NISMO Puts Four Decades Of Nissan Racing Livery On A Set Of Custom Grillz

A Peckham jeweller trades logos for grilles, translating four of Nissan’s most storied race cars into a one-off set of wearable jewellery.

NISMO, the motorsport division of Nissan, spent the second week of August marking the end of Formula E’s Season 12 the way it usually does: chasing points on track. The Nissan Formula E Team closed out the 2025/26 ABB FIA Formula E World Championship finale in London on 15 and 16 August, its GEN3 Evo car taking on the final two races of the season at ExCeL London. The team arrive in London with something to defend, coming off a first Drivers’ Championship the previous season and looking to close out a Formula E programme that has run since the team’s 2018 debut at the Ad Diriyah ePrix. Away from the paddock, though, the brand’s send-off for the London finale took an altogether stranger route through the city’s jewellery scene.

 

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Ahead of the race weekend, NISMO commissioned Peckham-based studio Loud Mouth LDN to produce a one-off collection of custom grillz, the removable tooth jewellery long associated with hip-hop culture and, more recently, London’s own music and fashion circles. Rather than reach for a logo or a wordmark, as grillz commissions typically do, the brief asked Loud Mouth LDN to translate the front grilles of four Nissan show and race cars into wearable pieces, pairing the marque’s decades of motorsport history with a completely different kind of craft. It is an unlikely pairing on paper: a Japanese motorsport division best known for carbon fibre and battery packs, working with an independent jeweller better known for fronting artists and London’s creative scene than for automotive work of any kind. But the logic behind it is straightforward enough. NISMO wanted a way to connect its design heritage to London’s own culture ahead of the city hosting the championship’s decisive rounds, and grillz, as a wholly individual and heavily London-coded form of jewellery, offered a route in that a straightforward merchandise drop would not.

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The connection marks a departure for Loud Mouth LDN, whose custom grillz have historically built out from letters, initials and logos, the standard vocabulary of the form. For this project, founder and director Reece Garcia and the studio worked backward from the cars themselves, treating each front grille as a piece of automotive design to be reduced and reassembled in metal and enamel rather than referenced literally.

“This collaboration was something completely different for us,” Garcia said of the project. “For this project, rather than starting with letters or logos, we looked at the shapes and details of the cars and translated them into something that works as jewellery.”

That shift in process shows in the level of detail across the four pieces. Each one carries its source car’s colourway and livery cues in miniature, down to enamel outlines standing in for badging and turn signals rendered as small coloured dots at the edge of the grille. It is a level of specificity that reads more like scale-model restoration than typical grillz work, filtered through Loud Mouth LDN’s own house style.
“Grillz are one of the only pieces of jewellery that are completely built around the individual, giving people a really unique way to express who they are,” Garcia continued. “We enjoy pushing ourselves creatively, and it was a chance to take what we normally do and apply it to a totally different world. That’s something we’ll definitely keep exploring in future projects.”

The brief also meant working to a different set of references than the studio is used to. Where a typical Loud Mouth LDN commission starts with a client’s own initials, a phrase or a personal motif, this project effectively handed the studio someone else’s design language wholesale, in the form of four production and race liveries that already carry decades of meaning to Nissan’s own fanbase. Reproducing that meaning at the scale of a grille meant editing hard: choosing which lines, colours and details actually read a car’s identity at a few centimetres across, and which ones would simply disappear once cast in metal and enamel. It is closer, in that sense, to badge design than to the studio’s usual custom work, even if the finished pieces are still built and fitted the way any other Loud Mouth LDN grillz would be.

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The four-piece collection draws on the Nissan Formula E GEN3 Evo race car, the R32 Calsonic Skyline GT-R, the R34 Pennzoil GT-R and the Z GT500 car, each one representing a distinct chapter of NISMO’s competition history rather than a single unified era. Spanning touring cars, GT racing and Formula E, the four cars cover roughly three and a half decades of Nissan motorsport between them, giving the set a compressed timeline running from the brand’s Group A and JGTC years through to its current all-electric programme.
The GEN3 Evo piece takes its cues from Nissan’s current all-electric race car, the model campaigned by Oliver Rowland, Norman Nato and the rest of the Nissan Formula E Team through the London finale itself. It is built in a silver grille with red enamel outlines and a white panel embossed with cherry blossoms, a nod to the marque’s Japanese roots rather than a literal copy of the car’s livery, which leans more heavily on red and black. As the newest and most technically distinct car in the set, a battery-electric single-seater rather than a combustion touring or GT car, it also reads as the collection’s clearest bridge between old and new: the same grille-first design logic applied to a car that barely has a conventional grille to begin with.

The R32 Calsonic piece looks back several decades further, drawing on one of Japanese motorsport’s most recognisable liveries: the blue Calsonic-sponsored Skyline GT-R that competed in Japan’s touring car championships during the model’s Group A era, a car closely associated with driver Kazuyoshi Hoshino and among the most reproduced liveries in Japanese racing history, still turning up regularly on model kits, video games and tribute builds decades on. That history is reduced here into a blue enamel grille with black accents and small amber dots standing in for the car’s turn signals, translating a livery built for a full-size touring car body onto a piece small enough to sit across a set of teeth.

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The R34 Pennzoil piece is built around the yellow and black livery of the Pennzoil-sponsored Nissan GT-R R34 race car, a Japan GT Championship-winning entry from the marque’s Super GT history that ran in the early 2000s and remains one of the more collectible liveries from that era of Japanese GT racing, distinct from the road-going, Bayside Blue R34 Skyline GT-R that tends to dominate popular memory of the model. Loud Mouth LDN’s version is translated into a yellow-toned enamel grille with the same badge-scale attention to detail as the rest of the set, extending down to the small livery graphics and aero-line detailing that separate a period race car from a standard production model.
The Z GT500 piece rounds out the collection with a red enamel base and black and yellow detailing matched to the current Z NISMO GT500 entry’s colourway, connecting the newest car in the set to Nissan’s ongoing Super GT programme, which has continued to campaign Z-based entries at circuits including Fuji Speedway through the current season. Where the R32 Calsonic and R34 Pennzoil pieces look back at cars now decades removed from active competition, the Z GT500 piece represents the collection’s live thread back to a car still being raced, giving the four-piece set a spread that runs from historic livery through to current-season machinery.

Taken together, the four pieces span Nissan’s motorsport programme from 1990s touring cars through to its current Formula E entry, giving the collection a kind of compressed timeline of the brand’s competition history, worn rather than displayed.

 

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Grillz themselves carry their own history, one that predates this collision by decades. The form emerged out of hip-hop culture in the United States, initially as a niche and often DIY practice among Southern rap scenes before spreading through mainstream American music culture in the 2000s. From there it travelled to the United Kingdom, where it has become part of London’s contemporary music and fashion scene over the past several years, moving well beyond music into streetwear and wider style culture in the process. For NISMO, that culture weight was part of the appeal: a way of connecting the brand’s design heritage to a different, and younger, form of creativity ahead of Formula E’s return to one of the world’s most influential cultural capitals, rather than defaulting to the kind of branded merchandise a motorsport partnership might normally produce.

It is also, in a fairly literal sense, a project built around individuality. Grillz are cast and fitted to a specific mouth, making each set inherently one-of-one in a way that most jewellery is not; two people wearing the same design will still each be wearing a piece built to their own bite. Applying that same individualised process to a set of cars, rather than a set of teeth, is what gives the collaboration its particular logic: four grilles, translated into four grillz, each built around a different piece of Nissan’s own identity rather than a wearer’s, but constructed with the same one-off precision the studio would normally reserve for a client.

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The collection was handcrafted at Loud Mouth LDN’s studio inside Holdrons Arcade in Peckham, a self-proclaimed “corridor of wonders and esoteric delights” in south-east London that has become a base for bespoke grillz work among the city’s artists and creative set. The arcade itself is one of Rye Lane’s older shopping parades, and its mix of independent studios and specialist retailers has made it a natural home for a jeweller working in a niche, appointment-driven trade like custom grillz. It is the same studio Loud Mouth LDN has built its reputation from, working across custom grillz and wider jewellery commissions for a client base that extends well beyond the automotive world, with the Nissan project standing out precisely because it sits so far outside that usual remit.

Ahead of the Formula E finale, the four-piece set went on display at Westfield Stratford City in east London, putting the collection in front of a shopping-centre audience well outside motorsport’s usual crowd before it moved to ExCeL London for the championship’s final two races over the weekend of 15 and 16 August. Visitors to the Formula E finale had the chance to win a bespoke piece from the collection, giving fans on-site a shot at a piece of grillz built to their own Nissan allegiance rather than simply taking home a photo of one, though the four original grillz themselves remain a one-off commission and are not being put up for sale.

For Nissan, the project sits alongside a wider run of Formula E-adjacent activity around the London finale, from GEN3 Evo unveilings to Super GT news out of Fuji Speedway. For Loud Mouth LDN, it stands as a marked departure from the studio’s usual letter-and-logo commissions, one Garcia has already flagged as ground the studio intends to keep exploring.