It’s the Climb
Moncler’s twenty-year New York story, from alpine utility to urban phenomenon
New York has never been particularly interested in behaving itself.
It is too loud for minimalism, too restless for nostalgia and too metropolitan to be easily reconciled with the romance of the great outdoors. And yet, for Moncler, that tension has become the point.
This September, the luxury house will turn New York itself into an exhibition space. New York in Moncler, running September 9–13, 2026, will bring together photographs and memories from the brand’s long relationship with the city, unfolding across public spaces before culminating at Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal.
The premise is simple: look back at the moments when Moncler and New York collided.
The result is a history less about jackets than about what happens when a mountain brand decides that the city can be its playground.
And there have been some spectacular collisions.
From snowfields to skyscrapers
Moncler was founded in 1952 in Monestier-de-Clermont, near Grenoble, by René Ramillon and André Vincent. Its earliest products were practical: sleeping bags, tents and protective clothing for high-altitude environments. In 1954, the company developed its first nylon down jacket, and Moncler equipment accompanied the Italian expedition to K2. The following year, it supported a French expedition to Makalu.
The brand’s history was written in extreme environments long before it was written in fashion magazines.
But eventually Moncler discovered another kind of terrain.
During the 1980s, its products moved decisively into urban life, becoming associated with a new generation of Italian consumers and the Paninari youth culture. Then, in 2003, entrepreneur Remo Ruffini acquired the company and began repositioning Moncler as a luxury brand while preserving its technical and alpine DNA.
New York was an unusually fitting destination for that transformation.
The cultural trailblazer and global icon’s co-created Moncler x Alicia Keys collection revisits personal memories of ‘90s New York, inspired by the possibility of the city’s concrete jungle. Credits: Laura Jane Coulson.
Moncler opened its first New York boutique in 2010, while Moncler Grenoble made its New York debut the same year.
What followed was not a conventional retail strategy.
It was theatre.
The city becomes the catwalk
Consider the images collected in the retrospective.
In 2010, at Chelsea Piers, A Hudson Hike turned a riverside construction site into an unlikely urban mountain, with around 100 Moncler Grenoble models climbing its scaffolding.
A Gotham Forest – Gotham Hall, 2013
Moncler Grenoble Fall/Winter 2013 transformed New York’s Gotham Hall into an immersive installation, recreating a sense of the alpine outdoors with a tiered ‘Inner Forest’ formation of nearly 370 green-clad models.
A year later, A Grand Groove took over Grand Central’s Main Concourse, where 140 dancers in alpine clothing performed among the city’s rushing commuters. In 2012, professional skaters took over Wollman Rink for A Central Skate, accompanied by a live orchestra. The following year, Gotham Hall became A Gotham Forest, an imagined woodland populated by nearly 370 models.
Then came the Chrysler Building. For Fall/Winter 2014, Annie Leibovitz photographed Moncler’s collection atop the iconic skyscraper. Later that year, Hammerstein Ballroom hosted A Ballroom Ballad, a Grenoble presentation featuring André and Michel Décosterd’s Pendulum Choir.
The pattern was unmistakable: Moncler wasn’t simply bringing alpine clothing to New York. It was turning the city itself into an extension of the mountain—and the mountain into a stage for culture.
More than a fashion show
That distinction matters.
Luxury fashion increasingly exists outside the runway. The product is only one part of the proposition; the rest is memory, community, celebrity, music, architecture and place.
Moncler has made that logic central to its identity. Today, its universe encompasses Moncler Collection, Moncler Grenoble and Moncler Genius, positioned at the intersection of fashion with art, design, entertainment, music, technology and sport.
New York provides an almost absurdly perfect stage for that philosophy.
A Grand Groove – Grand Central Terminal, 2011
Grand Central’s Main Concourse became a surprise runway for Moncler Grenoble’s Fall/Winter 2012 New York Fashion Week presentation. 140 dancers, clad in technical alpine wear, captivated commuters with a synchronized performance.
The retrospective moves from Grand Central, Rockefeller Center and Gotham Hall to more intimate encounters. Its archive includes a 2015 New York Public Library project photographed by Camilla Åkrans; Alicia Keys’ 2023 collaboration with the brand, drawing on memories of 1990s New York; and more recent encounters involving Edward Enninful, Fei Fei Sun, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
The 2025 Warmer Together campaign, photographed on New York rooftops, paired De Niro and Pacino as symbols of friendship and human connection. At Rockefeller Center, musician Tobe Nwigwe performed as part of the campaign.
There is a deliberate progression here: from clothes designed to protect the body from cold to a brand that increasingly makes warmth an emotional idea.
Warmer Together – A Celebration of Friendship, 2025, Shot on the rooftops of New York, two chairs stood as symbols of connection before friends and cinematic legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino took their seats. They embodied love, warmth, and respect in the Warmer Together campaign.
The puffer as cultural object
This is where Moncler’s New York story becomes more interesting than a conventional retrospective.
The down jacket has become so familiar as a luxury-fashion object that it is easy to forget how strange its original proposition was. Moncler began with the practical problem of keeping people warm in extreme conditions. Over decades, that functional object became a marker of identity, status and urban belonging.
Winter Runway – Sarah Jessica Parker, 2023
Co-created with Pierpaolo Piccioli, this couture-inspired gown gained renewed prominence in 2022. Worn by Sarah Jessica Parker, it evolved from a runway experiment into an pop-culture emblem of winter. Credits: Craig Blankenhorn; HBO.
New York accelerated that transformation because the city has always been good at stripping objects of their original context and giving them another life.
A technical jacket becomes streetwear.
A ski silhouette becomes eveningwear.
A mountain becomes an installation.
A railway terminal becomes a runway.
And a global luxury brand becomes, for a few days, a kind of open-air museum.
A new chapter
There is a clever piece of timing behind New York in Moncler.
The exhibition arrives alongside the opening of Moncler’s new Fifth Avenue flagship, which the company describes as its largest worldwide. The store brings together men’s, women’s and children’s collections, Moncler Grenoble and footwear in a space conceived around the meeting of mountain and metropolis.
The retrospective, then, is not simply looking backward. It is establishing a mythology for what comes next.
Art For Love – New York Public Library, 2015
Camilla Åkrans’ A Surrealist Portrait with Flowers features a Swedish model Moa Åberg enveloped by a dense floral arrangement, with the Maya jacket woven into a dreamlike composition. Credits: Camilla Akrans.
The new chapter also includes another collaboration with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom collective, represented through the rather charmingly surreal pairing of Moncler’s Monduck and Montgomery in Central Park.
There is something almost perfectly New York about that image: a house born in the Alps, a legendary designer, two mascots and Central Park.
It is earnest, extravagant and slightly ridiculous.
Which is precisely why it works.
New York, as Moncler sees it
Fashion brands often say a city inspires them.
Moncler has spent more than a decade doing something more tangible: staging itself inside the city’s visual language.
Its New York archive is therefore not simply an archive of advertising. It is an archive of occupation—of spaces, symbols and collective memories.
Studiocat by photographer Brigitte Lacombe presented an unexpected protagonist, turning the jacket into a protective cocoon and theatrical frame – a witty interpretation of Moncler’s recognisable silhouette. Credits: Brigitte Lacombe.
For Moncler, the city becomes the mountain: commuters become an audience, skyscrapers peaks, and rooftops stages.
That is the real story behind New York in Moncler.
The exhibition may be presented as a retrospective, but its deeper subject is the brand’s transformation from mountain equipment into a language of contemporary luxury—one in which performance, fashion, art and culture are no longer separate categories.
For a company founded in a small Alpine village, that is quite an ascent.
And for New York, which has never met a good idea it couldn’t make bigger, louder or more theatrical, Moncler may have found its natural habitat.
Images courtesy of Moncler.