The Phantom Of The West End

A subtle yet unrestrained reimaging of Rolls-Royce's Flagship model.

- Chris Nelson

STANDING IN A dark photo studio in downtown Los Angeles, we suddenly hear a voice. Her tone soft, seductive, and slightly eerie, a woman whispers the words on her script, purple prose written by Rolls-Royce to boast about its rose-colored past and the idyllic future it imagines. She ends with, “Today, we become tomorrow.” Overhead lights brighten, and a two-tone Rolls-Royce Phantom comes into view.

A thoughtful redesign of the marque’s flagship model, it’s not immediately apparent that this eighth-generation Phantom is a platformup project. It doesn’t look dramatically different from today’s Phantom, stale after 14 years on the market. Probably because Rolls-Royce engineers and designers were faced with this conundrum: modernize Rolls-Royce’s longest-running nameplate while retaining the model’s classic elegance.

Rolls-Royce calls the Phantom “the conveyance of choice for the world’s most influential and powerful men and women … a sentinel silently witnessing moments as significant as The Beatles collecting their honors at Buckingham Palace, Field Marshal Montgomery driving Churchill and Eisenhower, and numerous global superstars collecting their Oscars.” After creating the first-generation Phantom in 1925, the British manufacturer continued recapturing what it considers the model’s hallmark characteristics—comfort, effortlessness, opulence— for seven generations.