When a popstar designs a Twingo

I am sat in a Renault Twingo next to a girl called Nicola. The Twingo's cabin is lined in cream ostrich skin, festooned with spangly jewels and hung with pairs and pairs of earrings. In the footwell is a jewel-encrusted microphone and a jewel-encrusted shoe. Where the rear seats should be lurks a full-size recording desk, topped by an espresso machine. The rear mirror is surrounded by tiny bulbs, a twee facsimile of the looking glass in a theatre dressing room. Covering the dash are dozens of make-up pots.

Visible through the windscreen are three other modified Twingos. One has seats upholstered in hundreds and hundreds of dried pasta tubes. Another is painted matt black, its interior incongruously decked out as an 18th-century Parisian ballroom, all carpets and gold tassels and candelabras. The third has been shorn of its seats, the cabin fitted with a book-lined ‘library' and a log fire, an unironic copy of Clarkson's ‘Anne Hathaway's Cottage' S-Class.

This is not the work of an over-sugared GCSE textiles class. This monstrous array of Twingos is Renault's own concoction, Renault's own masterplan for shifting more Twingos over the next few years.

Words: Sam Philip

This feature was originally published in the February 2012 issue of Top Gear magazine