This year, the Winter Olympics has been as much a stage for luxury brands as it has for the sports themselves. Over the past two weeks, elevated outerwear has ruled the streets and athletes have worn head-to-toe designer outfits throughout the competitions. Fashion often has a place in both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games – take LVMH’s sponsorship of Paris for example – but it has always seemed to me that it is the snowy mountains and glassy ice rinks of the Winter Olympics that provides the backdrop for the chicer of the two sporting events. There is something inherently aspirational about alpine resorts, and that has certainly fed through during the Milano Cortina Games.
To understand the present, we need to go back in time to the late 19th century when the first resorts began to develop as an elite European tourist destination in St. Moritz, Gstaad and Davos. Due to the newly improved rail networks, going to a cold climate became fashionable among Europe’s upper class as aristocrats headed to these Swiss mountain towns for clean air, health tourism, and increasingly, skiing. This became even more popular following the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924, as modern resorts began to spring up across Europe and North America in the 1930s. Following some mass interaction from the middle classes in the post-war period, the luxury consolidation from the 1980s onwards, that separated mass-market package destinations from ultra-premium alpine enclaves, cemented these resorts as wealth ecosystems.
“There is something inherently aspirational about alpine resorts, and that has certainly fed through during the Milano Cortina Games.”
So perhaps it makes sense that luxury brands have consistently been so tied to the Winter Olympics. Traditionally, that tie has been most visible through team outfitting with few examples so consistent in the modern era as Emporio Armani and Ralph Lauren. EA7 Emporio Armani has outfitted the Italian Olympic team since 2012, designing opening ceremony and podium uniforms, and Ralph Lauren has done the same for Team USA, dressing the athletes since 2008. It has become standard practice over the last 15 to 20 years for these uniforms to be unveiled with a marketing campaign, worn on podiums and then made available for consumers to buy. This has generally been how fashion has made itself visible during the Winter Games, but in Milan, it has felt like this has moved forward.
This Olympic Games is the first time the city has hosted the event, but as a global fashion capital, it hardly needs any introduction. A short walk from the official Olympic megastore, Piazza Duomo (which has reportedly seen stronger-than-expected demand over the period of the Games) is the Quadrilatero della Moda, one of the most concentrated luxury retail districts in Europe. There, you’ll find Prada, Armani, Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana, alongside Louis Vuitton, Dior and Hermes. Few Olympic hosts have had their sporting retail centre so close to such a high density of luxury fashion houses.
Further north, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, brands have invested ahead of the Games in ways that extend beyond temporary pop-ups which is how many sponsors would usually make their presence felt. Prada and Loro Piana have both opened new boutiques on Corso Italia, while Dior, Louis Vuitton and Swatch have refurbished or expanded existing spaces. Feeding into the 360 luxury that resorts like Cortina offer, ultra-luxury hotel group, Aman, transformed the family-run Rosa Alpina Hotel & Spa into an exclusive retreat, opening in time for bookings for the Olympic Games. Many high-end brands have used this period to consolidate their position in the region and attract an even wider array of affluent visitors.
The question then becomes why this particular Winter Olympics has attracted such visible retail investment. Part of the answer lies in the sheer number of visitors that have attended this Games – with organisers estimating this number at around two million compared to the one million spectators from the last Winter Olympics before Covid, Pyeongchang, in 2018 – but the other part lies in product. Outerwear remains central to the identity of several Italian houses, with Moncler routinely described in financial reporting as a luxury outerwear company, its revenue anchored in down jackets and winter technical pieces. Just last month, the brand announced Bottega Veneta, CEO Leo Rongone as its new Group CEO from April, indicating an intention to move further towards the ‘quiet luxury’ approach, with a focus on value over volume. Similarly, Loro Piana’s brand equity is tied to textiles and cold-weather dressing, with cashmere and other premium fibres forming the backbone of its offering. Even broader fashion houses such as Prada and Fendi rely on winter-weight ready-to-wear as a prominent seasonal category.
This has been particularly significant of late due to the wider context surrounding the luxury sector. After the post-pandemic growth surge of 2021 and 2022, it experienced a slowdown through 2023 and 2024, driven by weaker demand in China and a pullback from aspirational consumers in the US and Europe. Leather goods – long the most profitable engine of many houses – saw slower volume momentum outside of the highest tier with broader commentary across the sector referring to softer entry-level demand. Despite late 2025 earnings suggesting stabilisation, the Winter Olympics offered an opportunity at a crucial time.
The association between skiing and aspirational living doesn’t just exist inside Winter Olympics, and has been a driving force for some brands to create winter technical outerwear as its own proposition. Moncler’s Grenoble line, which is positioned as a technical, mountain performance arm of the house, has become the brand’s fastest-growing division, illustrating how impactful the snowy backdrops can be. It has staged presentations on the slopes – Gigi Hadid just walked in the line’s Fall/Winter 2026 show in the Rocky Mountains – and is now tapping into the momentum that global interest in the Games has brought to winter sports and apparel.
“Outerwear remains central to the identity of several Italian houses, with Moncler routinely described in financial reporting as a luxury outerwear company.”
This differs from the Summer Olympics – which has a larger viewership but less in-game focus on apparel – as athletes, officials, coaches and spectators alike are all wrapped in coats, knits and technical layers from the opening to the closing ceremony. Of course, there are still many sports where the outfits need to be technical rather than fashion-forward (like the speed skating or skeleton) but outdoor events like skiing or snowboarding, and performance-based sports like figure skating give the clothes an opportunity to shine.
In this sense, Milano Cortina has created the perfect storm for luxury brands, bringing together the aspirational element of winter sports, the kudos of being one of the biggest fashion capitals in the world and the luxury backdrop of a ski resort. With Milan Fashion Week beginning on Tuesday and showcasing some of the world’s best known fashion houses’ Fall/Winter collections, it will be interesting to see how much of the collections will showcase winter sportswear on the catwalks – or whether that show has already taken place on the slopes.
