly notes is "reserved for the commissioning client’s exclusive use". This means someone had the kind of money that they could get Rolls-Royce to set aside entire paint colors for them specifically, like they're goddamn Anish Kapoor, and they chose white with grandma pink bath towels for their bare-minimum half-a-million-dollar sedan. The hood ornament and speaker grilles are also rose gold, because of course they are.

To be fair this bleached-white simulacra of old-money-taste is sort of Dubai's monied classes' whole thing, but it's still wild to commission a Rolls in Rental White (sparkly) With iPhone Accents. Say what you will about America's wealthy but at least Donald's Diablo was an actual goddamn color.

The real pièce de résistance of this Rolls-Royce email for me was this: the BLACK BADGE GHOST GAMER. Based on a Black Badge Ghost Series II (base MSRP $423,000), the BLACK BADGE GHOST GAMER has a "Bespoke 8-bit 'Cheeky Alien' motif" that recurs through its cabin.

Now I will not lie, it feels kind of like cheating making fun of this Ready-Player-One-ass car. Can you imagine rolling up to the club in this shit? The wealthy of our era are so jaw-droppingly tasteless they have finally invented a Rolls-Royce that you could not get laid in.

Rolls-Royce says the BLACK BADGE GHOST GAMER was "delivered to a tech entrepreneur", which somehow surpasses the American dog mom buyer of the SPECTRE BAILEY for obviousness. It also explains why the new owner wasn't worried about what women would think of his new car, because meeting a girl will be a theoretical concern for his entire life. Rolls-Royce, I should note, does not specify that the commissioning buyer is a man, but I am dead certain a woman's hand did not touch this car at any point in its construction.

Rolls-Royce says the BLACK BADGE GHOST GAMER is "a hidden cache of joystick-era Easter eggs, the discovery of every feature turns the motor car itself into a stunningly crafted game." I, personally, would call it the best evidence I have ever found that the people working us all to death are suffering from untreatable cases of Everyone Is Twelve Syndrome, but again I'm poor so perhaps I just can't understand Gen X's lead-paint-influenced tastemaking.

Rolls-Royce notes that the world of classic gaming is a growing interest for its ultra-wealthy clientele, "their interest driven not only by accelerating value, but a nostalgic personal connection." This asshole is why you can't afford a Gamecube on eBay anymore, in other words.

The motif carries through to the rear "Waterfall" inlay, where a pair of stainless-steel spaceships hover over an alien landscape (all squeezed between a pair of Gamer Chairs). This aesthetic nightmare unfortunately masks an unbelievable amount of effort; Rolls-Royce notes the entire hand-painted centerpiece artwork "required more than two weeks of intensive development, with multiple paint iterations refined to create the final, period-perfect hues" capable of paying homage to arcade cabinet artwork.

And this, really, gets to the crux of what makes the Bespoke cars so viscerally upsetting to me on a level much, much more intense than, say, a paint-to-sample Porsche. There is an unbelievable amount of actual talent that goes into building one of these commissions; some of the more intricate ones really cross the line into rolling art pieces.

The CULLINAN COSMOS, for example, features a hand-painted headliner that was painted freehand over the course of 160 hours by one of Rolls-Royce's in-house artists—one of many that the company employs to work on the Bespoke line, which has been so successful that Rolls-Royce is investing another $375,000,000 in facilities to build even more Bespoke cars.

I will not pretend the rich used to be harmless benefactors of humanity and now, suddenly, find themselves cruel and evil, but I will note that at least the rest of us get to see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. As the world of the wealthy continues to split off from the reality the rest of us inhabit, they continue to wall off gorgeous works made by some of the precious few working artists left on the planet so that they—and only they—get to look up and see beauty.