Moncler's Biggest Store in the World Just Opened on Fifth Avenue
The base of the General Motors Building was FAO Schwarz for nearly thirty years, from 1986 until the toy store closed in July 2015, and the plaza out front still belongs to Apple's glass cube. As of September 10, the old toy store is a Moncler, and not a small one. At 23,680 square feet across two floors, it is the largest store the company has ever built anywhere in the world.
It is worth walking into whether or not you intend to buy a down jacket. The design is by Gilles & Boissier, the Paris studio of Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier, who have shaped Moncler's stores for more than twenty years and who treated this one as a building rather than a shop fit-out.
What you walk into
The facade is inky granite with strips of light set into it, a deliberate nod to Times Square sixteen blocks south. Behind it the ground floor clears twenty-five feet and runs the full depth of the block, which Gilles has likened to the held breath of walking into a darkened theatre before anything happens.
What happens is a long aisle of checkerboard stone, alternating polished and raw, running between columns clad in dark speckled granite. Overhead, bars of hard white light repeat the vertical piers of white Georgia marble that Edward Durell Stone & Associates, working with Emery Roth & Sons, gave the General Motors Building when it was completed in 1968. It is the rare interior that argues with the tower it sits in and wins.
The centre of gravity is on the Madison Avenue side, where the Swiss-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone has stacked three enormous stones into a totem that rises through the space and is visible from both levels. The bottom one is raw and dark, the middle is chalk white, the top is a blue you will recognise from Rondinone's mountains elsewhere. It is a summit at eye level, and it sets up everything the store is doing with the idea of a mountain.
The rest of the art is quieter. There are works by Paul Bik, Jean-Guillaume Mathiaut and Arno Declercq worked into the furniture and the wall surfaces, including the sculptural screens of charred and carved wood, and full-height evergreen trees standing indoors as if the floor plan had been cut out of a forest.
The ground floor
This level holds the main Moncler Collection for men, women and children, the Moncler Genius designer collaborations, accessories and footwear. Rather than a single open sales floor, Gilles broke it into bays that reveal themselves one at a time as you move deeper in, an effect he compares to crossing from one Manhattan neighbourhood into the next.
Those bays do not match each other, on purpose. Menswear is lined in deeply carved antique oak boiserie, lit from within. Womenswear switches to white gypsum panelling and plaster mouldings. Free-standing cabins shaped like little houses, clad entirely in mirror, sit out on the floor, and what is staged inside them changes with the season, so the room you saw in October is not the room you will see in January.
The material palette keeps two stories running at once: textured stone, timber and icy glass for the Alps, and plasterwork and boiserie for the French side of a brand Remo Ruffini bought and moved to Milan in 2003, but which started in 1952 in Monestier-de-Clermont, a ski town outside Grenoble, and took its name from it.
What you can only get here
The store opened with a rotating slate of Fifth Avenue exclusives and a monthly calendar of things to turn up for, which is the part most worth checking before you go. Two of them are in the building. The third is worth doing before you arrive.
Moncler to Measure is the company's first made-to-order atelier. There are four silhouettes to start from, two for women and two for men, and the cloth runs to cashmere flannel, silk, suede, shearling and fil coupé. Reckon on six to eight months from the first appointment to the finished coat.
LoveFrom, Moncler is the collaboration with Jony Ive's design collective, and there is an assortment of it made only for this store, including New York patches and postcards.
The Outerwear Guide is not in the store at all. It is an AI tool on moncler.com, launched in the US alongside the flagship inside a hub called 5th Ave on the Go. It asks up to three questions and comes back with up to twelve jackets side by side, which makes it ten minutes well spent before you go.
Upstairs
The second floor is given over entirely to Moncler Grenoble, the mountain line, and the mood changes at the top of the stairs. The lighting drops to a single luminous panel running down the middle of a stone gallery, the palette goes colder, and the clothes are arranged as equipment rather than fashion.
The range covers the whole season, from technical skiwear and goggles through soft après-ski pieces to the light layering systems for hiking and trekking that make the floor useful in July. Hardware is here too: Stöckli skis, POC helmets, and the WHITESPACE snowboards developed with Shaun White.
The skis get the best display in the building, stood upright in tall backlit niches cut into dark granite, which is the sort of thing that makes non-skiers stop. Gilles has described the intention for this level as keeping to Moncler's discreet register while pushing the sensation as high as it would go, so that you are not only in the shop but part of it.
Not all of it is cold. One upstairs room drops the granite entirely for parquet, plaster cornices and a ceiling painted as a field of stars, and there is a private appointment suite up here.
How to visit
Where: 767 Fifth Avenue, at the base of the General Motors Building between 58th and 59th Streets. The Fifth Avenue doors are the main entrance. The store runs the full depth of the block toward Madison Avenue, and the Rondinone stands at that end.
Hours: check moncler.com before you go. The store is new enough that opening hours are still settling.
Getting there: the N, R and W stop at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, directly outside. The F is a block west and a block south at 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, and the 4, 5 and 6 are three avenues east at 59th Street and Lexington.
What is around it: Grand Army Plaza is directly across Fifth Avenue, the Plaza Hotel is diagonally opposite, Central Park's southeast corner is a block north, and Bergdorf Goodman is across 58th Street. It is an easy stop to fold into a Central Park afternoon rather than a trip of its own.
Timing: this is one of the busiest blocks in the city on a weekend afternoon. A weekday morning is the version of the store where you can actually stand in front of the Rondinone alone.
