MILAN — Moncler has another collaboration up its puffer jacket’s sleeve.
The brand has teamed with artist and designer Greg Lauren, who added his own touch to the firm’s staple outerwear piece, dismantling, intersecting and recomposing it, reinventing it with portions of denim garments and worn-out fabrics.
The collection, dubbed Collide, will be presented in Paris on Friday and will be available from the fall in all Moncler boutiques, including the brand’s online store and selective department stores.
‘‘The ability to express thoughts, feelings or sensations through artistic creations has always fascinated me,” said Moncler chairman and chief executive officer Remo Ruffini. “I have the greatest respect for art and artists in general, regardless of their form of expression. Greg Lauren is first and foremost an artist, but also a designer who experiments with new languages.”
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This is the latest in a string of collaborations with designers, artists and performers that Moncler has forged since 2004, ranging from the first, with Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons, to Sacai (Chitose Abe), Visvim, Pharrell Williams, Mary Katrantzou, Erdem and Rolling Stones, to name a few.
Speaking of Lauren, Ruffini said he is a longtime admirer. “His exhibition ‘Alterations’ revealed his true identity, and an outstanding ability to overlap. And it is this art of mixing things that led me to work with him. I wanted the iconic style of Moncler to be mixed with something else, almost as if to reveal a new identity. And that is what happened. The result is quite astonishing.”
Lauren is a painter and sculptor and, after studying art at Princeton, he specialized in fashion design, launching a men’s and women’s collection, and the collaboration with Moncler reflects his signature use of ‘‘repurposed fabrics.’’
The nephew of Ralph Lauren, the designer created around 200 unique and limited-edition pieces with Moncler for men, women and unisex drawing from the brand’s staple puffers Maya, Bady and Moka. The collection comes in three different colorways: classic Moncler two-tone in flame red and light blue, black and military green.
‘‘It all revolves around the concept of ‘destroyed elegance’ and ‘imperfect perfection,’ and around a philosophy of absolute uniqueness and originality,” said Lauren. “Each of these items came about thanks to a creative fusion suggested by morphology or the possibility for metamorphosis of Moncler’s heritage. I grew up in a family where the tailoring culture was practiced in a form I can only define as religious. It is no coincidence that my creations, all of which I produce in my atelier in Los Angeles, tell a story of the role we embody in life, in our families and our social circle. What I try to identify with my fashion work is an idea of new luxury which is customized and rendered unique, far beyond any brand uniformity or generalized trend.
‘‘In looking at who we are and why we wear what we wear, I love taking iconic ideas and reinterpreting them through the artistic blender, deconstructing what we thought we knew, so that we see it differently, a familiar vocabulary becomes a new language, one which we can still connect to emotionally,” Lauren concluded.