by I’m standing in a room dominated by a raised stage with silver couches and bean bag chairs, in a 30,000 square foot Shanghai shipyard along the Huangpu River, when Rihanna walks in.
The entire futuristic lounge pit – filled with people shouting over music blasting from a giant modular boombox the size of its own cereal dispenser – falls silent. Wearing a red suit with oversized sunglasses tucked into his updo, A$AP Rocky introduces Rihanna to a corner sofa in the middle, where he sits next to her, hand in hand. The couple take a few sips of champagne and laugh together. Then, Rocky looks around the room and exclaims, “Let’s do this!”
Shortly after, the models take the stage, wearing bright green, orange and yellow inspired puffer clothing. Some of them wear trapper hats like the one on top of Rocky’s head. Rihanna keeps her phone in her hand the whole time, twisting and turning to capture the best content in her partner’s Moncler Genius collection. When he’s done, Rocky stands up to take a bow while Rihanna cries and claps. Then they both walk out as briskly as they came, and the room erupts in exclamations.
Me: “That felt like a fever dream.”
I spent most of my time at Moncler City of Genius trying to come up with a metaphor that could describe what it looks like. The event was technically a show that ended the city’s Fashion Week, but it felt unlike any other runway I’ve ever seen. If anything, it felt like another world.
Since 2018, Moncler has been inviting creatives across disciplines to work with them for their annual Genius project. This year’s cast included Rick Owens, Jil Sander, Edward Enninful, and Donald Glover, among others. The day before the event, 8,000 guests, including thousands from the public who registered for a chance to score an invite, received a map of Moncler’s City of Genius. Each neighborhood had a different creative; Moncler described it as a “city of creativity.”
One fashion editor I spoke to compared the event to Coachella because of the overall sprawling expanse, which felt like a festival ground. Attendees rushed around, grabbing friends to see different “acts” at different stages, but instead of music, they were seeing different looks of Moncler puffer coats imagined by designers. (Although there was music, too—the evening ended with a concert put on by singer-songwriter Henry Lau, and A$AP Rocky performed hours later at the afterparty.)
Another said the production made it feel more like Epcot at Disneyland: neon lights everywhere, guests whipping around in Go-Karts at the Palm Angels section, food carts lining the walkways between “neighborhoods” and lines in everywhere and enthusiastic guests happy to be there. .
I couldn’t help but also think about what he didn’t feel: a fashion show. Sure, Rick Owens and Jil Sander both had sets with models walking on a loop like the traditional catwalk. But that was only a fraction of what was happening. Moncler created a fashion-festival-amusement-park hybrid with guests from Anne Hathaway to members of the public. (I stood alongside the two at the Rick Owens booth.)
Moncler is well known for its puffer coat. But the brand has managed to take functional clothing – that many of us have early memories of being forced to wear by worried mums and out-of-date dads – and make it not just a symbol of luxury but of creativity. The best part of The City of Genius was, of course, breathing the same air as Rihanna… but also getting to see how the minds of Rick Owens and Luke and Lucie Meier of Jil Sander managed to turn the puffer into dress and in their knitted clothes to fill down. .
Each creative collaborator, or “genius,” also took the opportunity to build a neighborhood around their vision. Of course, Willow Smith’s had overgrown willow trees; She and her mom Jada Pinkett Smith posed as models under the drooping branches. Donald Glover brought his farm Gilga in Ojai, California to China with the facade of the farmhouse perched on top of the orange grove, and showed a matching collection in soothing light layers and peach colors. Edward Enninful felt compelled to create a city built to survive the elements, with two sets of identical weather stations inundated by two extreme elements. One was covered in snow, with a model pushing snowflakes away as he clicked away on a computer. The other was a hot shower of sand dunes with models walking slowly around it as if it was about to get out of the sun. Fittingly, the Moncler x Enninful collection is made up of ten looks designed for extreme exposure: Sandstorm, Snowstorm, and Windstorm.
As I walked out at the end of the night, I realized that there was no perfect metaphor to sum it up. Maybe it was actually an all-too-good fever dream that somehow materialized that I briefly got to participate. Everyone is lamenting that the fashion world has become far too formal – can you blame Moncler for eschewing that world and creating one of its own?
Every neighborhood of the City of Genius is clearly etched in my memory, but the feeling I won’t soon forget is grabbing a friend’s hand to run to the next stop, in a daze of not knowing what’s in store. her. Who needs a fashion show, after all? Maybe we just need more of these kinds of extravagant fantasies. He is a Genius, after all.
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