With a retro sporting mindset, post-preppy. Francesco Ragazzi, the creator and creative director of Palm Angels, describes the brand's most recent collaborative Moncler Genius collection, which debuted today in a campaign featuring Naomi Campbell, in this manner.
The only fashion firms missing from Miami this week due to Art Basel are Palm Angels and Moncler. Ragazzi shot the advertisement for this new collection on the city's beautiful shoreline to make up for that understandable absence—he recently finished launching a pop-up in LA and a Formula 1 partnership in Abu Dhabi.
Ragazzi said: “The idea was to replicate some iconic sports images from the 1990s. Miami was a big part of last season’s collection for me and is iconic to the brand. So to shoot Naomi the icon, in this iconic location, wearing Moncler x Palm Angels and Tod’s—two giants and us—was really the cherry on top for me in expressing this collection.”
Ragazzi claimed that when looking into that historical sports/prep starting point, he had found numerous pictures of athletes in casual attire, including Michael Jordan, who was seen sporting loafers and white tube socks. Additionally, some basketball coaches of the day preferred it. Ragazzi was eager to recreate this seeming cool collision of diametrically opposed codes in the collection.
Unexpectedly, Tod's desire to attract outside cooperation through its Tod's-FACTORY initiative complemented Ragazzi's desire to parody Tod's. The end result was a minimalistic take on the Winter Gommino duckboot, which Gianni Agnelli is said to have once coveted and a fire-flecked remake of Diego Della Valle's iconic Gommino loafer. The 8 Moncler Palm Angels collection, as it is formally known, as a whole has a satisfyingly louche, post-streetwear Big Lebowski-ness about it that would fit in perfectly among the crowds of party-focused aesthetes who are currently washed up in Miami.