“Completely mind blowing. You and I both have been to a lot of shows, and I found this incredibly special. It felt emotional, and being in the snow, I feel really privileged to have experienced it. And the clothes were beautiful: there were a lot of pieces that I would want to wear. So you have that on top of the spectacle, which was incredible.”
Should the acting gigs ever dry up, Adrien Brody could always get by reviewing fashion shebangs. Because his summation of Saturday night’s Moncler Grenoble show neatly captured the essence of an experience that was pretty mind blowing, for multiple reasons.
The show was thrown on the runway of Courchevel Altiport, the cliffside alpine airport that Pierce Brosnan took off from on a motorbike in the opening scene of Goldeneye. The Italian-owned, French-born down jacket specialist brand had imported around 200 guests—who Brody apart included Vincent Cassel, Anne Hathaway, Yamashita Tomohisa, Jessica Chastain, Ashley Park, Penn Badgley, and Shaun White—to the hub of the 600 km network of ski runs that makes up Les 3 Vallées.
Over the last 20 years, Moncler has inserted itself into the fashion sphere (through the Gamme Rouge, Bleu, and later Genius projects) and more recently has begun operating beyond it, collaborating with protagonists running from Donald Glover to Jony Ive. Since last year, Remo Ruffini, Moncler’s chairman and CEO, has also been taking the brand founded by French mountain climber Lionel Terray back to its alpinist roots.
Where 2024’s forest-set show in Saint Moritz mustered a fairytale quasi-Narnia vibe, this evening’s sequel was sometimes gruelingly realistic. The show was pushed back for an hour in the hope that the driving snow would lessen a touch: instead it intensified. At the top of the sloping airstrip a podium had been set up, with raised seating for guests placed in front of a (fashion) runway, behind which sat an orchestra in a sunken pit. By the time guests arrived, all wearing identical white ponchos at the house’s request, that orchestra resembled a band of Arctic troubadours. The harpist and French horn player’s instruments seemed especially snowbound: then when the percussionist was called on to clash his cymbals he detonated an explosion of powder.
Way down at the bottom of the airstrip was a rig that sent rippling beams that resembled the Northern Lights floating in the snowy static of the sky above us. A detachment of snowcars motored at speed towards us—very Goldeneye—before a retinue of 140 models climbed twin staircases at each side of the runway, walking it from opposite sides.
The snow kept coming, heavier and heavier. Through the harsh spotlights it looked ever more beautiful, even as we became more bedraggled. And despite the hilarity of the situation (you try typing under a poncho in a snow event), this scenario perfectly complemented the collection.
Remo Ruffini, Moncler Grenoble’s creative director since its launch in 2010, has increasingly been producing collections that retain the high-performance specificity demanded of high-altitude gear—avalanche trackers, total impermeability and breathability, and extremely high insulation—in garments whose aesthetic is much more broadly defined. Tonight we saw pink-shot bouclé dresses, Nordic knit and cable-knit wool jackets and pants, shaggy shearling cowhide pattern coats and patched shearling aviators, raw denim full-looks, and glossily-coated scarlet leather-lookalike ski suits worn over the new collab Moncler x Moon Boot footwear that ran through the show.
Alongside these were ski looks in tweed, houndstooth, and beautiful heritage checks cut in technically treated wool, plus a floral intarsia knit. Around these drifted a wide range of looks fashioned in technical fabrics (fancy nylons and Gore-Tex) to best afford models equipped to ski, snowboard, and mountain climb: you don’t often see ice picks and crampons on the runway.
At the end Simon and Garfunkel sang “The Sound of Silence” while the sound system groaned with feedback as the snowfall compromised its wireless reception. Fashion shows are fanciful things designed to stimulate material desire through the creation of carefully crafted fictional context, and there was plenty of spectacular stage-management here tonight. But watching these show clothes left you spellbound because they were snow bound, and so in their element.
