Polestar 4: Inspired by fashion
Inspiration is essential to innovation. Imitation, on the other hand, is detrimental. For Polestar designers Maria Uggla and Komal Singh, there are no boundaries to what might spark inspiration. Looking far and wide (and, often, much closer to home), the designers have found inspiration in the fashion sphere – and in each other.
What do the footwear industry and Polestar 4 have in common?
Our newest addition to the Polestar family is an electric SUV coupé and our fastest car to date. With a sloped rear design and eliminated rear-window, Polestar 4 is not only aero-optimised for performance and efficiency, but it also allows for a larger interior space. Four different themes have been developed for the Polestar 4 interior space, each designed around carefully combined materials and colours. One of the themes, the Tailored Knit upholstery and Zinc deco, is a celebration of textiles, inspired by the footwear industry.
Komal Singh, Design Expert Colour and Material, and Maria Uggla, Head of Colour and Material, are two of the designers who developed this new, innovative material, together with The Swedish School of Textiles in Borås, Sweden, and are happy to share their sources of inspiration with us.
Name a more iconic duo (we’ll wait)
Forget Noel and Liam. Cheese and crackers. Wallace and Gromit (Editor's note: who?). Let us introduce a new dynamic duo, as iconic to us as beans and toast are to others: Maria Uggla and Komal Singh.
Maria, who constitutes fifty percent of the double-act, is a visionary with decades of experience in the field of CMF (Colour, Materials, and Finish). Raised in a small town with big ideas, Maria journey has taken her from a small community on the Swedish countryside to Polestar’s HQ in Gothenburg, where she currently heads up Polestar’s CMF team. As our Head of Colour and Materials, Maria is responsible for creating a new colour and material expression for the brand together with her small but mighty team.
The other half of the duo is named Komal. The yin to Maria’s yang. In contrast to Maria’s hometown of a couple hundred people, Komal grew up in a city near New Delhi, home to millions. Inspired by fashion, ground-breaking materials, and Scandinavian design, Komal found a perfect match in Polestar – and the perfect partner in Maria. Komal is an advocate of purposeful design and believes in making innovation accessible through pure, minimalist design.
With a shared vision, the duo are constantly looking outside the automotive industry to find inspiration. Together they travel to different fashion fairs and design events, in search of material tech on the cutting edge.
We’re allergic to copying. It’s such an uninteresting way of working. When we design, we always create from scratch, so we never pick anything off the shelf.
Imitation allergies
Some say imitation is the highest form of flattery. Well, not at Polestar. And certainly not in the CMF team. Komal and Maria may look to other seemingly unrelated industries to understand what works (and what doesn’t), for inspiration – but never to copy. “We’re allergic to copying,” Maria emphasises. “It’s such an uninteresting way of working. When we design, we always create from scratch, so we never pick anything off the shelf.”
Even if we wanted to (which we don’t), we could never copy the fashion industry. Both fashion and CMF design work with textiles and other materials, but that’s about as far as similarities go in terms of processes. The fashion industry is a fast-moving, ever-evolving, quick-turnaround type of story, which means that new techniques can be implemented quickly, while automotive has year-long lead times and a very different set of requirements in terms of durability, sustainability, and performance.
So, when Komal and Maria look to the fashion sphere for inspiration they don’t look at the ever-changing trends, but at the underlying currents. “I think fashion is a great indicator of where society is headed in general, if you look at the bigger trends. It’s a place to which we can look for both inspiration and confirmation that we’re headed in the right direction,” comments Komal.
But whether it be big or small trends, the designer duo would still prefer to set their own trends. “I believe we create our own trends, that hopefully someone else can get inspiration from,” Maria states.
Creating from scratch
Design does not equate to add-ons, cosmetics, quick-fixes, or adapting someone else’s style to make it your own. In fact, it is quite the contrary. “Design should solve a need, or a problem, and add value,” says Komal. “As a designer, I think it’s important to remind ourselves of that from time to time.”
Designing purposefully is a process and one that requires time. Creating something from scratch isn’t something you just do overnight. “You can either rush the process and pick something that already exists, but if we want to be innovative and bring something new to the industry, then it's going to take time, and we need to allow it to take time,” Komal explains.
To Maria, being thorough is essential to good design. “Design isn’t something you can do with your left hand. It requires time, work, different perspectives, and intellectual discussions,” she concludes. “Design needs to be worked-through.”
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The results
Trust the process, they said. And who are we to argue? The results? Sleek, timeless, and conscious. Inspired by innovation from the footwear industry, the Tailored knit upholstery available for Polestar 4 is knitted to fit, using yarn made from 100% recycled PET bottles, resulting in a premium material which also minimises waste.
Have a closer look at all the interior themes for Polestar 4 here.
