Palm Angels Recruits Naomi Campbell—and Remixes Tod’s—for Its Latest Moncler Genius Collection

“Post-preppy with a vintage sports attitude.” That’s how Palm Angels’s founder and creative director Francesco Ragazzi defines the house’s latest collaborative Moncler Genius collection, dropping today in a campaign starring Naomi Campbell. Palm Angels and Moncler are amongst the few fashion brands absent from an Art Basel-swollen Miami this week. To make up for that understandable absence—he’s just finished launching a pop-up in LA and an Formula 1 partnership in Abu Dhabi—Ragazzi shot this new collection’s campaign on the city’s golden shoreline.

Ragazzi said: “The idea was to replicate some iconic sports images from the 1990s. Miami was a big part of last season’s collection for me and is iconic to the brand. So to shoot Naomi the icon, in this iconic location, wearing Moncler x Palm Angels and Tod’s—two giants and us—was really the cherry on top for me in expressing this collection.”

Wait, what, Tod’s? Ragazzi said that when researching that vintage sports/prep starting point, he’d unearthed many images of off-duty sports stars including Michael Jordan wearing loafers with white tube socks. It was also a look favored by certain basketball coaches of the period. This seemed a cool clash of contrasting codes that Ragazzi was keen to replicate in the collection. “So of course we thought of Tod’s, because they are best in class.”

Serendipitously, Ragazzi’s wish to riff on Tod’s was matched by Tod’s wish to invite outside collaboration, through its Tod’s-FACTORY program. The result was a fire-flecked reboot of Diego Della Valle’s defining Gommino loafer and a satisfyingly minimalist version of the Winter Gommino duckboot reputedly once beloved of Italian menswear icon Gianni Agnelli. More broadly the entire 8 Moncler Palm Angels collection (as it’s officially called), has a satisfyingly louche, post-streetwear Big Lebowski-ness about it that would blend in perfectly amongst the crowds of party-focused aesthetes who currently find themselves washed up in Miami. We just wish Ragazzi and his crew were amongst them.