Scene setting: Guests entered an astonishingly vast industrial space in Milan, where in eight separate rooms — booming with music, frenetic lighting and hoards of jostling Moncler devotees — the label’s imaginative, drop-focused Genius collections were housed. As if that wasn’t enough of a sensory overload, outside strobe lit installations included a scaffold lined with Moncler trick bikes, a Rimowa installation stacked with suitcases and Rick Owens’ surprise guerilla tour bus, a brutalist silver vehicle housing not only his and wife Michèle Lamy’s oversized silver puffer jackets, but also custom Moncler nylon duvet sheets in the bus’s bedroom. The bus is even able to buy.
Mood board: Guests traversed the enormous venue – resembling a rave or festival with multiple enticing stages — with each of Moncler’s 8 Genius rooms showcasing the A/W 2020 offering of the label’s ever-evolving and consumer-captivating retail model. Queues were huge outside Richard Quinn’s stage, who erected a stark and eerie spaceship resembling installation, with models striding in striking sixties silhouettes given an outerwear update, from daisy motif puffer jackets to ski suits and sweeping opera coats in rainbow stripe and meadow print, paired with orb-like bags and extravagant ostrich feather headpieces. Elsewhere, Simone Rocha’s fourth collection for Moncler Genius was inspired by the cinema of Fellini (also a reference on the Gucci catwalk). Cue a film depicted a ballerina descending into madness and pieces including voluminous frilled mackintoshes paired with balaclavas, double layer dresses in tulle and floral print and A-line cagoules. Also on his fourth offering, fellow London designer Craig Green dived into the blue with a series of architectural and body swathing padded and plastic designs, which made male models resemble dinghies or pool inflatables skimming through water.
Best in show: JW Anderson is the latest designer on the Moncler Genius line-up (replacing Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli), and for his debut the designer delved into his imaginative archive, presenting a series of greatest hits reimagined in puffed, down-filled fabrics, from frilled shorts to trailing scarves, rugby stripe dresses to puffer jackets with reptilian spikes, in a kaleidoscopic colour palette. §
