The air in San Francisco on a cloudy May day is crisp and predictably cool. Inside the brick façade Jackson Square office of LoveFrom, the creative collective founded by former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, I’m offered a cup of tea to fend off the morning chill (served hot with milk and sugar, as in Ive’s native UK), and as I sip from a white ceramic mug, Ive waxes poetic—and passionately—about the jackets he and the LoveFrom team have designed with Moncler.
“The motivation was so clear and pure,” says Ive, 57, whose work at Apple made him one of the most celebrated tech designers in the world. “We wanted to collaborate... just for the love of doing it.” This, he tells me, is the case with most LoveFrom projects, which have ranged from creating a turntable with Scottish audio brand Linn to designing a special typeface for Terra Carta, King Charles’s environmental charter. (The new collection was sparked by a chance meeting between Ive and Moncler’s chairman and CEO, Remo Ruffini, at a Maison Bonnet store in London—both men are loyal to the brand’s eyeglasses.) Behind these efforts is a LoveFrom team of designers, writers, engineers, and architects—many of whom worked with Ive at Apple—as well as Ive’s 20-year-old twin sons, Charlie and Harry.
Hanging on two racks to the side of us are a smattering of down-filled base-layer jackets in yellow and off-white and a trio of outer shells in pale shades of blue, green, and orange: an oversized parka, a hooded popover poncho, and a field jacket with utilitarian front pockets, all of them modular and gender-neutral. But as with the myriad of culture-shifting products Ive designed at Apple, there is much more nuance at play than might first appear.
“This is how it all started,” Ive says, sliding three bound volumes of exhaustive research toward me across a long wooden table. “We did months and months of fastener research and button research before we even started drawing anything.” Eventually, the LoveFrom team landed on what they’re calling “duo” buttons—two-part magnets engineered from aluminum, brass, and steel. The buttons connect any of the base-layer pieces to any of the shells at five different points on each garment, making a delightful and tactile clicking sound in the process. “It’s quite a nice symbol of the collaboration with Moncler, of these two different things coming together,” Ive says. (One half of each button is etched with LoveFrom’s new mascot, Montgomery the bear; the other with Moncler’s long-standing logo.)
Since 2018, Moncler has collaborated with the likes of Valentino, JW Anderson, Roc Nation, and Simone Rocha, among other brands, through its Moncler Genius initiative. Still, “this is not really a collaboration like the other ones,” Ruffini says when we connect over Zoom. “This is more of a concept than a collection.”
When one thinks of Apple, it’s not just laptops and smartphones that come to mind but, rather, clean lines; a design that’s intuitive as well as innovative; and minimalist, origami-like packaging that’s of a piece with the products. Perhaps Cupertino, California, comes to mind, too—the slice of Silicon Valley where Apple is headquartered, and where Ive, who has lived in San Francisco since 1992, commuted to for nearly 30 years.
“I didn’t approach this as a fashion designer—I approached it as a designer,” says Ive, who is of course revered for the look and feel of the iPhone, the iPad, MacBooks, and AirPods, but has no formal fashion training. “When you move beyond your traditional practice, you do so being very self-aware and deferential to all the stuff that you don’t know. I think the most important thing is that you are clear that you are designing for people, and that you have a fundamental attitude of curiosity.” And though Ive insists that many creative challenges are universal—whether you’re designing a building, headphones, or a garment—“one of the very distinct challenges [of the Moncler collaboration] was understanding the drape of the textile and how the fabric moves and relates to the human form.” LoveFrom leaned heavily on Moncler for textile wisdom, with Ruffini’s team ultimately developing a custom fabric for the collection by treating recycled nylon with compressed air (or taslanizing the yarn, to use fabric-speak) to create what looks and feels like a natural matte fiber akin to washed cotton.
Ive’s other great ambition for the project? Achieving a seamless, one-piece cut for each garment. “It would’ve been very easy for the conversation to end with: ‘You can’t get fabric that wide,’ ” he says. “[But] at every stage, where there were those challenges, there wasn’t a gritting of teeth.” Instead, Moncler cast a wide search, eventually finding unusually large looms capable of such a thing in Italy (with the exact location a closely guarded secret).
Lightweight and soft to the touch, the jackets were designed for everyday wear—an outer layer for your morning commute, perhaps, or the piece you grab on a rainy day—but the muted Creamsicle palette and robust functionality lend them to more active pursuits like hiking too. “I find it very hard to disconnect color from material,” Ive says. “Because we spent so long with Moncler on the actual raw material, I think I was trying to develop colors that felt—maybe this is an odd thing to say—somehow inevitable. I love design where you think, Well, of course it’s this way—why would you do it any other way?”
The two teams’ work spanned three years and as many countries, with Ruffini assembling a dedicated group at Moncler’s Milan headquarters, where they were often joined by Ive and other San Francisco–based LoveFrom creatives—with some of the latter also spending time in Bacău, Romania, where Moncler has a sprawling production facility. (At one point, LoveFrom engineer—and Apple alum—Patch Kessler traveled 6,300 miles from the Bay Area to Bacău with a 100-pound custom-built tool to automatically fasten and unfasten the duo buttons. “You can fasten them yourself maybe 15, 20 times,” says Kessler, “but what about a thousand times?”)
This depth of research—and this careful consideration of every detail (down to the garment boxes, which are each cut from one piece of foldable card, as were the shopping bags specially made for the collection)—might seem obsessive to some, but it’s long been Ive’s calling card. “Why are we still living with a round button and a slot?” he asks. “It’s because you know it works and you don’t have to do all this. If you want to innovate, if you want to do something new, you have to know what that costs.”
And while the entire collaboration could be seen as a master class in design at the intersection of tech, style, and functionality, it is imbued with both sensuous and practical pleasures: The pieces drape comfortably over the body, can be worn alone or as part of a modular set, will withstand the elements, and come in colors that effortlessly pair with crisp khakis, your favorite faded denim, or, as Ruffini suggests, “vintage blue chinos or classic gray trousers.” Who among us—fashion-obsessed or otherwise—doesn’t want that?
The collection will be available in select stores this month and online in October—the culmination of an effort that “has been nothing but simple and joyful,” Ive says—with, perhaps, more to come. “Moncler didn’t need LoveFrom and LoveFrom didn’t need Moncler,” he continues, flashing the same friendly smile he has been all morning. “But if we stopped working together now, I would be profoundly upset.”
In this story: hair, Franziska Presche; makeup, Janeen Witherspoon; manicurist, Hayley Evans-Smith; tailor, Della George. Produced by theArcade Production. Set design: Samuel Overs.
