Perhaps you were thinking you might pick up an Avions Voisin C28 Aérosport this year at Monterey. After all, they?re dashing automobiles, arguably Gabriel Voisin?s greatest design?and Monsieur Voisin came up with some of the greatest lookers of the pre?World War II era.
But we will tell you this. After walking past the Hermès store at SFO, we thought to ourselves, ?Selves, it might be nice to have a Hermès belt. You certainly can?t go around springing for some manner of satchels from the famed Frankish leather house, but a belt could be a doable treat, a classic thing you?d own forever.? So we popped online and priced Hermès belts. We found that it is easily possible to spend over a thousand dollars on a leather strap that goes ?round one?s waist. Call us pedestrian rubes, but that puts said belt in air-conditioned front-yard territory, as our own John Phillips might put it. We point this out because the lone C28 Aerocoupe on offer at Monterey this year had its interior reupholstered by Hermès. We have no idea what that job cost, but we assume that one could at least purchase a whole Porsche 718 Boxster with that money. Or perhaps a Citroën SM, a later example of fabulous Gallic luxo-speed engineering. In short, this will be a very expensive car.
Gabriel Voisin first found fame as an aircraft designer and manufacturer. The destruction wrought by his creations during the First World War turned him into a pacifist, and he turned his attention to automobiles. He wroug...