“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.