Maserati Australia has announced overnight that it will offer buyers the choice of silk seat coverings on both the Maserati Ghibli and Quattroporte. Yes, silk, you read that right.

THE MASERATI Ghibli and Quattroporte will now be available with silk seat coverings. Wow. Just wow. So, if you thought heated and ventilated seats were the latest and greatest in car seats, think again. And the silk is being produced by Ermenegildo Zegna.

“Maserati’s joint venture with Ermenegildo Zegna is unlike any joint venture that has gone before it,” says Glen Sealey, Chief Operating Officer of Maserati Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. “This is not a marketing exercise where a brand name from outside the car industry is attached to a limited edition model or version. Ermenegildo Zegna has engineered a unique and new contribution to what the industry is able to offer customers, one that is exclusive to Maserati.

“Ermenegildo Zegna has taken silk, a natural material that is renowned for its soft and delicate nature, and developed it into a new form of silk that is suitable for car upholstery with its requirements for durability without losing any of silk’s intrinsic qualities. This is little short of remarkable a feat of fabric engineering and on a par with the mechanical and design engineering that has gone into the Ghibli and Quattroporte cars into which it is tailored,” says Mr Sealey.

The 100% natural Mulberry silk used by Ermenegildo Zegna to produce the new interior option for the Maserati Ghibli and Quattroporte has been processed “in a new manner developed by Ermenegildo Zegna to enhance its strength and durability while retaining the intrinsic qualities of silk that have made it such a sought-after fabric for centuries”.

It should be mentioned that silk will only be used in panels and mated with leather which will form the main component of the seat covering. Still…