Moncler’s new film of Cher runs just 41 seconds, and the whole thing turns on one prop: a bright yellow scarf she tugs loose, a wink at the Bob Mackie scarf dress she wore on her own CBS television show in the mid-1970s. The clip, titled “Cher in Moncler,” went up on the brand’s YouTube channel on Sunday, October 18, and had passed 29,000 views by Wednesday.
It belongs to Re/Icons, the Italian outerwear house’s line of reworked archive jackets, and Cher shares the campaign with Grace Jones and JENNIE. Moncler announced the trio on October 15 and says the collection is on sale now at selected Moncler stores and on its own site. It has not put prices in its campaign materials.
Why Cher and a puffer make sense
Heritage outerwear has a built-in problem: it asks shoppers to care about a jacket designed decades ago. Moncler’s answer here is to dress it on women whose careers are the argument for longevity. Cher’s look is two pieces from different eras of the archive, the white Himalaya, a style from around 2009, and the black Verone, an eighties cut that is chunkier and closer to the brand’s mountain roots. Neither is a straight reissue; both have been reworked.
The mountain story is real, not invented for the ad. Moncler was founded in 1952 in Monestier-de-Clermont, a village near Grenoble in the French Alps, made its first down jackets in 1954, and that same year equipped the Italian expedition that first climbed K2. The French climber Lionel Terray was the first to see what the jackets could do, and it is archival photographs of Terray that director and photographer Gabriel Moses used as the model for this campaign’s portraits.
The scarf is the most personal detail. Cher hosted her own weekly CBS show from February 1975 to January 1976, between her two series with Sonny Bono, and the Mackie scarf dress is one of the looks Moncler’s own campaign text calls iconic. Moncler calls the scarf a recall of that dress, and in the film she pulls it in a nod to the show’s famous reveal.
Her own line in the campaign is short and plain: “Pioneering spirit is just going forward and being tough. Pioneers were tough. It’s going and not giving up and being thankful.”
What the 41 seconds get right, and what they skip
As filmmaking, the clip is tight. Moses builds every Re/Icons portrait around one idea, a single star at the center of a crowd who is the only person who stands out, and with Cher that crowd is a troupe of dancers who spring into motion the moment the scarf moves. It is a clean, readable gesture, and the jackets stay in frame the whole time rather than fading into the background, which is what a clothing film should do.
The reference does ask a lot of its audience, though. The scarf reveal lands instantly for anyone who watched television in 1975. For younger viewers, the yellow scarf is simply a bold accent on a black-and-white outfit, and nothing in the 41 seconds explains it. Moncler leaves that context to its written materials and to a second, longer video, “Cher. Pioneering Genres & Generations,” which it posted on Tuesday, October 20, and which runs 2 minutes 40 seconds.
The bigger gap is practical. A campaign built on archive pieces is also a sales pitch for those pieces, and Moncler has not said what the Himalaya or the Verone cost in this edition, or which colors will be sold beyond the ones Cher wears. Shoppers who want the look should check the brand’s site directly before assuming the campaign colorways are on the rail.
Jones’s film, in a deep purple Karakorum, a style that dates to 1954, is the other Re/Icons release to watch, and Moncler has also announced a feature film for the line with Italian director Daniele Vicari.
Further reading
Image: RossVanDerH, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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