Remo Ruffini confesses that he no longer relishes his own birthdays: “I close my house and I don’t want to see anyone!” However when it comes to Moncler—which turns 70 this year—it’s an entirely different matter. This Saturday night in Milan’s Duomo square, Ruffini will throw an open-to-the-public birthday show for the brand featuring precisely 1,952 models and performers, all choreographed by the artistic director Sadeck Waff.
That will mark the start of a whole series of global Moncler initiatives: There will be a touring exhibition-meets-event entitled Extraordinary Expedition rolling through New York, London, Tokyo, and Seoul (with a digital-only Chinese leg). There will be seven NFTs created in a project with the artist Antoni Tudisco. And there will be a new, redesigned edition of the house’s defining product, the Maya down jacket, delivered in 13 colorways with a commemorative 70th anniversary logo.
Possibly the most exciting element of all this, however, is the return to Moncler of seven designers and creatives who have all contributed to the house’s ascent. Shortly after acquiring Moncler in 2003, Ruffini embarked on a model of collaboration—starting with Junya Watanabe, Fendi, and Nicolas Ghesquière-era Balenciaga, and currently manifested by the collaborative colossus that is its Genius project—as a means to generate the “energy” that Ruffini characterizes as the the brand’s driving force. Now it will reunite with some of the key protagonists in that story: Pharrell Williams, Rick Owens, Thom Browne, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Giambattista Valli, Hiroshi Fujiwara, and Francesco Ragazzi. Each has contributed their own riff on the Maya, which will be dropped in a series of weekly special editions starting on October 15, and each accompanied by a campaign starring one “inspiring” person of the designers’ own choosing. As Pharrell Williams said: “There are so many amazing artists also working on this project and I can’t wait to see them all.”
