Four Porsche builds. One eye.

Teddy Santis treats Porsche like a canvas. The first collaboration was a 1990 964 Carrera 4 in 2020. Since then: a 1977 911 SC in 2021, a 1960 356B in 2023, and a 1994 993 Turbo in 2024. Four cars, four years. The arrangement is less a product partnership than an extended meditation on a single question, which is what an old Porsche looks like if a designer from Queens had been in charge of it.

ALD is not a streetwear brand. It is a retail thesis with product attached, and the thesis is that the same eye can look at a sneaker, a sweater, a coffee cup, and a 911 and make all of them look like a single idea.

ALD Porsche 911 SC — The 911 SC, 2021. The second Santis Porsche, painted in an olive that has quietly become the reference tone for Santis-era menswear in general.

The strange part is that Porsche, for all its newsroom output and cultural confidence, has never let these builds carry the brand the way they could. Ask around about Porsche special editions and the answer is the 911 R and the GT3 RS, not the Santis cars. The company that built the brand asset for auto culture is still slightly awkward at publishing the cultural editions that actually affect how young people see the marque.

The four builds, in order.

Three of the four builds, photographed by Aimé Leon Dore's studio: the olive 911 SC safari, the Midnight Blue 356B, and the Mulberry Green 993 Turbo. Each is technically an Exclusive Manufaktur one-off. In practice they read as chapters in a single, coherent argument about American taste applied to German machinery. The opening 964 Carrera 4 from 2020 sits in the body copy above, with press coverage held privately.

ALD Porsche 911 SC safari — 1 · 2021The 911 SC, converted safari-style in olive. The car that established Santis's willingness to modify, not just restore. Lifted suspension, steel wheels, off-road tyres.

ALD Porsche 356B Midnight Blue — 2 · 2023The 1960 356B, painted Midnight Blue with oxblood leather. The most romantic of the four, and the one that gets reshared most on collector forums.

ALD Porsche 993 Turbo Mulberry Green — 3 · 2024The 1994 993 Turbo in Mulberry Green. The most commercially legible of the four, with the broadest appeal to collectors outside the Santis circle.

Part of why Porsche has kept these builds quiet is organisational. Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur, the bespoke arm, is structurally separate from Porsche's corporate communications. The ALD cars are Exclusive Manufaktur projects, one-off, heritage-adjacent. They get a short newsroom note and a careful press release and then they disappear into private collections. The marketing budget lives elsewhere, attached to the current model year, and current model year marketing does not talk about 964s.

The design language, up close.

Every Santis Porsche shares a detail vocabulary that is specific enough to be identifiable at the level of a wheel nut. The palette is American, the restraint is Italian, the wheels are almost always from a narrow shortlist of Fuchs references.

ALD Porsche 964 interior — The 964's interior, 2020. Houndstooth seat inserts, brown leather steering wheel, ALD-branded floor mats. The detail set each subsequent build has continued to reference.

The cultural consequence is that the Santis Porsches have been adopted as evidence of ALD's taste, not as evidence of Porsche's willingness to work with it. Porsche, as a brand, gets the financial return, the Exclusive Manufaktur margins are formidable, but forgoes the cultural return, which is the more compounding asset. This is the inverse of the Hermès-Carhartt dynamic, where Hermès has let the collaborations carry the brand into streetwear in a way Carhartt WIP could not have done alone.

ALD 224 Mulberry storefront — 224 Mulberry, the flagship. Every Santis Porsche has been photographed here before it was photographed anywhere else. None of them have ever been for sale in the store.

What Porsche is leaving on the table

Porsche could, if it chose, make the ALD collaborations the spine of its cultural communications to buyers under forty. The newsroom could publish long-form stories on each build, the official social could carry them, the bespoke Exclusive Manufaktur business could be turned into a visible program rather than a discreet one. None of this requires Porsche to do anything structurally different; it just requires the company to treat the cultural work as newsworthy on the same terms as the new Cayenne.

That Porsche has chosen not to do this is probably a choice, not an oversight. German corporate communications tend to treat bespoke work as private business, even when the buyers and the designers are actively publicising it. The result is a gap between Porsche's own newsroom output and the cultural air the brand actually breathes.

The ALD collaboration is the most important Porsche-adjacent cultural work of the last five years. It is also the least amplified by Porsche itself.

Repeat lineSantis has designed four Porsches since 2020. Porsche is still quiet about it.