If you subscribe to the maxim that looking good is prerequisite to feeling good, you no doubt devote as much thought to what you drive as to what you wear, knowing instinctively that the design of the machine in your garage influences your state of mind as much as the cut of the clothes in your wardrobe. Which is why, if you had to choose but a single vehicle to get you from point A to point B, over any terrain, through any conditions, while simultaneously satisfying your sartorial and psychic needs, then the Land Rover Range Rover Sport is an obvious choice.
The Range Rover Sport isn’t simply an SUV, it’s a sculpture. Forged by modernist philosophy and a reductive design approach, its silhouette is pure seduction. From its bold front end to its gracefully upswept tail, its lightweight aluminum body is a master class in purity of form. Taut, kinetic, muscular and refined, it invites the eye to linger, and to savor the light and shadow of a shape so sleek and a shoulder line so refined that Land Rover’s designers devoted untold hours to developing a retracting door handle would all but disappear into the bodywork.
As much as you’d like to spend all day gazing, though, you have places to go. With a last, longing look at a deliciously proportional 22-inch Satin Dark Grey alloy wheel wrapped in low-profile Pirelli rubber, you enter the cockpit-like cabin, easily accessible with the Range Rover Sport automatically lowered on the haunches of its Dynamic Air Suspension. Inside, you are struck once more by a sophisticated, modern aesthetic, and by the cleanest of lines clad in premium hides and textiles. A single, gently curved touch screen controls the vehicle’s functions, leaving the dash, and your thoughts, supremely uncluttered. You set the climate control, pop a mineral water in the refrigerator compartment, and go.
And so you set out for work or school or the feed store or the opera or the mountain cabin whose precarious track is but a walk in the park for the Range Rover Sport’s unparalleled off-road capabilities. And as you do, something happens. A feeling takes over. A feeling of being wonderfully at ease that is entirely related to the feeling you get when you step out in just the right outfit for the moment at hand, be it flip-flops and your favorite bikini or the perfect little black dress or the suit that fits you like nothing else because it’s bespoke.
Whether aluminum and glass, elastane, wool or silk, it’s all cut from the same cloth, as it were, and so, for that matter, are we. The things we drive are no different from the things we wear, their effect merely magnified by their mass, horsepower and torque. We are drawn to beauty and to beautiful objects, none more so than the beautiful object with the promise of transmitting who we are, transforming us into who we want to be, and transporting us over any conceivable obstacle, imagined or real.
