2 weeks Ago By Leah Faye Cooper
The air in San Francisco on a cloudy May day is crisp and 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, 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 next-generation turntable with Scottish audio brand Linn to designing a special typeface for King Charles’s Terra Carta 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 towards me. “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 aluminium, 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 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. 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 phones 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, a Brit 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 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 taslanising the yarn, to use fabric-speak) to create what looks and feels like a natural matt fibre 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, say, or the piece you grab on a rainy day – but the muted creamsicle palette and robust functionality lend them to more active pursuits, such as hiking too. “I find it very hard to disconnect colour from material,” Ive says.
“Because we spent so long with Moncler on the raw material, I think I was trying to develop colours 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, from Moncler’s Milan HQ – where they were often joined by Ive and other San Francisco-based creatives – to Bacău in Romania, where Moncler has a sprawling production facility. At one point, LoveFrom engineer Patch Kessler travelled from the Bay Area to Bacău with a 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 boxes for each piece, which are 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 signature. “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 masterclass 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 colours that effortlessly pair with crisp khakis, your favourite faded denim or, as Ruffini suggests, “vintage blue chinos or classic grey trousers”. Who among us – fashion-obsessed or otherwise – doesn’t want that? The collection will be available in stores 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.” Poncho, £1,420, Lovefrom, Moncler.
Leather boots, £1,325, Jimmy Choo. Hoop earring, £53 (sold as a pair), Kendra Scott. Photograph by Thurstan Redding.
Styling by Julia Sarr-Jamois Hair: Franziska Presche. Make-up: Janeen Witherspoon. Nails: Hayley Evans-Smith.
Set design: Samuel Overs. Production: The Arcade Production. Model: Ajok Daing.
