Bentley Emblem Evolution 1919-2025

The elements of the Bentley iconography have always been the same – a prominent B at the heart of the design, flanked by a pair of feathered wings. When W.O. Bentley started his car company in 1919, he needed an emblem that summed up his quest to push the boundaries of performance. He turned to his friend F. Gordon Crosby, the most famous motoring artist of the pre-war years, who brought distant motor races and continental tours to life for readers of The Autocar. Crosby created the original Winged B – with the ‘B’ of Bentley inside a pair of wings chosen to represent the exhilaration of motion – and perhaps also a reference to W.O. Bentley’s background as a designer of engines for fighter planes in the First World War. Crosby gave each wing a different number of feathers to make it completely unique – and stay one step ahead of fraudulent imitations.

When Bentley passed into the ownership of Rolls Royce in 1931, a new emblem was created. This second iteration was symmetrical, with 10 straightened feathers each side, flanking a simpler B in a plain black oval. This version is the longest-standing example in the company’s history, in use until the emblem’s third revision in circa 1996 – when, as a nod to Crosby the central ‘B’ was revised to echo the original, the emblem became more ornate and more pronounced curvature returned to the wings.

Following the purchase of Bentley by the Volkswagen Group in 1998, the emblem was redesigned again in preparation for the first Continental GT, launched in 2002. For the new era of Bentley ushered in by the Continental GT – a car that took annual production from 1,000 cars to 10,000 – a new Winged B was created. This honoured the 1919 original by reverting to an asymmetric design, with 10 feathers to the left an 11 to the right. This Winged B has been in use ever since as the main identity of Bentley.