When Speed Sits Still: Mercedes-AMG and MSCHF Reimagine the Language of Velocity in Sculptural Form.

In an exquisite collision of engineered precision and conceptual irreverence, Mercedes-AMG - the house of meticulously tuned combustion - finds an unlikely conspirator in MSCHF, the New York collective known less for design than for detonations of cultural logic. What emerges from this improbable alliance, revealed amid the conceptual ferment of NYCxDesign Festival 2025, is not a collaboration in the commercial sense, but rather a sculptural sleight of hand - a design détournement titled Not for Automotive Use, where velocity is frozen, repurposed, and provocatively misplaced.

This is not a car. Nor is it simply furniture. It is a surreal tableau in which high-octane engineering is distilled into domestic objects - part sculpture, part design joke, part performance in drag. The raw elements of Mercedes-AMG’s vehicular DNA have been transformed by MSCHF into a living room mythos: seats become chairs, grilles become grills, headlights stare back from a couch that never moves. It’s as if a Formula One car fell asleep in a Brooklyn loft and dreamed it was a Bauhaus experiment.

There’s a tension in every piece - not only in the taut lines of seatbelts repurposed as architectural scaffolding, but in the very idea of performance made static. The SEATBELT SHELF and SEATBELT RACK don’t merely hold objects; they clutch them in a suspended state, webbed in crash-tested nylon, caught in a permanent prelude to motion. The SEATBELT LIGHT, meanwhile, is less a lamp and more a ritual switch. Clipping the belt - a familiar preamble to speed - now ignites a glow, as if motion were being transubstantiated into illumination.

And then there’s the HEADLIGHT COUCH: long, low, and luxuriously upholstered in AMG’s own MICROCUT suede. It broods like an idling machine, headlights intact, ready to signal but going nowhere. It invites you to sit, not drive. To lounge, not race. This is not a couch that supports conversations. It’s a couch that listens, that watches, that waits.

MSCHF’s sly reverence for the 1960s Italian Radical Design movement is palpable here - a lineage of subversion that includes Castiglioni’s tractor-seat chairs and the ironic austerity of Archizoom. But where the radicals elevated the mundane into design, MSCHF flips the flow: exalting the elite and then humbling it, slicing AMG’s precision into absurd, cheeky fragments of domestic life.

The HEADREST CHAIR transforms passive sitting into something closer to ceremonial initiation. Forged from three authentic AMG headrests affixed to a skeletal steel armature reminiscent of a motorsport roll cage, it evokes less a piece of furniture than a throne for the mechanically devout. The central headrest - adorned with the AMG crest like an emblem of techno-religious authority - rises behind the occupant like a sanctified aureole. This is not comfort in the domestic sense; it is discipline by design, a seating posture suspended between contemplative stillness and imminent acceleration.

The WHEEL FAN and GRILLE GRILL are more openly playful. One trades combustion for quiet rotation, the other repurposes a car’s aggressive front fascia into an actual barbecue. Here, the boundary between symbol and utility collapses - grill meets grill, wheel becomes wind.

Even the SEATBELT TABLE, with its belt buckled around its perimeter, gently mocks our cultural addiction to branding and security. It says: you’re safe, you’re strapped in, now eat your breakfast.

To accompany the physical collection, a merch capsule extends the collaboration’s reach into wearables: tees, sweats, caps, and even utility trousers emblazoned with detailed prints of AMG components. An air freshener shaped like an apple tree hangs like an olfactory joke - referencing Affalterbach (literally “apple tree on the brook”), the spiritual home of AMG. It’s heritage, distilled and diffused into the air with a wink.

The unveiling was held inside MSCHF’s formerly secret Greenpoint studio, now transformed into a theatrical installation. No longer a locus of myth and mystery, the space itself became part of the exhibition - the machinery of creation laid bare, the tools and chaos of design revealed not as backstage noise but as central narrative.

And therein lies the soul of this collaboration: a mutual fascination with systems - of speed, of design, of meaning - and how they can be bent, broken, or reimagined. It’s a kind of automotive alchemy, where carbon fiber and suede are transformed not into performance, but into metaphor.

In the end, Not for Automotive Use is not about utility, nor even about irony. It is about motion stilled into memory, velocity distilled into sculpture. These pieces hum with a strange energy - the silence after the engine cuts, the tension before the light turns green. They ask a question that lingers: when speed is repurposed, does it lose its soul - or does it finally find it?

More at www.mschf.com.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Mercedes Benz.