“What I’m really proud of, more than any of the work we’ve done, is honestly the celebration of creating.” So says Jony Ive, founder of design agency LoveFrom and former Chief Design Officer at Apple, during a dinner created to serve the hottest scoop of Milan Design Week: Moncler and Ive are collaborating on a new collection.
The dinner was hosted by Remo Ruffini – chairman, CEO and driving force of Moncler – at his home in the heart of the Italian design and fashion capital. The exact nature of the products that Ruffini’s Moncler and Ive-founded LoveFrom will launch in September remains unrevealed for now, but there were some clues to gather as guests arrived and started chatting. A screen in the living room showed an image of Monduck, the Italian brand’s historic mascot (and laundry supervisor). He sat next to a new character, a bear, on a motor scooter: perhaps tellingly, both wore jackets with triangular flap pockets. There was talk of a new ‘duo button’, apparently magnetic. We had to connect the dots…
Although a long-time San Francisco resident, both during and since the decades he spent designing products for Apple, Ive is a true Brit. Last night’s dinner brought together many of his friends and co-creatives in London to mingle with Ruffini’s from Milan and beyond. LoveFrom co-founder, Aussie Marc Newson, was there with his wife Charlotte Stockdale; she sat next to Kering’s CEO François-Henri Pinault and opposite the architect Norman Foster. There was Ruth Rogers from the famous River Café, enthusiastically tucking into a magnificent artichoke cake, alongside the incomparable Italian dancer Roberto Bolle and the great graphic designer Peter Saville (also a member of the LoveFrom collective). Gildo Zegna, Karla Otto, Linda Evangelista, Karl Templer, Maria Sharapova, Anna Cleveland, Giovanna Engelbert, Deyan Sudjic and Gabriele Muccino further graced the tables. John Elkann, his wife Lavinia and brother Lapo were also there: John is the leading member of the Agnelli clan and chairman of Ferrari, for which Ive and LoveFrom are currently developing the very first Prancing Horse electric car. In short, despite the tone-defying participation of some journalists, this was a guest list with serious clout.
Yet it was also a lot of fun: the guests showered Mirazur’s maestro chef Mauro Colagreco with applause at the end of the evening, and were just as exuberant at the end of Ive’s speech – in which he made a few statements. more key details about the LoveFrom Moncler collection will follow. He said: ‘We have been working together for four years, and the only reason is love: and the only reason is the practice and the joy of creating together… There is a moral obligation to somehow make the to celebrate something together. people who you think are important and curious and special.†The product of that process – a collaboration that I suspect will prove to be Ive and LoveFrom’s very first exercise in clothing design – will be unveiled in full when it launches worldwide in September.
