Moncler

Moncler takes its name from Monestier-de-Clermont, a mountain village near Grenoble in the French Alps, where René Ramillon and André Vincent founded the company in 1952. At first it made sleeping bags, tents and other equipment for mountaineers. The first quilted down jackets, made in 1954, were intended for its own factory workers to wear over their overalls in the cold, but they soon found a more glamorous use.

That same year Moncler equipped the Italian expedition that made the first ascent of K2, the world's second-highest mountain, and in 1955 a French expedition to Makalu in the Himalayas. The alpinist Lionel Terray worked with the company on technical designs. At the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, Moncler was the official supplier to the French alpine ski team, and it took a cockerel into its logo for the occasion. The jackets moved from the slopes to the street: in the 1980s they became a uniform of the Paninari, the fashion-obsessed teenagers of Milan.

The brand drifted in the following decades, passing through several owners, until the Italian entrepreneur Remo Ruffini bought it in 2003 and moved it to Milan. Ruffini, who had grown up in Como in a family of shirt-makers, saw that the down jacket could be a luxury product worn in cities as well as on mountains. He tightened distribution, opened boutiques in the world's grand shopping streets and commissioned designer lines: Gamme Rouge, a womenswear collection designed first by Alessandra Facchinetti and then by Giambattista Valli, and Gamme Bleu, a menswear line designed by Thom Browne from 2009.

Moncler listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in December 2013 in one of the most heavily oversubscribed offerings of its time. In 2018 Ruffini replaced the seasonal runway show with Moncler Genius, a programme of collaborations with designers and brands released throughout the year, which has involved names including Pierpaolo Piccioli, Simone Rocha, Craig Green, Rick Owens and Pharrell Williams. In 2020 Moncler agreed to buy Stone Island, the Italian sportswear label known for its garment-dyeing and compass badge, for about €1.15 billion.

The group now sells far beyond down, with knitwear, footwear and eyewear, but quilted outerwear remains its core. In January 2026 Moncler announced that Bartolomeo Rongone, chief executive of Bottega Veneta, would become group chief executive from April 2026, with Ruffini continuing as executive chairman. Seventy years after those first workers' jackets, the company still defines itself by the mountain where it began.