I’m standing in a room dominated by a raised stage with silver couches and beanbags, in a 30,000-square-foot shipyard in Shanghai along the Huangpu River, when Rihanna enters.
The entire futuristic lounge pit – which is filled with people shouting over the music coming from a huge modular boombox so big it has its own cereal dispenser – goes silent. Rihanna wears an all-red catsuit with oversized shield sunglasses in her updo. She is ushered in by A$AP Rocky and led to a corner bench in the center, where he sits next to her, holding hands. The couple takes a few sips of champagne and laughs together. Then Rocky looks around the room and exclaims, “Let’s do this!”
Shortly afterwards, models took to the stage wearing bright green, orange and yellow moto-inspired puffer clothing. Some wear helmet-like fur hats, like the one on top of Rocky’s head. Rihanna keeps her phone in her hand the entire time, twisting and turning to capture the best content from her partner’s Moncler Genius collection. When it’s done, Rocky stands up to take a bow and Rihanna grins and claps. Then they both walk out as quickly as they arrived, and the room erupts in exclamations.
Mine was: “That felt like a fever dream.”
I spent most of my time in Moncler’s City of Genius trying to think of a metaphor that could describe what it felt like. The event was technically a show closing out the city’s Fashion Week, but it felt unlike any other runway I’d ever seen. It certainly felt like a different world.
Since 2018, Moncler has been inviting creative people from different disciplines to collaborate with them for their annual Genius project. This year’s cast included Rick Owens, Jil Sander, Edward Enninful and Donald Glover. The day before the event, 8,000 guests, including thousands of the public who signed up for a chance to win an invite, received a map of Moncler’s City of Genius. Each neighborhood was conceived by a different creative person; Moncler described it as ‘a metropolis of creativity’.
A fashion editor I spoke to compared the event to Coachella because of its vast expanse, which felt like a festival site. Attendees rushed around and grabbed friends to see different “acts” on different stages, but instead of music they saw different versions of Moncler’s puffer jackets created by designers. (Although there was music, too: the evening ended with a concert by singer-songwriter Henry Lau, and A$AP Rocky performed at the afterparty hours later.)
Another said it felt more like Epcot at Disneyland because of the production: neon lights everywhere, guests floating around in Go-Karts in the Palm Angels section, food carts along the paths between “neighborhoods” and lines everywhere with eager guests happy to be there to be .
I couldn’t help but also think about what it didn’t feel like: a fashion show. Sure, both Rick Owens and Jil Sander had a setup with models walking in a loop, similar to the traditional runway. But that was only a fraction of what happened. Moncler created a hybrid fashion festival-amusement park with guests ranging from Anne Hathaway to the public. (I stood next to both of them at the Rick Owens booth.)
Moncler is largely known for its puffer jacket. But the brand has managed to take a functional garment – which many of us have early memories of being told to wear by worried mothers and weather-obsessed fathers – and turn it into a symbol not only of luxury, but of to create creativity. The best part of The City of Genius was, of course, breathing the same air as Rihanna… but also seeing the ghosts of Rick Owens and Jil Sander’s Luke and Lucie Meier transform the puffer into down-filled dresses and knits.
Each creative contributor, or ‘genius’, also took the opportunity to build a neighborhood around their vision. Willow Smith’s, of course, had oversized willows; she and mother Jada Pinkett Smith posed with models standing under the hanging branches. Donald Glover brought his Gilga Farm in Ojai, California to China with a farm facade atop an orange grove, and showed a matching collection in soothing light layers and peach tones. Edward Enninful felt compelled to create a city built to survive the elements, with two identical weather stations drowned by two extreme elements. One was covered in snow, with a model pushing away snowflakes while clicking on a computer. The other was a heat-drenched sand dune around which models slowly walked as if they were about to pass out from sun exposure. Fittingly, the Moncler x Enninful collection consists of ten looks designed for extreme lighting: Sandstorm, Snowstorm and Windstorm.
As I walked away at the end of the evening, I realized that there was no perfect metaphor to sum it all up. Maybe it really was a fever dream that was too good to be true, but somehow became a reality in front of me for a moment. Everyone laments that the fashion world has become far too formal. Can you blame Moncler for bypassing that world and creating 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 arm to run to the next stop, dizzy with nervousness because I don’t know what awaits me. After all, who needs a fashion show? Maybe we just need more extravagant fantasies like this. It is genius, after all.
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