New Rolls-Royces don’t come along very often, and fortunately there’s more to this one than first meets the eye. According to director of design Giles Taylor, the aim when they got cracking on the Dawn drop head wasn’t just to design something beautiful, it was to create a car that made its occupants look like rock stars. Or perhaps 21st-century incarnations of the characters in The Great Gatsby. A noble ambition, but a tall order given that Taylor and his team are car designers, not magicians, and team TG probably didn’t feature in any of the mood boards. You need serious chutzpah to pull this off.

Following all the ghostly going son with Phantoms and Wraiths, Rolls says the name of this new convertible symbolises the start of a significant new era for the company. It also invokes the spirit of the early Fifties Silver Dawn, of which only 28 were made, each coach built, and a car whose arrival chimed with an emerging post-World War II feel-good factor among the country’s upper classes. (The rest of the nation was still on rations and gravel for breakfast, but at least the bombs had stopped.)

With Phantom production winding down after 13 years – its replacement isn’t due until 2018, a deliberately lengthy interregnum only Rolls could absorb – and the SUV incoming (a “high-riding vehicle” in Rolls-speak), the Dawn is leading the push for a younger, more dynamic clientele. Fat, old, cigar-chompers with claret features and wardrobes full of red trousers would be advised to look elsewhere. Rolls is chasing new-age Silicon Valley gazillionaires, and would rather see Cara Delevingne and St Vincent exiting elegantly through those magnificent rearhinged doors than lilac dowagers.