STEP CHANGE

It's a gloomy day in April and the designer Jony Ive is in Milan.

The former chief designer at Apple, dressed in a powder blue suit and aviator glasses, is discussing the upcoming release of his latest project with the Italian luxury outerwear brand Moncler. 'A phone and a building are very different things,' says the designer, who would know better than most: he has worked on our generation's most era-defining objects, including the iPod, iPhone and MacBook, as well as Apple's Cupertino campus with Foster + Partners (W*273).

'But if you're a proper designer, you can design many different forms. The important thing is the curiosity to go beyond what you're used to. You need to be aware that you've got so much left to learn.'

When Ive left Apple in 2019 after 27 years to found his creative collective, LoveFrom, alongside industrial designer Marc Newson, it gave him the opportunity to follow a range of new and different paths. Their first projects have included rethinking a turntable for audio brand Linn and the development of electric cars for Ferrari. But this latest collaboration with Moncler, a modular collection of jackets that can be mixed and matched with a single down-filled base layer, has allowed the London-born designer to explore a host of new fields: fashion design, textile development and even a reimagining of the humble button.

But how did Ive, a longtime California transplant, and Moncler’s CEO Remo Ruffini, who lives in Milan and hails from Lake Como, begin a conversation about coats? ‘We have a lot of friends in common,’ says Ruffini. ‘When we first started talking, it wasn’t about business, it was just about life. The collaboration, for us, is an opportunity to learn about another world.’