A Fashion Fever Dream in Shanghai, With Rihanna and Go-Karts

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 Saturday night event was technically a show closing out Shanghai Fashion Week, but it felt unlike any other runway I’d ever seen. If anything, it felt like another world.

Moncler’s City of Genius in Shanghai

Since 2018, Moncler has been inviting creative people across disciplines to work with it for Italian luxury brand’s annual Genius project. This year’s 10 picks included designers Rick Owens and Jil Sander, fashion editor Edward Enninful, and actor Donald Glover. The day before the event, 8,000 guests—including thousands of members of the public who won invitations—received a map of the City of Genius, each of its neighborhoods dreamed up by a different creative. Moncler described it as “a metropolis of creativity.”

The City of Genius even had its own traffic lights.

One fashion editor I spoke with compared the Shanghai event to Coachella, because of the overall sprawling expanse, which felt like a festival grounds. 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 Canadian singer-songwriter Henry Lau, and Rocky reappeared hours later to perform at the after-party.)

Someone else said it felt more like Epcot at Disney World because of the production: neon lights everywhere, guests whipping around in go-karts in the Palm Angels area, food carts arrayed along the paths between “neighborhoods,” and line after line of 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 setup 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.)

Models wearing the Moncler × Jil Sander Genius collection

Moncler is known in large part for its puffer coat. But the brand has managed to take a utilitarian garment—which many of us have early memories of being coerced into wearing, by concerned mothers and weather-obsessed dads—and make it not just a symbol of luxury but also 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.

A model at Rick Owens’s pavilion stands in front of a set that can also be purchased.

The creative collaborators—or “geniuses”—also each used the opportunity to build a neighborhood around their vision. Willow Smith’s, of course, had oversize willow trees; she and mom Jada Pinkett Smith posed with models standing underneath the drooping branches. 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. And Enninful felt compelled to create a city optimized for surviving the elements, with two identical weather-station sets, each immersed in an extreme climate. Snow covered one, the model pushing away flakes of white while clicking away at a computer. The other was a heat-showered sand dune, which models walking around slowly, as if on the brink of passing out from exposure. Fittingly, the Moncler × Enninful collection is made up of 10 looks conceived to withstand harsh environments: Sandstorm, Snowstorm, and Windstorm.

A model at Edward Enninful’s Genius activation standing atop a snowy hill

As I walked away from the City of Genius 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 one of the 10 neighborhoods 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 this kind of extravagant fantasies. It is Genius, after all.

Moncler Genius Fall 2024 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Open Gallery

Tara Gonzalez is the Senior Fashion Editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Previously, she was the style writer at InStyle, founding commerce editor at Glamour, and fashion editor at Coveteur.