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Tristan Auer apologizes for not bringing his car, one out of his collection at least. It might be his Ferrari Dino 308 GT4 or his Lamborghini Urraco, two (often overlooked) stars of 1970s Italian design. He says that the traffic getting to his office in central Paris is a pain, and parking is worse, but I tell him it’s no problem. We have too much to talk about, really, and I’m already overwhelmed by his office alone. Take, for instance, the 308 GT4 and the Urraco. Both were penned by the legendary Marcello Gandini, and both stemmed from one original design study. There’s its original wood model on Auer’s side table. Auer bought it a few years back, at Bertone’s bankruptcy auction, and he points out how you can spot elements from both cars on its hand-carved form.
These little bits of inspiration are what fill Auer’s office, and his Instagram page, too. That’s where he launched Car Tailoring, what you might call his side gig, in 2017. His work is unlike anyone else’s. While others redo cars for performance, Auer redoes them for style. He is not seeking a perfect restoration of taking old cars back to their showroom specifications. Nor is he stripping them down into trackday restomods. He is reenvisioning them and transforming them from the inside out. “Car tailoring is not a business,” Auer says to me. “It’s more of a passion.”
His main work is as a kind of atelier for living spaces, redoing homes, hotels, and apartments for the style set. Off a high shelf in his archive, he pulls down a few framed pages of sketches, with pasted-on polaroids and scribbled-on notes. The handwriting isn’t his own. Auer redid Karl Lagerfeld’s apartment some years back, and those are Lagerfeld’s pictures and addenda, noting a particular lamp to use as a guide.
“At one point I was desperate to find my own identity,” Auer says, explaining the origin of Car Tailoring, “and to build it.” Auer is easy to talk to and soft spoken. But his eyes are bright as he talks about finding a use for his interest in cars, transforming it into something that gives him clarity as a designer. “I looked at all the other designers, how good they were at promoting themself. And I didn’t find something for myself. So neither way to dress, neither little dogs or whatever. So I gave up and said, OK, I will do what I really like and my passion is cars, old cars. And I started to build my brand Car Tailoring for that.”
Sunlight spills into the office past tall plants and onto the thick rug. We’re a few floors up from the narrow streets that fill up the middle of Paris, right on the edge of the 9th Arrondissement. I’ve followed Car Tailoring for years, not long after his first commission, redoing a 1973 Citroën DS as a courtesy car for the five-star Hôtel de Crillon in 2019. It is by chance that I happen to be in Paris, and that we both had a free hour to meet; he in between meetings, me before running off to catch a flight home. Auer’s assistants swirl around us, with updates and questions from clients for his design work as an interior architect. And Auer peppers our whole interview, diving into cupboards and drawers, pulling out the compilation books he has made for each car project. Here is a photo of the wooden loom used for making woven leather panels for a Mercedes 280SL, number 16 in the Car Tailoring series. Everywhere I look, something else grabs my attention. There’s a header off of Auer’s old Lancia 037 up on a nearby shelf, and here’s a photo of him sliding it on a historic rally.
Cabinets open, and more boxes fill the table in the next room, with papers and samples from project after project. Here are his treatments for the Mercedes SLS, trimmed in a fantastic brown tweed wool and a kind of hand-carved leather I had never seen before, textured in a way that looks like wood grain. I spy the manufacturer’s mark on the corner of the sample; naturally, Auer sourced it from a shop on the outskirts of Paris, one of the many connections he has made in his main job. It’s funny. Mercedes went through all the trouble of designing the SLS to call back to the 300 SL of the 1950s, even engineering in exploding bolts in the roof so that its gullwing doors would still open in a rollover. And yet Mercedes only sold them trimmed in fairly plain leather. Sure, the new car got performance and styling that called back to its predecessor, but its interior design was painfully behind. Auer’s Car Tailoring is the only shop I’ve seen to realize the SLS as a Gullwing successor, inside as well as out.
From a broad and slim box, Auer pulls out two sheets of leather, custom-dyed by a woman who works nearby in Paris. It took her several months and a couple of tries to get the look right, experimenting with different treatments. The final product is a red-to-red fade, from crimson to burgundy. Auer had a rare early-‘90s Porsche America Roadster retrimmed with the stuff in a vertical ombre. It looks more in-period than anything that came from the factory.
It’s worth saying that the Car Tailoring treatment isn’t exclusive to expensive cars. Auer is proud of a little Autobianchi A112 Abarth, kind of like an Italian Mini Cooper, done for about five grand. The car isn’t costly, but to its owner, it’s precious.
What Auer does is a service to the automotive world, elevating the design and style of often-overlooked cars. But it’s clear that the cars themselves have done so much for Auer. It’s easy to see the kind of love he has for them, and the sense of duty and obligation he has to get them right.
Car Tailoring is now on its 30th car, but Auer’s 308 GT4 was its first project. He still has all the original samples and starts unloading them on his desk, accessory after accessory tumbling out. “This is for the little pockets for the paper,” Auer laughs. “This is for the bag, and the umbrella, and all the accessories, and the key holder.” Then he pulls out a sizable piece of luggage, with no exposed metal that might accidentally scratch or damage the car’s paintwork. Of course, it matches the car’s redone interior trim. “Because you don’t always drive your car, but when you have the bag of your car, you take it and you travel with it. And this is an enjoyment as well.”
Auer talks about these cars with a sense of devotion, with a sense of service. He talks about the joy they bring him and their owners, and to the people who see them driving down the street in something perfectly stylish, perfectly refinished, perfectly designed. Auer turns the umbrella around to show that it’s stamped with the serial number of its corresponding vehicle. “Those accessories don’t belong to you,” he points out. “They belong to the car.”
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