“New York In Moncler” Traces The Brand’s Relationship With The City Through More Than 20 Years Of Fashion, Performance And Cultural Moments Ahead Of The Opening Of Its Fifth Avenue Flagship
Moncler is looking back at more than two decades of its relationship with New York through “New York in Moncler,” a public exhibition that will take over locations across the city from September 9 through 13.
The project brings together photographs documenting some of the brand’s most significant New York moments, from elaborate Moncler Grenoble presentations during New York Fashion Week to campaigns, collaborations and cultural projects. The exhibition will extend across public spaces throughout the city, with a central presentation at Vanderbilt Hall inside Grand Central Terminal.
The retrospective arrives as Moncler prepares to deepen its presence in New York with the opening of Moncler Fifth Avenue, which will become the brand’s largest global flagship. The store, located near Grand Central Terminal, represents the latest stage in a relationship with the city that has played a significant role in transforming Moncler from its alpine roots into a global luxury brand.
A film released September 3 accompanies the exhibition, framing the relationship between Moncler and New York as a long-running love story. Alicia Keys, a New Yorker and longtime collaborator with the brand, narrates the film over unreleased music of her own.
The exhibition begins its chronology in 2010, when Moncler transformed Chelsea Pier into an urban mountain. One hundred models dressed in Moncler Grenoble scaled scaffolding at the riverside location, establishing a formula that would become central to the brand’s New York presence: taking the codes and performance requirements of alpine clothing and placing them against the architecture and energy of the city.
A year later, Moncler staged one of its most memorable interventions inside Grand Central Terminal. In 2011, 140 dancers wearing technical alpine pieces transformed the Main Concourse into an unexpected synchronized performance. The brand followed in 2012 with an ice-skating presentation at Central Park’s Wollman Rink, accompanied by a live orchestra of New York musicians.
The scale continued to grow. In 2013, nearly 370 green-clad models filled Gotham Hall in an “Inner Forest” installation that recreated an alpine landscape inside Manhattan. The following year, Moncler took over the Hammerstein Ballroom, where 60 choristers performed as part of André and Michel Décosterd’s Pendulum Choir installation on hydraulic platforms.
New York’s architecture also became part of Moncler’s visual identity. For the Fall 2014 campaign, Annie Leibovitz photographed model Simon Howell atop the Chrysler Building, using the skyscraper as a metropolitan counterpart to a mountain summit and reinforcing the idea of Moncler’s outerwear moving between alpine and urban environments.
The exhibition also revisits 2015’s Art For Love initiative at the New York Public Library. Curated by Fabien Baron in support of amfAR, the project asked 32 photographers to reinterpret the Moncler Maya jacket. Among the works were Brigitte Lacombe’s “Studiocat,” which transformed the jacket into a protective and theatrical frame, and Camilla Åkrans’ floral portrait, which placed the functional outerwear within a more romantic, surrealist setting.
In 2016, Moncler returned to performance with a presentation at Lincoln Center staged during severe winter conditions. Eighty performers marched across the frozen plaza, turning the weather itself into part of the presentation and connecting the brand’s technical origins with the theatrical possibilities of New York Fashion Week.
Other moments document the people who have helped connect Moncler with New York culture. Spike Lee attended the brand’s 2017 Hammerstein Ballroom presentation, while a 2017 editorial project photographed New Yorkers across their neighborhoods wearing Moncler’s colorful puffers.
The retrospective then moves into a more recent period in which celebrity, collaboration and popular culture have increasingly shaped the relationship. A couture-inspired puffer gown originally created with Pierpaolo Piccioli for Moncler Genius in 2019 found a second life when Sarah Jessica Parker wore the design in 2023. That same year, Alicia Keys collaborated with Moncler on a collection informed by her memories of 1990s New York, translating the city’s street culture through oversized proportions, technical fabrics and color.
Penn Badgley became the face of the Moncler Collection Spring 2025 campaign, photographed on the streets of SoHo, while Moncler made its Met Gala debut later that year with Edward Enninful and Vittoria Ceretti. Ceretti wore a navy pinstriped mini dress with a corseted silhouette and dramatic train, finished with a Moncler down cape and oversized hood.
The exhibition also includes Fei Fei Sun photographed in New York wearing Moncler x EE72 by Edward Enninful, as well as Moncler’s 2025 “Warmer Together” campaign. Photographed on a New York rooftop, the latter brought together longtime friends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino around ideas of friendship, warmth and mutual respect. Tobe Nwigwe subsequently performed at Rockefeller Center as part of the campaign.
The chronology reaches 2026 with Moncler’s continuing partnership with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom collective. A second LoveFrom, Moncler collection will be unveiled in connection with the Fifth Avenue flagship opening, represented in the exhibition by Moncler’s Monduck and LoveFrom’s Montgomery mascots visiting Central Park.
Taken together, the images chart more than a succession of campaigns and events. New York became a testing ground for the way Moncler learned to translate its mountain heritage into metropolitan culture: technical clothing became performance, public space became a runway, and the puffer moved from protective equipment toward a recognizable symbol of urban style.
“New York in Moncler” brings that history back into many of the same public spaces where it developed. Its return to Grand Central Terminal is particularly circular: 15 years after Moncler filled the station with 140 dancers, the landmark now becomes the centerpiece of an exhibition documenting what followed.
And with the opening of Moncler Fifth Avenue, the retrospective functions as more than an exercise in nostalgia. After two decades of using New York as a stage, Moncler is marking its largest physical commitment to the city yet — turning a history of temporary spectacles into something considerably more permanent.