These days, it feels like fashion collaborations come two-a-penny — a new day, a new pairing of brand names that feel like they could have been drawn out of a hat. Years before they reached their current ubiquity, though, the Italian luxury brand was a pioneer of the genre, brokering game-changing collaborations through the Moncler Genius initiative. A development on the house’s longstanding history of creative partnership, the groundbreaking initiative saw fashion week-familiar designers such as Craig Green and Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli — you remember those monastic, jewel-tone puffer-cape coats, right? — the freedom to articulate their vision through the prism of Moncler, unencumbered by the strictures of traditional industry calendars and expectations. Well, five years on from radically shaping ideas around what fashion collaborations can be or look like, Moncler is back at it again.
On February 20th, at a blockbuster event on the penultimate day of London Fashion Week, at the Olympia in West London, the brand will initiate a bold new chapter of Moncler Genius, one that expands its remit beyond simple collaboration, and into holistic co-creation.
‘Well, what does that actually mean?’, you may be wondering. Indeed, it’s an understandable query to raise. Put simply though, Moncler’s intention here is to serve as a cross-disciplinary platform, branching beyond the field of fashion collaborations in which it was an early champion, and inviting leading voices from a range of creative and artistic disciplines to engage with and interpret its world – legends in the fields of art, music, entertainment, sport, engineering, design and culture. The spirit of cross-pollination that has defined Moncler Genius to date will, naturally, remain its driving – its output, however, will be felt on a far more expansive scale.
So, what will it look like? Now, it would be cruel of us to spoil all the surprises, but what we can say is that you should prepare yourself for what is set to be one of the biggest spectacles of London Fashion Week – a fact backed up by the line-up of co-creators locked in for this first iteration of Moncler Genius’ new era. Titled The Art of Genius, the multidimensional live show will encompass installations, performances, experiences, and yes, fashion collections created in partnership with Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams, Mercedes-Benz, Palm Angels, FRGMT, Adidas Originals, Salehe Bembury and Roc Nation by Jay-Z. Oh, and Rick Owens, a longstanding Moncler collaborator, will also be part of the grand affair, presenting new work that challenges the possibilities of design beyond fashion, alongside the latest Moncler + Rick Owens collection. Basically, Glastonbury could never!
It’s no doubt the sort of thing that anybody reading this will want to be part of – and that’s perhaps the best part of it all. You can be! Bucking the fashion industry’s elitist tendencies, tickets will be made available to the general public at moncler.com, allowing for a varied, enthusiastic audience to take in everything that this new era for the brand has to offer. Now, that really is genius.
