Moncler Re/Icons Takes On Four Archive Jackets at Once, and Isetan Shinjuku Gets Them First

Moncler’s 2026 Re/Icons chapter reworks four archive down styles dating from 1954 to 2009, and Isetan Shinjuku sells them a day before the rest of Japan.

Isetan Shinjuku is no stranger to Moncler. The brand has taken over event space in both of the department store’s Shinjuku buildings in recent seasons, from a menswear pop-up in 2024 to a designer collide launch last November. The space opening on October 14 at The Stage, the main building’s first-floor event area, is built around something narrower and older than a new season. For seven days it holds the 2026 edition of Moncler Re/Icons, the program in which Moncler pulls a style out of its archive and rebuilds it, and it sells that collection a full day before any other door in Japan.

 

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This year’s lineup reads like a company timeline. There is the Karakorum, made for the Italian expedition that put the first two climbers on top of K2 in 1954. There are the Verone and the Tibb vest, both products of the 1980s, when Moncler’s quilted nylon moved from the ski slopes into city streets. And there is the Himalaya, a short jacket introduced in 2009 that later developed into the Moncler Maya, one of the most recognizable styles the brand makes. Around those four, Moncler has built something the program has never carried before: a full wardrobe, with tees, trousers, skirts, a windbreaker and mountain-minded accessories.

Signal. What happened: Moncler has rel the 2026 chapter of Re/Icons, its archive reissue program, reworking the Karakorum, Verone, Himalaya and Tibb down styles and, for the first time in the program’s history, surrounding them with a complete ready-to-wear and accessories offer. Exact object: Moncler Re/Icons 2026, led in Japan by the Verone (¥540,100), Karakorum (¥518,100), Himalaya (¥473,000) and the reversible Tibb gilet (¥315,700), with a Re/Icons tee (¥79,200) and a knit cap (¥77,000) among the non-outerwear pieces. When and where: a pre-release pop-up at Isetan Shinjuku’s main building, first floor, The Stage, running October 14 to October 20, 2026 from 10:00 to 20:00 with Isetan-only colors, followed by a general release from October 15 at select Moncler boutiques in Japan, major select shops and Moncler’s official online store. Source: the Japanese rel details by reply source on October 5, read alongside WWD’s report on the collection’s Paris preview the same day. Why it matters: Re/Icons has grown from one revived jacket a year into a four-style collection with its own clothing and accessories, and two of the four styles, the Karakorum and the Verone, are getting the treatment for a second time.

Moncler showed the collection in Paris before it reached any shop floor, previewing it on October 5 and 6 during fashion week in Il Rifugio, a private room the brand has refitted inside its Champs-Élysées boutique, according to WWD’s report on the launch that morning. In Japan the rollout begins in Shinjuku, where the pop-up will also carry colors available only at Isetan.

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At about six in the evening on July 31, 1954, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli reached the summit of K2, the first people to stand on the second-highest mountain on Earth. The 1954 Italian expedition to K2, led by the geologist Ardito Desio, had spent all of June and most of July establishing camps up the Abruzzi Ridge, and the final push would spend the next half century tangled in disputes over who carried the oxygen and who was left to spend a night in the open high on the mountain. The equipment list is far less controversial. Moncler, then a two-year-old company from the alpine village of Monestier-de-Clermont near Grenoble, supplied the expedition’s quilted down jackets, and the style that came out of the job was named for the range, using its Italian spelling.

The timing was tight. Moncler’s first down jackets had been made that same year for its own factory workers, who pulled them on over their overalls, and it was the French mountaineer Lionel Terray who first saw what they could do at altitude. K2 turned that hunch into a reputation. Moncler went on to equip the French team that reached the top of Makalu in 1955 and Terray’s Alaska expeditions in 1964, and by the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble it was dressing the French national downhill team.

The route carries a second layer of history that Moncler has stitched into the new collection. The Abruzzi Ridge takes its name from Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi, whose 1909 expedition to the mountain brought along the photographer Vittorio Sella. One of Sella’s K2 photographs from June 1909 now appears as the label inside the 2026 Re/Icons jackets, tying the oldest style in the set to the Duke’s attempt 45 years before Compagnoni and Lacedelli finished the climb.

The 2026 Karakorum keeps the expedition logic and changes the cloth. The original was built from down-insulated raw cotton; this one uses a glossy 10-denier micro ripstop, shaped into a light, cocooning silhouette. The working details carry over: a double snap-button front, a removable hood, a drawstring coulisse, and internal shoulder straps that let the jacket ride on the back like a pack once it comes off. A large chest pocket carries the reworked Re/Icons logo. In Japan the jacket costs ¥518,100, and WWD lists the men’s colors as black, red and petrol blue, with black and purple for women.

This is the Karakorum’s second turn through the program. In September 2023, Moncler made it the subject of the second Re/Icons chapter, splitting the 1954 jacket into three versions in cotton, ripstop and tech jersey. The cotton version took its colors and lettering from the wooden crates that carried the original expedition’s kit, while the ripstop version looked forward to the Milanese street style of the 1980s, a thread this year’s collection picks up again. The brand’s 2023 Karakorum announcement counted the Maya jacket, reissued for Moncler’s 70th anniversary in 2022, as the opening chapter. Three years on, the Karakorum is one of two styles in the 2026 set making a return appearance.

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By the 1980s, Moncler’s glossy quilting had come down off the mountain. In Milan it became part of the uniform of the paninari, the teenagers who took their name from the Al Panino sandwich bar and gathered in the streets around Piazza San Babila. They built an entire subculture out of expensive, clearly branded clothing, from work boots to the right jeans to a brightly colored down jacket, and spread it across Italy through commercial television and dedicated magazines, one of which reached a monthly circulation of around 100,000, before the movement burned out at the end of the decade. Those years turned Moncler’s down jacket into a city garment, and two of this year’s four styles were born in them.

The Verone returns as a relaxed jacket in matte cotton, with a hood that stows away when it isn’t needed. Tincture carries most of its personality: women’s versions come in pastel pink and lilac alongside black, while men’s run navy, gray and black. At ¥540,100, it is the most expensive of the four styles in Japan.

It has been through Re/Icons before, too. In November 2024, Moncler made the Verone its third Re/Icons chapter and split it into two extremes: the Verone Opus, a floor-length black and white coat whose sleeves detach to leave a long vest, and the Verone AI, a boxier take developed partly with digital tools and inflated with oversized boudin quilting. The 2026 version is restrained by comparison, a matte jacket that relies on color rather than proportion.

The Tibb began in the same decade as a down vest and has since become a fixture of the permanent Moncler range. For 2026 it is recut as an oversized gilet and made fully reversible, with a matte nylon containing recycled material on one face and wool gabardine on the other, so the same piece can read technical or tailored depending on which side faces out. A double zip with round pullers and a metallic logo on the chest finish it off. At ¥315,700, it is the most accessible of the four outerwear styles in Japan.

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The newest style in the set has the shortest history and arguably the longest reach. The Himalaya arrived in 2009, six years after Remo Ruffini bought Moncler and moved it to Milan, and the same year the company opened its first New York boutique as part of a push to reposition itself as a luxury label. The short jacket later evolved into the Moncler Maya, the glossy, boudin-quilted style that became one of the brand’s signatures and opened the Re/Icons series in 2022.

The 2026 Himalaya stays close to its original details, keeping a drawstring hood and a logo patch pocket on the sleeve, while switching the shell to a soft, matte cotton nylon. It sells for ¥473,000 in Japan.

Of the four, it is the only one without an expedition or a youth movement behind it. Its place in the set is genealogical instead: it is the parent of the jacket that started Re/Icons in the first place.

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Every earlier Re/Icons chapter was built around outerwear alone. This one adds a wardrobe for the first time, and the Japanese rel lists a windbreaker, Tee, trousers and skirts alongside a beanie, a balaclava and a silk twill scarf. There is also a pair of sunglasses modeled on vintage mountaineering goggles, made from titanium and leather. Japanese pricing includes the Re/Icons tee at ¥79,200 and a knit cap at ¥77,000.

The pieces share a visual code that points back to the mountains. According to WWD, the outerwear uses a camaïeu treatment, building hue from several tones of a single shade, and the metal logos fixed to the pockets borrow from the souvenir pins once sold at alpine resorts. Together with the Sella photograph inside, the effect is a consistent expedition vocab that runs from the parkas down to the scarves.

The expansion also changes the shape of the program. The first three chapters were capsules built on a single style each: the Maya in 2022, the Karakorum in 2023 and the Verone in 2024. The 2026 chapter dresses someone from head to toe instead, and it returns to two styles the program had already covered within the past three years.

 

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The Isetan pop-up runs from Wednesday, October 14, to Tuesday, October 20, on the first floor of the main building at 3-14-1 Shinjuku, open from 10:00 to 20:00, and stocks Isetan-only colors not offered elsewhere. From Thursday, October 15, the collection reaches select Moncler boutiques in Japan, major select shops and Moncler’s official online store, with Moncler Japan handling inquiries. The main building sits directly above Shinjuku-sanchome Station, with underground exits on the Marunouchi, Fukutoshin and Toei Shinjuku lines, and is roughly five minutes on foot from the east exit of JR Shinjuku Station.

The setting has its own long history. Isetan moved its flagship from Kanda to Shinjuku in 1933, and the men’s building across the street, where Moncler ran its 2024 menswear pop-up on a separate stage, marked its 20th anniversary in 2023. For one week in October, the main building’s ground floor becomes a short course in Moncler’s past: an expedition jacket from 1954, two survivors of 1980s Milan, and the 2009 short jacket that became the Maya.

By the time the Shinjuku pop-up closes on October 20, the collection will have been on sale across the rest of Japan for six days.