A Fashion Fever Dream in Shanghai, With Rihanna and Go-Karts
I am standing in a room dominated by an elevated stage lined with silver couches and bean bag chairs, on a 30,000-square-foot shipyard in Shanghai alongside the Huangpu River, when Rihanna walks in.
The entire futuristic lounge pit—which is filled with people shouting over music blasting from an enormous modular boombox so big it has its own cereal dispenser—goes silent. Wearing an all-red catsuit with oversized shield sunglasses tucked into her updo, Rihanna is ushered in by A$AP Rocky and led to an angular couch in the center, where he sits beside her, hand in hand. The couple take a few sips of champagne and laugh together. Then, Rocky looks around the room and exclaims, “Let’s do this!”
Shortly after, models ascend the stage, wearing bright green, orange, and yellow moto-inspired puffer garments. Some wear helmet-like trapper hats like the one atop Rocky’s head. Rihanna holds her phone in her hand the entire time, twisting and turning to capture the best content of her partner’s Moncler Genius collection. When it's done, Rocky stands up to take a bow and Rihanna grins and claps. Then they both walk out as briskly as they had arrived, and the room erupts into exclamations.
Mine being: “That felt like a fever dream."
I spent most of my time at Moncler's City of Genius trying to come up with a metaphor that could describe what it felt like. The event was technically a show closing out the city’s Fashion Week, but it felt unlike any other runway I'd ever seen. If anything, it felt like another world.
Since 2018, Moncler has been inviting creative people across disciplines to work with them for their annual Genius project. This year's cast included Rick Owens, Jil Sander, Edward Enninful, and Donald Glover, among others. The day before the event, 8,000 guests, which included thousands from the public who signed up for a chance to score an invite, received a map of Moncler’s City of Genius. Each neighborhood was dreamed up by a different creative; Moncler described it as “a metropolis of creativity.”
One fashion editor I spoke with compared the event to Coachella because of the overall sprawling expanse, which felt like a festival ground. Attendees rushed around, grabbing friends to see different “acts” at different stages, but instead of music, they were seeing different takes on Moncler’s puffer coats dreamed up by designers. (Although there was music, too—the evening ended with a concert put on by singer-songwriter Henry Lau, and A$AP Rocky performed hours later at the afterparty.)
Another said it felt more like Epcot at Disneyland because of the production: Neon lights everywhere, guests whipping around in Go-Karts at the Palm Angels section, food carts lining the paths between “neighborhoods” and lines everywhere with enthusiastic guests happy to be there.
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 set-up with models walking on a loop akin to the traditional catwalk. But that was only a fraction of what was happening. Moncler created a fashion-festival-amusement-park hybrid with guests ranging from Anne Hathaway to members of the public. (I stood alongside both at the Rick Owens booth.)
Moncler is known in large part for its puffer coat. But the brand has managed to take a utilitarian garment—that many of us have early memories of being coerced to wear by concerned mothers and weather-obsessed dads—and make it not just a symbol of luxury but of creativity. The best part of The City of Genius was, of course, breathing the same air as Rihanna…but also getting to see how the minds of Rick Owens and Luke and Lucie Meier of Jil Sander rendered the puffer into gowns and knitwear lined with down filling.
Each creative collaborator, or “genius,” also used the opportunity to build a neighborhood around their vision. Willow Smith’s, of course, had oversized willow trees; she and mom Jada Pinkett Smith posed with models standing underneath the drooping branches. Donald Glover brought his Gilga Farm in Ojai, California to China with a farmhouse facade set atop an orange grove, and showed a matching collection in soothing light layers and peachy shades. Edward Enninful felt compelled to create a city built for surviving the elements, with two identical weather-station sets drowned by two extreme elements. One was covered in snow, with a model pushing away snowflakes while clicking away at a computer. The other was a heat-showered sand dune with models walking slowly around it as if on the brink of passing out from sun exposure. Fittingly, the Moncler x Enninful collection is made of ten looks conceived for extreme exposures: Sandstorm, Snowstorm, and Windstorm.
As I walked away at the end of the night, I came to the realization that there wasn't a perfect metaphor to sum it all up. Maybe it really was a too-good-to-be-true fever dream that somehow became a reality I briefly got to join. Everyone laments that the fashion world has become far too formulaic—can you blame Moncler for bypassing that world and creating one of its own?
Every neighborhood of the City of Genius is clearly etched into my memory, but the feeling I won’t soon forget is grabbing a friend’s arm to run to the next stop, giddy with the nervousness of not knowing what’s in store. Who needs a fashion show, after all? Maybe we just need more of these kinds of extravagant fantasies. It is Genius, after all.
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