MONCLER'S MONCORE JACKET SWAPS SHELLS WITH MAGNETS

Moncler's New York flagship opened this week with a coat that is not quite a coat. The Moncore Jacket, the anchor of the brand's second LoveFrom collection with Jony Ive, is a down filled base built to accept three different outer shells through a magnetic system with no zipper anywhere in the design. It arrived the same week Moncler called its citywide New York campaign a love letter to the city's faces, energy and spirit, and for once the metaphor has a building attached to it.

The Moncore Jacket Is a Foundation, Not a Coat

A single down filled shell sits at the center of Moncler's second LoveFrom collection, the line built in collaboration with Jony Ive. Moncler calls it the Moncore Jacket, and on its own it looks like a plain quilted base layer. That is the point. Three more pieces, a Field Jacket, a Parka and a Poncho, attach to the Moncore through a magnetic fastening system engineered specifically for the collection, turning one garment into four silhouettes without a single zipper or button changing hands. Moncler has chased that same problem, how to make a down shell do more without adding weight, since René Ramillon and André Vincent founded the brand in Monestier de Clermont in 1952, sixteen years before it became the official supplier to France's downhill ski team at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. This time the engineering problem was different: how a coat changes shape in under a minute, standing in a store, with no tools. Three attachable shells make the base piece a chassis, not a finished coat by itself.

Three Shells, One Magnetic Seam

The magnets do the work a zipper track usually does, and they do it faster. A wearer swaps the Field Jacket shell for the Parka shell in the time it takes to pull one piece off and press another into place, no track to catch and no pull to snag on a glove. It is the same modular logic phone cases and camera rigs have used for years, though Patta's new corduroy bomber took the opposite route this week, wrapping a single Primaloft fill inside one fixed shell rather than three. Moncler has released collaboration collections before, but never one where the base piece was designed to be incomplete on purpose.

Jony Ive Put a Manual Where the Hype Usually Goes

LoveFrom's first Moncler collection arrived as a proof of concept. This one arrives with a system, four outerwear silhouettes offered through the Moncler to Measure atelier that customers can now customize inside the brand's new store, one floor from where the Moncore Jacket sits on display. The pairing of Ive, a designer who spent three decades making objects disappear into their function, with a brand whose identity is a visible, quilted shell, is the tension the collection is built on. A magnetic seam stays invisible until a wearer needs it. That reads like an Ive instinct wearing a Moncler label.

Look Past the Rack. Grand Central Carried This Campaign.

Moncler opened the store carrying all of this on September 10, inside the General Motors Building at 767 Fifth Avenue, 23,680 square feet across two floors designed with longtime collaborators Gilles and Boissier. The opening closed out a five day citywide retrospective, New York in Moncler, running large scale photography across billboards, subway platforms and bus shelters through September 13, anchored by a presentation inside Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Terminal. A film released September 3 carries the idea forward in sound: Alicia Keys narrates New York in Moncler over her own unreleased music, extending a relationship that started in 2023 when she co designed a Moncler collection drawn from her own memories of the city in the 1990s. Stone Island, a house working the outerwear category from another angle, spent this week explaining the sailboat behind its own compass badge. Moncler's answer to archive work is a magnet nobody can see until the shell comes off.

Judged as a coat on its own, the Moncore Jacket is a fine, unremarkable quilted base. Judged as one piece of a four shell system that snaps together with magnets inside a 23,680 square foot flagship that opened September 10, it is the most interesting bet Moncler has made on outerwear in years, and the one hardest for a lower priced brand to copy by next winter.