“Insulation, protection, and momentum are my impressions of what Moncler stands for, and applying my aesthetic to an insulated traveling bubble was my answer to the collaborative challenge,” said Rick Owens.
On the day preceding the launch of the Moncler + Rick Owens collection, the designer’s life partner and creative accomplice, Michèle Lamy, returned to Milan to present a creative program from the hyper-personal setting of the Rick Owens designed custom tour bus. The tour bus is an ultra-protected cocoon, upholstered in Moncler’s iconic duvet, which earlier this year took the couple across the Nevada desert on a road trip. In February, it was taken to Milan to reveal the Moncler + Rick Owens collection at the Moncler 2020 show, and now Lamy returned to the city where it began to curate a day of multidisciplinary and intimate discussions.
Lamy, known for restlessly pushing boundaries in culture and communication, and living in a headspace without territory or borders, so set herself the task of finding a way to communicate with the outside world from the seclusion of the bus. Her series of conversations were conceived with an undulating flow, as the day was inspired by the many hours and layers of Jacques Rivette’s 1969 arthouse classic ‘L’Amour Fou’, with topics rippling from the beautiful to the gritty, from modern Milanese culture to environmental activism, via the medium of Zoom calls.
Moncler approached me about a collab and I took advantage of the moment to ask them to do something different — to customize a tour bus for Hun and I to make a road trip from Lax to Michael Heizer’s ranch in Nevada… Heizer had invited us to see his monumental land art piece City, 48 years in the making… and I hadn’t been to the west coast since I moved to Europe 18 years ago… I was kind of thinking about Joseph Beuys traveling to the U.S. from Germany in the seventies, landing at JFK, being wrapped in felt and taken by ambulance to his N.Y. gallery to live with a wild coyote for 3 days in his installation I like America and America likes me, and then going straight back to Germany the same way…Our tour would take us through Las Vegas and Area 51 with a detour to Heizer’s double negative… This custom tour bus was exhibited in Milan on February 19 and available, as well as the clothes Moncler made for Hun and I to wear on our tour…
MONCLER + RICK OWENS will be available in Moncler Harbour City now. The collaboration brings the partners back to their DNA: for Moncler, a duvet; for Owens, conceptual, and architectural forms. Extreme volumes are reinterpreted in Moncler nylons, expressed in a palette of black, silver and dust, realized in an array of radiance quilting.
