Hypebeasts Hit the Road

Forget the factory model. For certain status chasers, the Abushi brothers take car customization to the next level — with luxury price tags to match.

It is, by its owner’s description, a “zombie killer” dream machine — a 2021 Mercedes-Benz SUV G-Wagon/Brabus, Frankenstein-built using organs from a sacrificial donor auto, custom portal axles, 16-inch lifts that elevate the roofline to Manute Bol height, tires so pneumatic that custom bumpers and fenders were machined to give them clearance, a roof rack resembling the launchpad for a drone fleet and two-toned honeybee-colored interiors as detailed as a Dutch still life. The base sticker price on this particular vehicle runs around $135,000. But that would be before the fashion designer Kerby Jean-Raymond, the creative director of his own successful New York label, Pyer Moss, and of Reebok, began to collaborate on customizing it with the help of the Abushi brothers, four Palestinian American siblings who, in an industrial section of Queens, operate a luxury and exotic automotive facility that may well be to the average auto-body shop what the Hospital for Special Surgery is to a walk-in clinic. Tucked between an enormous UPS depot and opposite some desolate rail tracks in Maspeth is the state-of-the-art 15,000-square-foot Abushi facility. On any given day, one would likely encounter there some of the world’s rarest, most costly and covetable rolling stock waiting its turn in the beautician’s chair.