I'm With The Brand

Menswear brands are rewarding their coolest customers with the ultimate flex: luxury vacations.

- Jen Murphy

AT FIRST, AN invitation to the fashion show was enough, with front-row seats declaring your elite status. Then the secret after-party was the hot ticket, until a preview with the designer became the mark of a real friend of the label. Now you can't consider yourself a true VIP unless you're dining with Kazakh eagle hunters in the snow-dusted mountains of Western Mongolia, attending a meditation ceremony at a mountaintop temple and watching the sun rise from the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert-all on the same trip. The real flex, now, is an invite to the menswear brand experience.

It's a familiar concept elsewhere in the luxury space. Ferrari hosts its highly coveted, invite-only Cavalcade for the world's most elite Prancing Horse collectors while Panerai arranges extreme customer excursions led by Navy SEALS or acclaimed climber and film-maker Jimmy Chin. Last summer, Van Cleef & Arpels threw an opulent, Grand Tourinspired party at Rome's Villa Medici to showcase its latest high-jewellery collection for its most esteemed buyers.

Into this mix, in October, Stefano Ricci launched the latest of its Explorer project in Mongolia, whose rich culture and forbidding landscapes were muses for creative director Filippo Ricci's newest designs. The Explorer project, which debuted in 2022 and has previously journeyed to Iceland and the Galápagos, is equal parts research trip, preservation initiative, fashion shoot and once-in-a-lifetime travel experience. Former National Geographic Society executive vice president Terry Garcia acts as senior consultant, helping select locations (based on both conservation opportunities and adventuring wow factor) and support the missions.