Hiroshi Fujiwara’s O.G. status has attracted collaborators from Nike to Louis Vuitton, but he heaps praise on Moncler: “I think they really listened to me.”
Cloud Atlas: Hiroshi Fujiwara Expands the Map of FRGMT With Moncler
Hiroshi Fujiwara has got it totally sorted. As he explains down a Zoom in anticipation of the latest chapter of his Fragment (or FRGMT as it is increasingly termed) collab with Moncler as part of the Genius jamboree, his IP and creativity lives in the cloud—allowing him to live in serenity. He said: “I changed the way I work more than 10, or maybe even 20 years ago when I decided I would no longer make any Fragment in my office. I just wanted to work with somebody else. So I started with Undercover and Bathing Ape—and since then I haven’t been making the products from Fragment. Really, there’s no brand.”
Except, of course, that there is: Fujiwara’s O.G. status in the refinedly contemporary menswear arena—ok, then, streetwear—has attracted no end of collaborators keen to intersect with his intellect and enjoy a shard of that fragmented Fragment/FRGMT flex. Pokemon, Maserati, Nike, Levi’s, Beats By Dre, Louis Vuitton, Victorinox, Neighborhood, Anti Social Social Club… type FRGMT into Grailed and you’ll see more hot merch than many big ticket houses with enormous infrastructures. Fujiwara, meanwhile, is left free to roam, develop his Drudge Report of cool underground stuff—ringofcolour.com—and generally do what he wants.
What’s been so fitting about Fragment/FRGMT’s ongoing inclusion in the Moncler Genius project (he has been there since day one) is that in some ways Remo Ruffini’s piumino powerhouse has adopted Fujiwara’s ethos. Its multiple-drop mega-roster of rotating collaborators, a list whose membership is intermittently updated and refreshed, allows the house to navigate fashion less like the ponderous battleship its size suggests, and more like a fleet of fast and maneuverable destroyers: It can be anywhere, everywhere, almost all at once. Instead of one Creative or Artistic Director whose ‘vision’ it is hitched to and must indulge through thick and thin, Ruffini’s house is free to date anyone it fancies.
Fujiwara himself appears in this season’s imagery for his FRGMT collaboration with Moncler. Photo: Courtesy of Moncler
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Luke Leitch
