The rise of technical tailoring in Motorsport Fashion Ferrari, but make it Margiela
For decades, F1 was the spiritual home of fire-retardant overalls, carbon-fibre monocoques and sponsorship logos big enough to cover a small hatchback. Fashion, in the high sense of the word, was relegated to the periphery — cropped grid girl uniforms, branded baseball caps, and perhaps a Monaco yacht party dress code. But, somewhere between the Netflixfication of the sport with Drive to Survive having done for F1 what HBO once did for mafia families, and Lewis Hamilton turning up to race weekends looking like a Comme des Garçons moodboard, something rather unexpected happened: F1 became fashion. Now, it’s tailoring’s turn to take the wheel.
Motorsport style has entered its next phase: technical tailoring. Not the sort of tailoring one associates with Savile Row or Savonarola, but something altogether more kinetic: performance-layered blazers, ballistic nylon suits, aerodynamic venting, neoprene lapels, and suiting engineered for both the boardroom and the pitlane. It’s the board meeting meets the wind tunnel, and, somewhat improbably, it works.
Ferrari
At the centre of this stylistic overtake manoeuvre is Ferrari, long the canonical emblem of combustion-powered opulence, now moonlighting as an unexpected avatar of avant-garde design. The 2025 Ferrari x Puma collection showcases this aesthetic mutation in full throttle. Gone are the formulaic logo splashes and Scuderia-red hoodies for petrolheads. Instead, we find sharply tailored silhouettes built from high-density nylon, race-suit-inspired seams, and sharply exaggerated lapels mimicking the finned air vents of a LaFerrari. The tailoring here is not an afterthought, it’s the thesis.
Perhaps no single driver has done more to accelerate this fashion revolution than Sir Lewis Hamilton, F1’s reigning style laureate. Hamilton’s collaborations with Tommy Hilfiger have grown increasingly architectural over the seasons, culminating in a series of technical suits that sit somewhere between an air marshal’s dress uniform and the wardrobe of a dystopian architect. Bonded seams, reflective piping, layered mesh panels—they are not so much clothes as high-spec uniforms for the paparazzi battlefield.
Outside the paddock
Yet this movement is not confined to the paddock royalty. Brands across the fashion spectrum are now mining motorsport’s rich aesthetic veins with surprising seriousness. Prada’s Linea Rossa line — once a footnote in sportswear — has roared back into relevance by embracing F1’s visual language: sleek, red-striped utility, wind-slicing minimalism, and tailoring that looks born to survive a G-force turn.
Maison Margiela, never one to miss a trick in the realm of intellectual fashion, has begun crafting deconstructed tailoring from high-performance technical fabrics, whispering the codes of pit-lane pragmatism into the ears of couture. And A-COLD-WALL*, always the streetwear darling with architectural ambitions, has taken the aesthetics of trackside insulation and translated them into asymmetrical blazers with vented backs and magnetic closures—essentially sportswear for people who solve climate change in PowerPoint.
Aston Martin, that most Bondian of constructors, has leaned heavily into the fashion race too. Its ongoing collaboration with Hackett — a brand once known for polite Chelsea raincoats — has turned out a series of collections that are anything but apologetic. The 2025 drop includes structured technical trench-coats with reinforced seams, pleated suits in performance merino, and blazers with hidden zips, storm flaps and laser-cut logos. It’s pitwear, but with a Savile Row stamp.
Executive ergonomics
What all these brands have recognised, quite cleverly, is that F1 style is not just fast; it’s disciplined. In a world where fashion often wallows in the unstructured (boxy fits, ironic proportions, post-normcore disarray), motorsport provides the antithesis: clothes engineered for purpose. Garments that move with you, not despite you. In many ways, technical tailoring is the new power dressing in a 21st-century context where strength lies in mobility, utility, and hyper-specific fabrication. We might call it executive ergonomics — a mode of dress that signals seriousness of purpose while hinting at the potential to change a tire mid-meeting. A tailored blazer with gusseted underarms and moisture-wicking lining doesn’t just flatter the body; it flatters the idea that this body is going somewhere. Quickly.
The irony, of course, is that the average fashion consumer will never touch the steering wheel of an SF-24, nor will they leap from a pit wall into the inferno of brake dust and team radio. But that’s precisely the point: the fantasy of performance, distilled into fabric. Wearing a Ferrari-cut blazer in ballistic nylon is no more absurd than wearing hiking boots in Soho or aviators without a pilot’s license. Technical tailoring is about the illusion of readiness for action, movement, speed, the next thing. It’s fashion’s answer to the start light countdown: prepare to launch. Beyond aesthetics, the technical aspect itself is not mere gimmickry. We are talking breathable wools, Kevlar-infused linings, temperature-regulating seams, adjustable cuffs hidden within traditional lapels. Designers have taken cues from Nomex race suits, carbon composites, even air flow mapping, and translated them into clothes one might wear on a Tuesday to an over-air-conditioned finance panel.
Of course, none of this would matter if it didn’t look fantastic, and it does. The clean lines, the tension, the sense that even standing still, one is already in motion. This is tailoring for the algorithmic age: precise, polished, and just aerodynamic enough to signal that you may, at any moment, pivot into something extraordinary. So where does all this leave the traditionalists — the chalk-striped gents and worsted warriors of sartorial old? Slightly baffled, perhaps, but not obsolete. Tailoring, like any great design language, evolves. Just as the internal combustion engine gave way to hybrid torque curves, so too does the wool-and-lapel suit adapt to the speed of culture.
