Quite often, from opportunities to look at trendy clothes for the next season, fashion weeks turn into moments to live an experience. As we saw in yesterday's posts, modern shows can be theatrical displays in which designers explore their passions, interests, fears and anxieties, or attempt to make a comment about society.
Yet shows can also be celebratory events, a good example is Moncler's celebration of the brand's 70th anniversary, that took place last week in Milan's Piazza del Duomo. The event was open to the public and thousands watched the performance from the main square, and the surrounding balconies and terraces.
For the occasion, the brand went monumental enlisting the principal dancer of Milan's La Scala, Virna Toppi, who opened the show in a white tutu and a Moncler jacket.
Besides, there were also 700 dancers, 200 musicians, 100 choir members and 952 models, a total of 1,952 performers (a symbolical number representing the founding year of Moncler), all of them wearing a white Moncler Maya '70' edition jacket (Toppi matched the jacket with a tutu, a rather unfortunate combination, while the brand may have created for her something more extraordinary maybe moving from Pierpaolo Piccioli's Genius designs).
On Gucci’s runway, Alessandro Michele explored the power of the double and the possibility of multiplying onself; Moncler's show was more focused on repetition, also thanks to the choreography (yes, having a cool choreographer is another key to a memorable fashion show) orchestrated by artistic director Sadeck Berrabah, better known as Sadeck Waff.
If you like follow dance/choreography accounts on Instagram, you may have stumbled upon Waff's mesmerizing choreographies.
The French-Algerian artist who choreographed the hand-off ceremony for the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games and the 2024 games in Paris, produces highly visual and physical performances in which the focus is on the bust and the arms of the dancers who are usually sitting down.
Imagine vogueing, but more angular and linear and less graceful, more rigid and robotic and geometrical rather than glamorous, but in both cases the dancer moves the arms swiftly from one static position to another. Besides, Waff's "Géométrie Variable" choreographies work much better with a large group of people who move their arms in perfect synchronicity and create geometrical configurations, while Waff stands in front of them giving directions like an orchestra conductor.
At the Moncler show, dancers in white Maya jackets had their sleeves rolled to reveal underneath a black jumper, that helped Waff punctuating the visually striking movements he designed for this show, at times inspired by the aggregations of starlings.
You don't need to be a professional dancer to know that reaching this level of co-ordination is extremely difficult: Waff’s mathematically precise choreographies designing shapes, lines and geometries first make you go wow, but then immediately prompt you to wonder how the hell he manages to perfectly co-ordinate large groups of dancers.
Waff's input added an arty touch to the event that was otherwise a huge marketing exercise: this show focused on dance was more stylish than visions of Milan's "paninari" (a youth culture that fascinated even the Pet Shop Boys in the '80s) in Moncler jackets, but its monumental scale seemed to have only one main purpose - promoting the Maya jacket in a new, lightweight, washed and lacquered nylon (by the way, 500 limited-edition platinum Moncler Maya 70 jackets will be associated with - surprise, surprise - an NFT).
The jacket will also be revisited through seven collaborations (with Francesco Ragazzi of Palm Angels; Thom Browne; Hiroshi Fujiwara; Rick Owens; Giambattista Valli; Pierpaolo Piccioli, and Pharrell Williams; you wonder if brands nowadays have a list of things for their shows that goes Choreographer - TICK; NFT - TICK; Collaboration - TICK), launching on a weekly basis from 15th October.
Moncler seems currently interested in exploring new territories in dance and the brand has been getting its inspirations from '90s dance subcultures as proved by the images and video campaign by movement artist Thomas Heyes and director Eddie Whelan for the Moncler1952 collection.
Will this passion for dance and choreography continue for Moncler? Well, having an original choreographer on your side is an asset nowadays if you're a fashion house or a brand, so Moncler may just want to pursue closer collaboration with Waff whose variable geometries represented the added value of an otherwise monumentally commercial show.
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