When Rihanna walks in, I’m standing in a 30,000-square-foot shipyard on the banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, in a room dominated by a raised stage lined with silver sofas and bean bags.
The entire futuristic lounge pit filled with screaming people falls silent as music blares from a massive modular stereo big enough to have its own cereal dispenser. Wearing an all-red catsuit and oversized sunglasses tucked into her updo, Rihanna is ushered in by A$AP Rocky and led to a square couch in the middle, where Rihanna sits next to him, holding hands. The couple takes a few sips of champagne and laughs together. Rocky then looks around the room and says, “Let’s do this!” he shouts.
Shortly after, models take to the stage wearing bright green, orange and yellow moto-inspired puffer suits. Some wear helmet-like trapper hats like the one on Rocky’s head. Rihanna constantly holds her phone and spins it to capture the best of her partner’s Moncler Genius collection. When it’s over, Rocky stands up and salutes, and Rihanna grins and claps. Then they both leave as quickly as they came, and screams erupt from the room.
Mine: “This was like a fever dream.”
I spent most of my time in Moncler’s City of Genius trying to find a metaphor that could describe what this felt like. The event was technically a show that closed out the city’s Fashion Week, but it was unlike any fashion show I’d ever seen. Rather, it felt like another world.
Since 2018, Moncler has been inviting creative people from different disciplines to work with them for the annual Genius project. This year’s cast included Rick Owens, Jil Sander, Edward Enninful and Donald Glover, among others. The day before the event, 8,000 guests, including thousands of members of the public who registered for a chance to receive an invitation, were given a map of Moncler’s City of Genius. Each neighborhood was imagined by a different creator; Moncler described it as the “metropolis of creativity”.
One fashion editor I spoke to compared the event to Coachella due to the overall large space that felt like a festival grounds. Attendees ran around with their friends to see different “shows” on different stages, but instead of music they saw different interpretations of Moncler’s puffer jackets imagined by the designers. (There was music, too, but the evening ended with a concert by singer-songwriter Henry Lau, and A$AP Rocky performed at the afterparty hours later.)
Another said it looked more like Epcot at Disneyland because of the production: Neon lights everywhere, guests riding around in Go-Karts in the Palm Angels section, food carts lining the roads between “neighborhoods,” and everywhere filled with enthusiastic guests happy to be there queues. .
I couldn’t help but also think about what it didn’t feel like: a fashion show. Of course, both Rick Owens and Jil Sander featured a setup of models walking on a loop similar to a traditional runway. But this was only a small part of what was going on. Moncler has created a fashion-festival-amusement park hybrid with guests ranging from Anne Hathaway to members of 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 utilitarian garment that many of us have first memories of being forced to wear by anxious mothers and weather-obsessed fathers and turn it into a symbol not just of luxury but of creativity. The best part of The City of Genius was breathing the same air as Rihanna, of course… but also seeing how the minds of Rick Owens, Luke, and Jil Sander’s Lucie Meier transformed the porcupine into down-filled gowns and knitwear. .
Each creative collaborator or “genius” also took the opportunity to build a neighborhood around their vision. Willow Smith’s, of course, had extremely large willow trees; she and her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, posed with models standing under drooping branches. Donald Glover brought Ojai, California’s Gilga Farm to China with a farmhouse façade perched above an orange grove, showcasing a harmonious collection of soothing light layers and peach tones. With two identical sets of weather stations overwhelmed by two extreme elements, Edward Enninful felt compelled to create a city built to survive the elements. One of them was covered in snow, and a model was pushing snowflakes while clicking on the computer. The other was a hot rainy dune with models walking slowly around it as if they were about to faint from exposure to the sun. The Moncler x Enninful collection accordingly consists of ten looks designed for extreme exposure conditions: Sandstorm, Snowstorm and Windstorm.
As I left at the end of the night, I realized that there is no perfect metaphor to sum it all up. Maybe it really was a fever dream that was too good to be true, and somehow it turned into a reality that I had to briefly participate in. Everyone complains that the fashion world has become too formulaic; Can you blame Moncler for skipping this world and creating a world 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 arm and running to the next stop, dazed with the tension of not knowing what awaits me. After all, who needs a fashion show? Maybe we need more of these kinds of exaggerated fantasies. This is Genius, after all.
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