This restomod Porsche 928 is apparently channelling the turn of the millennium

You’re probably old enough to remember the turn of the millennium. We certainly were. But in among the nu metal, Globe skate shoes, MSN Messenger, Jackass and Newgrounds.com, we must have missed the world-sweeping trend of ‘paint everything purple and go from there’. 

But clearly it must have been quite a thing. Otherwise, Porsche’s restomod collaboration with artist/designers Daniel Arsham and Khyzyl Saleem wouldn’t actually “pay homage to the early ’00s”, and we’d be left with a rather purple Porsche and an awfully long bow to draw. 

After all, how else does one explain that particularly purple metallic paint, matching “purple Ultrasuede and leather”, and “aluminium steering wheel and shift knob”? And no, ‘It’s going to SXSW’ is not a good enough answer. 

We guess the front and rear bumper have just enough Need for Speed Underground to qualify as an early 2000s, which brings the twin-plane rear wing out of the whale-tail-loving Eighties and there or thereabouts. The wheels, on the other hand, look like they’d be right at home on a special-edition Smart car, which couldn’t be any more millennium-era if they played the Vengaboys. 

But the purple, people. The purple. It was certainly a thing for Prince in the mid-Eighties, Jimi had some experience with it (yeah, we’ll see ourselves out) in the Sixties, and we’ve made something of a career out of purple prose over the past decade or so. We just don’t remember it being a thing in the late Nineties or early Noughties.

Are we now at the stage where a decade is being reimagined and repackaged for its turn at the retro table, like when we retconned the Sixties to only exist on Carnaby Street or the corner of Haight and Ashbury? And were the people old enough to remember how it really was just as confused as we are now, and just as willing to head back to their comfort zone? Because that is – at least as for us – Driver on the Playstation, Gorillaz in the CD player and a fistful of Doritos in our hand. It was pretty much Shangri-La, to be honest  – a real purple patch. Oh... now we get it.