Black Badge is Rolls-Royce’s Bespoke program for the brand’s most demanding and daring customers. Rolls-Royce wanted to team up with creatives to “express the soul of Black Badge.” To do that, they have teamed with bionic performance artist and art director Viktoria Modesta.

Key to expressing Modesta’s character through the prism of Black Badge was an international team of tech and fashion designers. Anouk Wipprecht, the ‘FashionTech’ pioneer collaborated with Rolls-Royce to build items that apply Wipprecht’s hallmark aesthetic of fashion design, engineering, science and user experience to the pieces.

Among the extraordinary items created for this performance art piece was a prosthetic limb wrought from Black Badge carbon fibre that the designer created in collaboration with Joe DiPrima at ArcAttack, the Alternative Limb Project and the Rolls-Royce Bespoke Collective of craftspeople, designers and engineers. A Tesla coil is incorporated into the heel and activates under pressure to create a ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ effect, illuminating the glass area of the limb with a continuous train of large sparks on demand. It is the first wearable ‘Jacob's Ladder’ of its kind. The coloured area of the prosthetic is finished in the marque’s hallmark Black paint and detailed with a 3D printed and electroplated Rolls-Royce grille motif.

Wipprecht, alongside Modesta and the Bespoke Collective also tailored a Black Badge carbon fibre bodice to the bionic artist. The artist’s silhouette was digitized using a high-resolution body scan while the bodice itself was created using a SLS powder-based 3D printing technique to form the extra-lightweight wearable before it was veneered with carbon fiber.