Small but perfectly formed

Clearly, we have become a nation obsessed with style. How else can we explain the explosion of the iPod, a sleek machine of impossibly perfect ergonomics that fits into your hand – and your life – like a dream?

When the Mini Cooper was re-launched in Ireland five years ago, a sort of fever washed over young trendsetters. Would-be buyers awaiting a Mini Adventure were placed on a forbiddingly long waiting list, which only appeared to heighten the car’s cachet even more. Still, the Mini started life as the vehicular equivalent of the highly coveted Hermes Birkin bag and evolved into the Coca-Cola of cars. As undeniably beautiful as the Mini is, it has become a boutique buy that is less about performance and more about appearance.
It may not be the inspired choice of the individualist any more, but undeterred, its distributors BMW are fast making the Mini not only a car but a lifestyle choice. Mini now professes to reflect the thinking of vibrant, cosmopolitan, young-at-heart people. Their new range of modern merchandise – eyewear, clothes, bags, car miniatures – are so designed to represent a modern, positive way of life.
With that, I was duly packed off to Milan to experience a day of this Mini Experience for myself – yes, it’s a tough job but someone had to do it.
As you can probably tell from the cars many bells and whistles – the leather and chrome interior, the Barbarella-style dashboard and a door handle that’s almost impossible to find – Mini’s makers have an almost Rabbinical obsession and devotion to detail.
With that, our group of journalists is met at Milan’s Linate airport by a fleet of Minis, which are driven by a host of suited and booted male models. It’s the sort of attention to detail that isn’t lost on our group of smitten journos, and these trendy young boys only serve to make the cars look even more spectacular and sleek. If you have yet to drive through Milan’s streets in a Mini convertible with a beautiful young thing at the wheel and Babyshambles blaring from the stereo, it’s an experience I would recommend without hesitation.
After chowing down at lunch at Japanese restaurant Nobu (natch), we are duly dispatched to the Hangar Bicocca - Milan’s epicentre for new, conceptual art – where Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Epic is showing. Presumably, it’s all in keeping with the exciting Mini lifestyle – a pulsating blend of aspirational consumerism and high art.
Later on, the marriage of art, fashion, lifestyle and industry is copper-fastened at the main event that evening. It transpires that Karim Rashid – a demi-god of industrial design that has also designed for Prada and Issey Miyake – has reinterpreted the Mini lifestyle in his own unique way, and the fruit of his vision is to be presented at a special fashion show.
It turns out that Mini and Rashid make for near-perfect bedfellows. Born in Cairo in 1960 and raised in Canada, Rashid is not only a Professor of Industrial Design, but also conceives hotel interiors, and has his own art work permanently on display at New York’s Museum Of Modern Art. His raison-d’etre, he reveals later, is to constantly change the aesthetics of product design.
As if he wasn’t enough of an overachiever, Rashid also designs shoes for a Brazilian company, sells his own clothin to Barneys and Fred Segal in the US, and is currently immersed in several design projects – a jewellery line, a mobile phone for Vodafone, a car, a restaurant in Moscow. In short, he’s the metrosexual Mini male to the power of ten.
“I cannot be categorised and I don’t want to be,” he says simply. “I’m a big believer in people who inspired we were renaissance characters.”
A keen music fan and consummate urbanite (he is currently recording an album with an unnamed Berlin-based producer), he hopes to marry design, music and globalism seamlessly… hence his affiliation to Mini.
“The Mini collection of casual wear is incomplete,” he explains. “It’s about mixing it with other collections and other lines. We wanted to make it a little more exciting, young and pleasurable.”
Ahead of the showing of the new Mini clothing collection, Rashid tells the assembled journalists of his affection for the Mini brand. In 1958, his mother bought one of the first Mini Coopers from the production line and drove it from the UK to Cairo as a wedding present for his father. With that, Rashid’s first memory of design is that Mini against the backdrop of the desert.
I can’t help but think that herein lies the power of the new-look Mini. With most young urbanites recalling the first phase of the car as a part of their sepia-tinted childhoods, surely the new Mini is little more than a nostalgia fest, a paean to times past?
“Well, there two things happening,” he muses. “When a brand revisits itself, there’s the danger it will abuse its history, but at the same time the risk is to build a new marketplace. The issue is so clear… in the 21st Century you have to move on, and here you have a youth culture who knows nothing of the car’s history. They are watching the new Italian Job, not the old one.”
The Mini Casual Collection is a blend of preppy, utilitarian pieces; much like any leading sportswear brand, the Mini logo is emblazoned on T-shirts, while the Union Jack appears on the line’s polo shirt. It’s not so much an inspired collection as a commercial line of highly wearable T-shirts.
“Personally, I think regional thinking is completely over,” says Rashid, by way of defending the clothing’s overtly commercial feel. “Every new company and young person thinks globally. I like this time we live in.”
While the Mini car is still clearly a boutique buy – some commentators have been moved to describe it as the Starbucks of automobiles – Rashid still stands firm behind the brand’s dedication to individualism.
“Let’s face it, when the world shrinks, this is the danger of the shrinking world, you look more for diversity because everything’s becoming too similar,” he observes. “There are so many cars – I would say that the success of Mini people looking for diversity. Any time a car company does something original, they’re successful with it. I don’t know why more car companies don’t see it.”
And so we retreat into the Milanese night with the male models in tow, and with the top down on our soft-top Convertible mini. Trendy or not, it’s certainly a lifestyle you could get used to in a hurry.