Moncler Opens Its Biggest Flagship Yet, and New York’s A-List Turns Out in Full

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Julia Roberts, Cher, and an Olympic gold medalist helped Moncler open the largest store in its history on Fifth Avenue.

Moncler opened its largest store in the world on September 10, a two-level, 23,680 square foot flagship at 767 Fifth Avenue, steps from Central Park. The address sits inside the General Motors Building, the 50-story Edward Durell Stone tower completed in 1968 on the former site of the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The ground-floor space has carry a lot of names over the decades: a General Motors showroom first, then the flagship toy store of FAO Schwarz, briefly a temporary Apple Store during a renovation, and, for a stretch, a spot once earmarked for what Under Armour had planned as its own largest store in the world. The tower itself has changed hands almost as often, passing from General Motors to Donald Trump in 1998, then to the Macklowe Organization in 2003 for what was then the largest single-asset real estate deal in U.S. history, and finally to Boston Properties in 2008 for roughly $2.8 billion.

The company first confirmed the project back in September 2024, not long after striking a licensing partner with LVMH covering eyewear, with an early target of an early 2026 open. Ruffini described the location at the time as a longtime point of reference for him personally, sitting between Fifth and Madison Avenues in a stretch of Manhattan he had watched for years before the space became available. Restructuring the space took three years, according to the brand’s longtime design partners, and the result is now the most ambitious retail statement Moncler has built anywhere. From the sidewalk, the finished building keeps a fairly restrained black glass frame; the more theatrical moves are saved for the interior.

 

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The interiors are the work of Gilles & Boissier, the Paris studio founded in 2004 by married couple Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier, who met years earlier working under designer Christian Liaigre. Their first Moncler store opened on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 2005, and the relationship has since grown into roughly 250 boutiques worldwide, plus a handful of Remo Ruffini‘s own homes. The Fifth Avenue flagship is being described inside the studio as the most personal project yet, closer to an extension of Ruffini’s own taste than a conventional retail brief. Beyond Moncler, the pair’s portfolio includes the Baccarat Hotel in New York, restaurants include Hakkasan, and private yachts and residences, which has made them one of the more sought-after names in haute hospitality design even outside the fashion world.

Inside, ceilings climb past 25 feet, a scale meant to nod both to Moncler’s alpine roots and to the size of the skyscrapers around it. Two tones of Carrara marble alternate underfoot along the main corridor, checkerboard flooring and glass display cases run through the ground floor, and site-specific artworks are placed throughout rather than treated as an afterthought. The ground level carries Moncler’s core collections and its Genius collaboration line; the second floor is dedicated entirely to Moncler Grenoble, the brand’s mountaineering and ski division. The opening also introduced Moncler to Measure, a made-to-order atelier for special fabrics, and 5th Ave on the Go, an AI-powered outerwear guide and virtual dressing room tied specifically to the store.

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Moncler’s own story starts a long way from Fifth Avenue. The company was founded in 1952 by René Ramillon and André Vincent in Monestier-de-Clermont, a village near Grenoble in the French Alps, originally making quilted sleeping bags and tents for mountaineers. Its link to competitive skiing goes back decades too: Moncler became the official outfitter of the French national downhill team at the 1968 Winter Olympics, held that year in Grenoble itself, an association the brand still leans on in its marketing today. Ruffini took control of the company in 2003 and rebuilt it into the global luxury house it is now, a group that posted €3.13 billion in revenue in 2025 and also owns Stone Island. Along the way, Ruffini expanded Moncler beyond a single product line into a family of sub-labels handled by outside designers, including Thom Browne’s Moncler Gamme Bleu menswear and Giambattista Valli’s Moncler Gamme Rouge womenswear, a structure that eventually evolved into the Genius platform now sold on the Fifth Avenue store’s ground floor. Of the new flagship, Ruffini said simply that it amounts to a brand statement on one of the world’s most iconic streets.

The flagship isn’t the only piece of Moncler currently occupying New York. Through the same week, Grand Central Terminal‘s Vanderbilt Hall has been hosting “New York in Moncler,” a photographic retrospective tracing two decades of the brand’s relationship with the city, with large-scale prints documenting collaborations, campaigns, and cultural moments the label has been part of locally since well before the Fifth Avenue store was ever on the table. Between the exhibition and the new store, the opening reads less like a single launch than a coordinated argument for how central New York has become to Moncler’s identity.

The Genius platform now anchored on the flagship’s ground floor is itself a sprawling structure: rather than a single seasonal collection, it gathers a rotating roster of outside collaborators, past editions have included partnerships with designers and labels spanning streetwear, sportswear, and high fashion, rel capsules on a staggered schedule throughout the year rather than a single runway drop. It’s the retail expression of the same instinct that led Ruffini to bring in Thom Browne and Giambattista Valli years earlier: keep the outerwear at the center, but let outside voices keep reinterpreting it.

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The store’s debut was marked with an opening-night cocktail party on September 10, and Moncler filled the room accordingly. Julia Roberts, Cher, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Serena Williams, Adrien Brody, Spike Lee, Future, Odell Beckham Jr., Maria Sharapova, Colin Kaepernick, Adriana Lima, Shaun White, Helena Christensen, Penn Badgley, Gus Kenworthy, Jordan Clarkson, Coco Rocha, Evan Mock, Edward Enninful, Questlove, and Pete Davidson were among the dozens of names who moved through the space over the course of the evening, with Mark Ronson and Carlita on the decks. New York was in the middle of an 80-degree September evening, but the store’s air conditioning was running at full strength, which meant guests could actually wear the puffers, parkas, and shearlings they’d been handed without regretting it. Cher went fully into the brand’s aesthetic in a black quilt jacket paired with a tiered maxi skirt; Hathaway wore an oversized Moncler shirt with matching denim; three-time Olympic snowboarding gold medalist Shaun White showed up in a houndstooth jacket with a coordinating knit. Passed hors d’oeuvres and champagne kept the room moving between the ground floor and the Grenoble level upstairs.

Roberts arrived in a black tweed puffer worn over a white button-down and bow tie, unbothered by the heat outside. Asked about the outerwear, she made the case for it as a genuine wardrobe upgrade rather than just a winter uniform: on a film set, she said, everybody ends up in a puffer regardless of how it looks, so having a version with some actual shape to it, rather than the boxy sil she associated with the category, felt like a small win.

The bigger news she was carrying that night had nothing to do with outerwear. Roberts is returning to Broadway in Bess Wohl’s “Small Mouth Sounds,” a nearly wordless play about six strangers at a silent spiritual retreat, working out their personal baggage without much dialogue to lean on. Wohl had a big year already: her play “Liberation” won both the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2026 Tony Award for Best Play. Roberts joins Paul Rudd, Sarah Paulson, Martin Freeman, Greta Lee, and Isaac Powell in the “Small Mouth Sounds” cast, in a production directed by Joe Mantello that begins previews February 18, 2027, at the Barrymore Theatre. Mantello, who won the 2026 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for “Death of a Salesman,” is having a busy season of his own: he is also staging Bruce Norris’s “Downstate” this fall at the Booth Theatre, meaning “Small Mouth Sounds” is his second Broadway production inside a matter of months. It will be Roberts and Rudd’s first time sharing a Broadway stage since 2006’s “Three Days of Rain,” also directed by Mantello, twenty-one years earlier. Roberts described looking forward to doing the show now that her children are grown, rather than balancing it around them the way she did the first time. Of reuniting with her old convincer, she kept it simple: “It’s like a dream come true.”

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Among the guests was Lucas Pinheiro Braathen, who had landed in New York only that morning after training in Chile’s Andes. Born in Oslo in 2000, Braathen raced under the Norwegian flag from his World Cup debut in 2018 through 2023, racking up eight World Cup wins and 25 podium finishes across slalom and giant slalom, before switching his skiing allegiance to Brazil, his mother’s home country, in 2024. The move paid off in February 2026, when he won the men’s giant slalom at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, beating Switzerland’s Marco Odermatt by 0.58 seconds to become the first athlete in history, from Brazil or anywhere else in South America, to win a Winter Olympics medal. He carried the Brazilian flag at the Games’ opening ceremony wearing a uniform Moncler had co-designed with Brazilian artist and Instituto-E founder Oskar Metsavaht, a collaboration that gives the brand a direct line to his story beyond a party invitation.

Seven months later, jet-lagged and fresh off a red-eye, he still made it to Fifth Avenue in time for cocktails.

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Later in the evening, a smaller group of guests moved to Gotham Hall, the landmark former Greenwich Savings Bank building on Broadway at 36th Street, for a private dinner hosted by Ruffini. Built in 1922 and designed by the architecture firm York and Sawyer, the building’s soaring 70-foot domed ceiling and stained-glass skylight were joined for the night by scores of real pine trees, transforming the space into an alpine forest and revisiting the same setting Moncler Grenoble used for its Fall/Winter 2013 runway show. Three-Michelin-starred chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park prepared a mountain-inspired menu for the evening. Humm, a Swiss-born chef who has led Eleven Madison Park since 2006 and bought the restaurant alongside former business partner Will Guidara in 2011, has built the restaurant’s reputation on hyperlocal, seasonal cooking, and more recently on an almost entirely plant-based menu, making the pine-scented, mountain-themed dinner a departure from his usual register. Roberts, Cher, Chastain, Brody, and White were among those who stayed on for dinner and dancing, with the night running well past midnight.

By the time the last guests left Gotham Hall, Moncler had spent one night making the case for itself twice over: once as a retailer with the biggest store it has ever built, and once as a brand willing to fly in an Olympic champion and reunite two Broadway veterans just to prove the point. The store itself stays open every day going forward, minus the pine trees and the alpine forest theatrics, but the argument behind it, that a puffer jacket brand can also be a cultural institution, is presumably meant to hold up long after the last DJ set winds down.