Marni (Q1889)
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Italian luxury fashion label
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Marni |
Italian luxury fashion label |
Statements
2016
creative director
Francesco Risso is now in his ninth year at Marni, and it seems he’s only improving with time. Today’s collection was one of his finest yet: Though more restrained by his usual pyrotechnical standards, it still captured all the magic and enchantment Risso consistently conjures from his Mad Hatter ingenuity.The show was held at Marni’s headquarters, a vast and spare space suffused with dark red light. Crowds in hysterics screaming for celebrities were nowhere in sight. The seating arrangement, a sparse and labyrinthine layout of chairs seemingly scattered at random, surrounded three black grand pianos. On each seat lay a poem, printed on origami paper, by an unknown author. It was about a white rabbit darting through the quietude of a dark moonlit forest. But swoop! In a flash, the bunny vanishes. “Beauty is a white rabbit,” said Risso backstage. “You chase it, though you fall short in capturing it.” Perhaps this time he succeeded.Staying true to his whimsical radicalism, Risso crafted the entire collection solely from cotton, experimenting with its textures and weaves in various forms. Cotton, a perennial, honest material, symbolizes resilience and embodies the “purity of beauty” that Risso said he has been pursuing. “The cotton thread represents the thread that mends relationships and wounds, guiding us back to the right path after we’ve strayed and leading us toward what I call the essential beauty routine,” he explained. Fittingly, this was also the title of the show.The collection’s approach was “rather liturgical,” as Risso put it: He wanted to evoke the ritualistic nature of fashion shows from a bygone era, when the progression flowed seamlessly from daywear throughles tenues d’après midi, culminating in grand evening gowns. Here, Risso began with slender silhouettes in soft hues, punctuated by dashes of black and white: fitted blazers over leggings, cropped chemises worn backward like capelets, and small hourglass dresses shaped by vertical pleats. Gradually, the designs transitioned into more voluminous forms, featuring broad-shoulder jackets and tuxedos paired with tight siren skirts with stiff ruched hems. They introduced a hint of ’50s couture further accentuated by wondrous hats “à la Audrey Hepburn.”Nostalgia doesn’t feature in Risso’s vocabulary, though; the stunning parade of evening gowns that closed the show was a masterclass in fresh, poised fabulousness.
Bustier dresses with pannier skirts were printed with bold, blown-up roses or exquisitely fluttered with shredded cotton feathers embroidered with shimmering crystals. “They’re glimpses of impossible beauty,” said Risso. “Beauty is pervasive. It makes everyone feel more beautiful.”
17 September 2024
Expect the unexpected from Marni’s Francesco Risso—a predictable designer he is not. For starters, today’s venue was a cavernous space located in one of the tunnels sneaking under Milan’s stazione Centrale, entirely plastered in white paper, with cubic seats and lightning poles (at times disquietingly oscillating) included. Not great for claustrophobics, but utterly atmospheric. White paper is one of Risso’s obsession—when he brought his fall 23 on tour in Tokyo last year, he covered the indoor arena and podium of the Yoyogi National Gymnasium with an inordinate amount of immaculate sheets of Japanese paper.To prep for this collection, he and his team gave the same white-paper treatment to their studio at Marni headquarters, lining every surface as to make them disappear, in a radical attempt to keep out visual distractions, banning images, moodboards, or any excess of conceptual stimuli. “It all started with Virginia Woolf,” said Risso, rather cryptically. In one of her letters he happened to read, she invited friends to a weekend in the countryside, asking them to “bring no clothes.” It certainly wasn’t about spending happy times in birthday suits, rather an exhortation to come as they were, to be themselves, stripping back the symbolic implications of restrictive clothing. “That reading was a revelation,” said Risso, as it prompted him and his team to act on the deconstruction of the creative process. “We wanted to put Virginia Wolf’s invitation into practice—letting go of the needs we usually believe we need.”Working without visual references brought to the surface an instinctual, almost primal approach to design; shapes and volumes were stripped of everything “para-essential,” and returned to a state of purity, taking away all superfluous information. Pockets, buttons, darts, and any detail that wasn’t necessary to glorify “the soul of the shape” were hidden or “reduced to shadows.” In a radical, extreme attempt to dematerialize the shape itself, surfaces of geometric capes, bell-shaped dresses and ovoid coats were almost concealed under thick glazed layers of curly gestural paint. The hirsute textures of circular furry blousons were gelled and then hand painted to achieve a spiky, feathery finish; the surface of an egg-shaped parka in black flocked velvet was covered in printed scribbles as if to erase it with frantic, almost hysterical urge. Concise and artistic, they were bravura pieces of exceptional presence.
23 February 2024
Marni’s artsy quirk is rooted in the practice of its design studio—a sort of workshop where everything is done by hand, from the creation of garments, which are called “objects” and whose volumes are intended as couture-ish soft sculptures, to the one-of-a-kind graphics so inherent to their eclectic visuals. “It’s a continuous, obsessive manual activation,” said Francesco Risso at a showroom appointment. “Every decoration or exploration of shapes is done by our team. We’ve got painters that can go from Renaissance reproductions to the craziest interpretations of modernist references. Our m.o. goes way beyond just making clothes.”Risso has taken Marni on tour across the globe, in a series of collections that have alternated between the creative ebullience of shows and the slightly calmer pace of seasonal presentations. While the spring 2024 show held in Paris in September brought the “exuberance of the hand” to a performative peak, resort, which is dropping in stores now under the name Volume One, is a sort of balancing act between pragmatic “objects” that Marni-fy the everyday and more expressivecapriccios. “Disciplined chaos” is how Risso often refers to the approach.The collection encompasses a variety of volumes, shapes, and decorations—from concise daywear staples to painterly specimens, where the Marni triad of stripes, florals, and checks is juxtaposed and mismatched in imaginative mashups, tweaking the lineup’s workwear/sporty undercurrent. For both genders, suits, shells, trench coats, peacoats, and anoraks sit alongside expansive cocoon and balloon shapes and slimmer tailored or A-line silhouettes.Risso said that Marni has always been about the idea of uniforms, playing around a certain utilitarian feel subverted by spirited nonconformity. To emphasize this notion, the collection was tied together by the use of a variety of cotton textures, from crisp poplin to robust canvas. “We had a true cotton obsession,“ he joked. Together with wit and whimsy, obsession seems to be a vital component to making the Marni machine run.
16 November 2023
After New York and Tokyo, Francesco Risso brought his spring collection to Paris “to continue amplifying connections among our global community,” he said at a preview. “I’m in a flâneur state of mind.” It sounded like he was giving the word “peripatetic” an ineffable coating of je ne sais quoi. Showing in the Ville Lumière also gave him permission to savor bites of some rather personal Proustian madeleines.The day before the show, previews were held at the OTB headquarters, in whose attic Risso and his crew had been “squatting” to prep for the show, transforming the space into a Marni-fied kids’ playground—walls and floors hand-painted with skies, shooting stars, and comets, with vivid fleurs en découpage scattered everywhere. Risso recounted that the idea of showing in Paris came “from a scent and a crossover of coincidences.” The first time he visited the city he was 14, and at a party he met by chance “a beautiful creature, who suddenly disappeared, leaving behind only a faint whiff of perfume,” he explained. That subtle French flutter haunted him for years, making him travel to Paris only in the hope of smelling it somewhere again. He never found it, but the magic of Paris was forever imprinted in his memory and olfactory functions. That was the first madeleine.The second was less elusive and more fortuitous. As a teenager, Risso used to visit his friend Serena in Paris at her parents’ house in the chic 7th arrondissement; their neighbor was the late Karl Lagerfeld, whom they spied on obsessively, waiting for him to appear all-black clad in Rue de l'Université “as if he were Michael Jackson.” Recently, scouting for this show’s location, Risso was presented with the possibility of using Lagerfeld’s little Versailles. Et voilà—dots were connected.The private apartments and the formal gardens of the fabulous hôtel particulier where Lagerfeld spent many years were colonized by Marni and its audience, who sat (rather wobbly) on tubular white inflatables (a Risso fixation) snaking through the opulent gilded salons. A series of small orchestras, dressed in surgical white vinyl lab coats, performed music by Dev Hynes, a frequent Risso collaborator. Almost 45 minutes past showtime, Usher and Erykah Badu made their majestic entrance—him wearing a red-flame polka-dotted puffy ensemble, her sporting a trailing cape and a hat so monumental, you only felt grateful not to be seated behind her.
27 September 2023
Francesco Risso is seeking clarity and concision, “both privately and professionally,” as he said at a studio appointment. “Absorbing the beauty of chaos” while distilling it into purified Marni archetypes (he calls them “heroes”) is part of the creative quest he’s been on for quite some time. It’s a journey that peaked at the fall show held in Tokyo in February; this prefall collection was a precursor, laying the groundwork for the maximalist minimalism that seems to be Risso’s blueprint at Marni.The core of the lineup consists of simple wardrobe staples often rendered in black, “which is a sort of oxymoron for Marni.” No-nonsense, no-gender knits—including long fluffy turtlenecks worn as minidresses, tube tops, miniskirts, fuzzy mohair jumpers, and leggings—were offered in an energized palette of solid bright colors or multicolored stripes. Silhouettes ranged from the slender and graphic (’50s modernist slim tailoring in deconstructed jacquard-knit jersey, grungy fluid-silk pajamas) to inflated and ballooning (poufy taffeta skirts, abstract floral-print dresses with ample ankle-grazing gathered skirts, cocoon parkas, and shearling coats). The look was artsy in an intriguing, playful Marni way, while the optics were smoothed away from an overpowering impact.Risso is rather adamant about his idea of luxury. For him, the concept is linked to the intrinsic value of each Marni object, to the know-how embedded in the way they’re made, to the humanity infused in each creation. In the Tokyo collection, the polka dots and stripes that at first glance looked printed were actually made entirely by hand with a marker. “They’re not objects that scream, ‘Hello! I’m here! I’m super expensive, and you want me!’ Quite the opposite”, he said. “We don’t like the banal or the ostentatious. What we’re pursuing is the elevated feel of the hand. I’d like our objects to be appreciated as containers of experience and knowledge, soaked in creativity and passion.” There’s obviously nothing quiet or anonymously luxurious about Marni’s ethos. “What we’re after,” Risso summarized, “is rather a sort of quiet screaming.”
1 June 2023
A drastic change of hairstyle often means a page must be turned and a reset is in order. Francesco Risso chopped off his bleached curls right before today’s Marni show in Tokyo. “I think it was time to start a new chapter,” he said at a preview, sporting a neat new buzz cut and a groomed beard. He looked serene, and rather cool, in an ascetic-chic all-white outfit, wearing a slender goatskin coat over pajamas cut from sheets of pristine, rustling wrapping paper.Thick yellow and red paper covered the couch and armchair where we sat for the interview, and massive quantities of stark-white paper were laid out on the wooden floor and podium of the indoor arena in the Yoyogi National Gymnasium where the Marni show was held. Built by the architect Kenzo Tange for the 1964 Summer Olympics, it’s a structure, as Risso pointed out, “both rigorous and intimate—it looks to the future while keeping a feel of enveloping protection, like if you were in a womb.” This way of balancing discipline and humanity, cutting-edge design and domesticity, connects with the soul-searching Risso has been doing on the meaning of making clothes.Showing in Tokyo now just felt right. “Here in Japan I’ve found a profound sense of patience, of stillness, of respect, something that in the West I believe we’re losing.” He continued: “We’re surrounded by futility. After three years of pandemic, where we all have been vocal about the changes we wanted in the system, to slow down, etc., we’re back to square one. We are again devoured by the brutality of the algorithm.”Going back to the love he feels for his metier keeps him grounded. At the show, on each of the paper-covered seats, he left a handwritten letter (“it took me a month to write it,” he said) whose opening line asked: “Why do I make clothes?” For the Marni creative director, clothes are living creatures, they touch, breath, move; it’s a love dance, a sentimental relationship: “Because they’re our companions, and there’s more to them than just air kisses. I don’t know if I make clothes that people need, or if I make clothes that need people, or if I make clothes for the people that I urgently need to need the clothes that need them…What I do know is that today we need less and less clothes that are needless.”
1 February 2023
In keeping with his increasingly radical practice, with its implicit critique of today’s fashion system, Francesco Risso is taking the concept of collaboration to the next level at Marni. He’s doing so not just by testing the perimeter between fashion and art, but also by questioning the boundaries of authorship.Risk-taking is obviously included in such a journey, but Risso seems to enjoy meeting the challenges head-on. And what’s more fearless than luring into Marni’s inner sanctum not a fellow designer, as other brands are doing, but a true artist—and a painter, no less? This see-now, buy-now resort collection marked the inception of this new direction, with Flaminia Veronesi taking up a long term role at the label. (The Italian artist was also involved in the spring show presented in New York in September.)At an appointment at Marni’s headquarters, Risso introduced Veronesi, a longtime friend whose imaginative allegorical drawings have true affinity with the sensibility he has introduced at Marni. “We are connected by a similar way of dealing creatively with reality through play,” she explained, “a play which happens through tactility, is activated by the touch of the hand, and which is expressive of a feminine, no-gender ingenuity bringing us back to our instinctual, creatural side.” Risso chimed in: “In the path towards the definition of Marni, the backbone for me has always been the concept of play, so it seemed natural that Flaminia’s vision opened doors onto landscapes where we share the same delight in exploring the simple, childlike playfulness I believe is crucial to shaping Marni’s aesthetic.”Risso and Veronesi’s interaction feels as smooth as one of her swirling, fluid drawings of aquatic creatures, which have been transposed for resort onto bias-cut dresses, oversized cargos, low-slung trousers, and jumpers. But beyond the obvious visual appeal of their ‘creatures,’ what Risso wanted to highlight is how the new integrated practice serves to add integrity to the items they’re creating. “I did not invite Flaminia to just make a couple of drawings to print on a series of disposable hoodies,” he explained. “There’s too much fake creativity around, plastered surreptitiously onto zillions of products. What I want to achieve is an authentic, generative artistic partnership which makes us both grow, and which adds intrinsic value even to the less visually conspicuous items of a collection.
All the hyper-branded, status-driven logoed products out there reveal such poverty of thought, it’s an appalling way of depleting our work as creatives of any meaning.” He went on: “I really think that there’s also a desire for quality—quality and integrity in the production of both ideas and of objects. Objects that nurture, where one can feel the touch of the hand, the dedication and discipline that has been put into their creation.”The collaboration with Veronesi has triggered a counterintuitive stripping-down approach to the hybridized flamboyance of previous Marni collections. For resort, silhouettes had a clarity and purity that only enhanced by contrast the poetic intensity of the prints based on Veronesi’s drawings. Even the clashing-striped knitwear looks had a more streamlined energy to them. For now, Risso is keen on keeping shapes, volumes, and decorations from overwhelming the personality of the wearer. Maximizing self-expressive potential through reworked classics is what he’s after. That said, “I’m not a minimalist in the least,” he concluded. “Quite the contrary.” Despite any good intention, the leopard cannot shed its spots so easily.
21 November 2022
“‘Why am I here?’ All the time I’ve been thinking, is someone going to ask me that?!” Marni’s Francesco Risso—a picture of rude health, tanned with his curly hair both gray and platinum, sporting a BrownMill tee emblazoned with the legendLeading Our People to the Promised Land—said, laughing. It was a Manhattan Friday afternoon, and Risso was giving a preview of the collection that would be shown the next evening, with Marni making its NYC debut on a Brooklyn street nestled under a bridge, the trains audibly rumbling overhead. Everyone from Paloma Elsesser to Tyler Mitchell to Lara Stone would appear in it; a cast of models and friends (though with Risso they’re one and the same), walking to a live soundtrack written by Dev Hynes and performed by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn. The show’s Dumbo location would be known to just about anyone who has ever visited New York and is in need of a photo op for the gram, but the Saturday night of that Marni show it would seem renewed, otherworldly, a veritable fashion happening—something Risso has proved himself rather adept at recently.The afternoon of the preview, Risso stood amid racks of clothes in gorgeous, hallucinogenic, searingly bright colors; distressed mohair; papery leathers; mystical cobwebs of beads; and psychedelic panne velvets, the pieces punctuated every now and then by enormous and the chicest-ever squashy courier bags, their no-nonsense utilitarian shape turned off-kilter by their puffy aeration. But back to that burning (man) question: Why decamp from Milan? “I’ve been wanting to explore for a while,” Risso said. “It means understanding things from a different perspective, connecting with different people. It feels refreshing. There’s a lot of learning as well, and I’m up for that every fucking second. Ever since America opened its borders last December I’ve been here, I don’t know, maybe 20 times. Still,” he went on, “it’s not really news, because everyone is out in some other realm in some way or other.”He’s not wrong. We’d barely stopped double masking before the fashion circus had started its world tour again, alighting here, there, and everywhere. Some can seem like flash-the-mega-cash extravaganzas, strategic corporate exercises in brand visibility.
Yet Risso’s arrival stateside feels like it comes from a place of curiosity, of challenge, of risk: How can we get out of the moribund, straight-back-to-business way of doing things? The answer: Maybe destabilize and decentralize it all, stop putting the designer on a pedestal, start to rethink all the relationships between brand, creator, audience, and those actually buying the stuff. Come together, join forces. I know, I know, it can all sound like a particularly deadly case of kumbaya. But here’s the thing: Aren’t we all feeling the need to connect in ways that feel more real and meaningful? The community fostering of Risso’s feels is attuned to where we are right now. “It’s not the ’90s anymore,” he said, “when brands spoke in very defined ways. Now you have to talk universally.”
11 September 2022
Moodboards boasting painstakingly edited abstruse images seem like a thing of the past. In Francesco Risso’s case, they’re definitely not in the picture at Marni. His practice has become increasingly activated by the lives and choices of his ‘interpreters,’ as he calls them—a telling use of words to describe the osmotic connection he’s established with his community of kindred spirits.Pre-fall was intended as a prelude to Marni’s fall 2022 catwalk show, a term that’s becoming rather inadequate to define Risso’s approach, which now includes more elaborate performances and happenings involving diverse artistic contributions. His interpreters were involved in the collection’s creation. Risso wanted to explore the idea of ‘classic,’ a rather difficult concept to pinpoint, and asked his collaborators and friends to dive into their wardrobes and provide pieces that epitomize their meaning of the word.“No one came up with something bizarre, costume-y, or weirdly fashionable,” he said. “They all presented pure, simple, nostalgic pieces—a peacoat, a tailored jacket, objects often inconspicuous from a fashion standpoint but rich in memories and emotions. It was interesting to see how everyone had a sort of emotional storage for their treasured repertoire, composed of objects that give you identity, strength, and courage—most of the time they’re the archetypal ones.” A flair for subversive romanticism permeates Risso’s unorthodox aesthetic. “I’m obsessed by how clothes can so intimately and powerfully enshrine the time in which they’ve lived; in Marni’s shows I’ve often asked my interpreters to wear their own clothes mixed with my creations.”Classic wardrobe staples were “augmented and extended through a Marnification process,” as Risso explained. Energized by quirky colorways, blown-up in off-kilter volumes, and submitted to playful deconstruction and daring inside-out treatments, the results weren’t cliché in the least. Yet the collection retained a sense of charming, askew balance. Covetable standouts included a cocoon robe-coat in reversible tweed with floral-printed lining matching the dress worn underneath (an à la Marni twist on bourgeois proper elegance); vivid faux-fur stoles worn wrapped around slim citycoats and oversized peacoats; and rainbow-striped knitted hoodies and chunky jumpers in fluffy mohair to layer over matching slouchy pants (pajama-dressing brought to bold extremes).“Clothes are a sort of explorers’ armor,” concluded Risso.
“Not impenetrable shields, but rather soft carapaces made out of memories and sentiments—they keep us ready for our fights.”
6 June 2022
Oh, for the love of God, no. Not. Another. Black. Box. Despite some stellar shows these past few days in Milan, the venues have often been more miss than hit; there’s nothing like stumbling into a space where you can barely see three feet in front of you. (OK, I have the world’s worst eyesight, but still.) Compound that with some epically long drive to said black box and, well, you get the picture. Francesco Risso’s Marni show for his fall 2022 collection, an ode to the handmade, the mended, the crafted and the tailored, and very good it was too, did indeed involve a dark space, a lengthy ride, and a bit of a challenge to the peepers.Yet in that poetically anarchic way of Risso’s, he turned the whole thing on its head: A barely lit cavernous space, fit for a rave, the entrance shrouded in foliage, enormous concrete breeze blocks where a runway would usually be, and yet more foliage framing this picture of dystopian revelry. Bit of a sharp intake of breath when someone lit up a ciggie—all those dried leaves, yikes!—but no harm done, thank goodness. Anyway, spoiler alert: that setting was only part of the story.Last season’s show, set to a soundtrack by the genius Dev Hynes and art directed by the equally genius Babak Radboy (both Dev and Babak were involved in today’s proceedings too) was a joyful, cathartic gathering, bringing people together as physical shows returned. Then Risso offered a moving and sincere treatise on events in the fashion world, and the real world (not always the same thing) and captured the moment beautifully. This time round, Risso was questioning what’s next, according to the emailed show notes. “The future came and went, leaving us alone, but together in the dark, but lighter than before,” Risso wrote.
“Where do we go after? Where are we bound, beyond what binds us to each other?”It’s become a thing for fashion to speak of community, but with Risso’s casting, it was a disparate and unconnected band of individuals who made their way via flashlight around the venue; nothing slickly and self-consciously unified about this group, wearing looks from fall 2022 that suggested communality: anyone could be wearing anything—and who cares? They might be in dresses in washed mottled pastels which had then been patched or cut into strands or glistened with beads; long shearling coats wrapped on the bias across the body, as much naive gesture as practical fastening; irregularly checked (and snappily cut) pantsuits; full skirted deb dresses, overdyed, as if tried at home and then gone a bit wrong, but in a good way; and raggedy sweater sleeves trailing to the floor from under the cuffs of trad Crombie coats. Almost everyone was bearing some kind of crown of twine and twigs, or elaborate head wraps, which were actually jackets folded and twisted, as if in preparation for some magical, arcane ceremony. Spiky shoes glittered on their feet.
27 February 2022
After the epic and touching Marni show in September, reviewing resort feels like watching a thriller on Netflix in rewind mode, a rather twisted perspective, really. But a degree of serpentine thinking is expected from Francesco Risso. That the spring catwalk was conceived like a spiral is telling of the ways in which his work is becoming increasingly supple, like an open-source artistic practice. A similar elasticity is required to crack his layered message.Circularity in the transmission of knowledge and ideas is pivotal for Risso; he believes that human connection is a powerful agent for the shared creativity he’s putting at the core of his message. Since the start of Marnifesto a few seasons ago, interacting with like-minded friends—artists, musicians, performers, and other members of his fashion crew—has been essential to his practice and to shaping the corollary of performative activations he’s increasingly drawn to.Resort served as a sort of incubator/rehearsal for the joyous sense of community that peaked in the emotional spring celebration. The imagery was shot in Milan, with the crew driving a vanful of clothes through the city to photograph the many friends of Marni in their neighborhoods or in their homes. Each of them chose to wear their favorite look. “They’ve been very active in the conversation to shape what Marni is becoming today,” said Risso on a Zoom call from his studio. “I’m obsessed with expanding the dialogue to a constructive, joyful level, to include and engage diverse contributions as much as I can. I crave human connection; I’m striving for it—my work is all about humanity. I’m not interested in fashion bubbles of any sort. I don’t want to be the only storyteller in the narration.”During his tenure at Marni, Risso has established a series of identifiers, “our treasures,” he calls them. They were reiterated here, as he believes it’s important for us to emphasize them, “because it just takes a minute to lose your identity in the maze of today’s futility.” Hand-painted florals; check, tartan, and windowpane patterns; supple tailoring and imaginative sportswear; striped cardis in fuzzy mohair—it was all combined à la Marni, in a highly individual, stylish version of freestyle grunge.Risso puts his work in perspective: “Good design helps people live better,” he said. “I want to make clothes that bring joy and happiness to people. Fashion is part of a wider cultural context where all art forms are amalgamated.
It can be such a powerful vector of energy. My message is to pass the baton from one to the other. Energy can be regenerated and reproduced only if it circulates.” So true. Fashion can contribute to bringing about change only if it’s able to connect.
8 December 2021
In the days leading up to the Marni show, Francesco Risso and his team conducted fittings for 400 people. The models got the new spring collection, while the show’s performers and guests wore upcycled cotton separates hand-painted with colorful stripes. My pink and white camp shirt was numbered 219 of 800, and my pants 218 of 800; both were sewn with a large patch that read Marniphernalia: Miscellaneous Handpainted Treasures. Risso grew discouraged by the digital focus of the job during the lockdowns. His idea, he explained, “was about going back to the practice of what we do, which is making clothes for people, one to one.” He said the process was just as significant to him as the final result.But, oh, what a final result. All season, we’ve been waiting for a designer who was up for the hard but necessary work of addressing the last year-and-a-half of pandemic and racial justice reckoning. Who acknowledged the changes the world has gone through in our mutual isolation, and, in turn, changed the way they do things. Tonight that designer was Risso, and what he came up with was less a runway show than it was a fashion happening.His collaborators were many: Dev Hynes was responsible for the music, the poet Mykki Blanco did a spoken word performance, and the singer Zsela was joined by a heavenly sounding choir. On the program notes, Babak Radboy, who’s known for his work with Telfar Clemens, shared creative direction. The cast had the racial diversity, body inclusivity, and gender fluidity that’s become the norm in Telfar’s New York. “Finally, Milan woke up,” a colleague said on the way out the door.Dressing the audience was central to the concept. By aligning us with the models, it helped make the crucial point Risso has picked up on that others here haven’t: that authenticity matters more than aspiration in 2021. And if it doesn’t, then it definitely resonates more. The spring collection’s two main motifs were stripes and daisies. “Stripes are strongly associated with direction, where daisies are new beginnings and resilience; they’re banal concepts,” he said. But in a palette of blues and yellows, they weren’t boring.Navigating a spiral seating arrangement before reversing the circle on a central stage, the models wore slinky bias dresses in graphic rugby stripes, color-blocked blazers, Breton stripe ponchos, easy woven caftans, and shaggy cardigans and shawls, one of which was modeled by Risso himself: everyday clothes with a feeling of the hand.
And then came the daisies, which felt more eccentric: naively embroidered on signature Marni shapes, intarsia’d on trompe l’oeil knits, and on the striking final look, hand-painted on a floor-length T-shirt dress.“I kept thinking about sports, not because the collection has references to sports in its details, but because of how teams work—that union,” said Risso. “At the end of the day, who is our trainer? It’s our heartbeat, it synchronizes everyone.” As the models circled the crowd at the finale and Szela sang Dev Hynes’s moving original composition “Guide You Home,” the audience erupted in applause. It went on for some time. Risso got the reunion he was waiting for. And so did we.
26 September 2021
Even if lockdowns are slowly lifting and we’re tentatively re-emerging into a blurred state of freedom, we’re not in Zoom-free territory yet. And even though some of the videos that designers were forced to make in place of live events over the last year have been virtual gems, the physical representation of fashion is still the non-negotiable light at the end of the tunnel. “It has been such a strong learning curve,” reflected a pensive Francesco Risso on a video call from his studio in Milan. “But now I need to go live, I needil contatto. We’ve become creatively proficient in the immaterial translations of experiences. Now we must integrate abstraction and materiality.”Risso tried his hand at balancing ether and flesh earlier this year, when he staged a communal Marni-fest in his flat, gathering a posse of friends for a breakfast/luncheon/dinner tour-de-force broadcast live on video. The bonkers banqueting binge (in which, for starters, a sneaker was cooked into minestrone-style soup for the guests to enjoy) was born out of nostalgia for the sensorial and sentimental representation of pre-lockdown creativity. “The need of being digital-friendly, I understand that,” he mused. “But somehow I rebelled against it. As designers our approach is eminently tactile and sensitive, especially here at Marni.”For pre-fall, which reads as a prequel to the kooky fall 2021 dinatoire, he started a conversation with his design team about connecting with an even wilder, more emotional side, bringing poetry and romanticism into the picture. Black isn’t a color usually associated with Marni’s chromatic pyrotechnics, yet it featured prominently in this collection, providing a sort of dark space of exploration from where newness could flourish. Black is also the most romantic of colors, evocative of dramatic sturm und drang, but also soothing, a blanket of tranquility and composure laid over the depths of inner turmoil: “I indulged the idea of concealing and not being seen or not showing yourself to others, which can be reassuring, but also sensual,” Risso said. “Black gives off a sense of calm, of comforting repose.”Risso loves riddles and toying with the arcane and paradoxical; the extensive presence of black was perhaps intended as a metaphor for the limitations and restrictions of our times, contrasted by the need for softness and comfort, which he described as “shells against a harsh reality.
” The concept was twisted into a play on deconstructed shapes, treated as collapsing carapaces melting and dissolving around the body. “I wanted to soften the formal to a point of extreme suppleness and malleability,” he explained. Square-cut, roomy, reversible tweed coats were snapped open and recast as fringed blanket-sized mutations to be wrapped around the body like protective stoles.Risso took a tactile, artsy approach to the shredded edges and raw hems of tartan kilts worn over matching trousers, to hand-drawn watercolor florals printed on soft-draped asymmetrical dresses, and to blurry grids airbrushed on tailored suits. Ruffles coiling on a vintage-looking black puff-sleeved dress were daubed in gold, while the floral lace embroidery of an antique wedding dress was transposed in gold sequins onto a delicate slipdress. “Ruffles and lace speak of lightness and frivolity,” said Risso. “They’re romantic antidotes to the obscurity and gloom we’ve been through.”
4 May 2021
When fashion weeks went digital and wardrobes turned domestic, designers faced new pressures from the marketing machine. “People came to me saying, ‘It has to be digital savvy; it has to be digital friendly; it has to go through the screen,’” Francesco Risso recalled. “Fuck that.”Posed with designing his second Marni collection in lockdown, he asked himself: How do we respond to times of continued separation? Do we surrender to a digital overthrow, or do we fight back with all the things cyberspace could never give us: the human hand, tactility, and the chemistry of nature? “To me, it’s been revelatory,” Risso said. He realized that the virtual humdrum had him hankering for romanticism. Developed almost entirely by hand, the collection became a quest for understanding what triggers a romantic state of mind. He found his answer: “Life! Life is romantic. A life that allows for laughs, for positive thinking, and definitely not for abandoning the feeling of the hand that makes things.”His search materialized in the tongue-in-cheek transformation of the sportswear and loungewear codes of lockdown into real dressmaking, expressed in jaunty shapes clearly informed by the classic silhouettes of haute couture. Inevitably, it generated a ladylike romanticism conveyed through Risso’s countercultural lens: A chic wrap was abstracted into a puffer cape, but retained its neat little plume trim; a mermaid skirt morphed with sweatpants; and tennis trainers sharpened into evening shoes. There were sassy do-you-see-me-now demonstrations of the made-for-digital mentality Risso rejects, like a Birkin-ish bag—that timeless, practical elegance—blown up to impossible proportions, or velvet opera gloves so big and red they looked like oven gloves.Paradoxically, Risso had started his search for romanticism by dyeing everything black. Wanting to witness the power of nature, he placed his all-black garments in the Marni courtyard, embellished them with real flowers, and watched the sun do its magic. “The corrosion made our prints,” he explained. Then, he took his tricks to the factories, girding himself with the patience needed to watch age-old dyeing techniques do their thing through the soak-dry-wait, soak-dry-wait ceremonies necessary. “It’s cathartic,” Risso said. “This patience has been romantic…not forcing it because it ‘has to be digital.’”Screened on Zoom, the presentation portrayed a familiar lockdown situation shot in Risso’s Milanese apartment.
It turned into a salon show and culminated in the kind of lunch we are all looking forward to—with a performance by Mykki Blanco that felt relatably stir-crazy. Now, we are all asking the million-dollar question of what we’ll be wearing when we reemerge. Risso’s proposal was as likely as it was far-fetched: a couture elevation of the comfort and jump-through-the-screen dress codes we’ve adapted to in confinement. And, ironically, an exuberant transition wardrobe the marketing machine might appreciate. “I hope we’re not going to forget all we’ve learned,” Risso said. “It’s about narrowing things down and not wasting time and not making bullshit clothes. It’s about being more focused.”
26 February 2021
When fashion weeks went digital and wardrobes turned domestic, designers faced new pressures from the marketing machine. “People came to me saying, ‘It has to be digital savvy; it has to be digital friendly; it has to go through the screen,’” Francesco Risso recalled. “Fuck that.”Posed with designing his second Marni collection in lockdown, he asked himself: How do we respond to times of continued separation? Do we surrender to a digital overthrow, or do we fight back with all the things cyberspace could never give us: the human hand, tactility, and the chemistry of nature? “To me, it’s been revelatory,” Risso said. He realized that the virtual humdrum had him hankering for romanticism. Developed almost entirely by hand, the collection became a quest for understanding what triggers a romantic state of mind. He found his answer: “Life! Life is romantic. A life that allows for laughs, for positive thinking, and definitely not for abandoning the feeling of the hand that makes things.”His search materialized in the tongue-in-cheek transformation of the sportswear and loungewear codes of lockdown into real dressmaking, expressed in jaunty shapes clearly informed by the classic silhouettes of haute couture. Inevitably, it generated a ladylike romanticism conveyed through Risso’s countercultural lens: A chic wrap was abstracted into a puffer cape, but retained its neat little plume trim; a mermaid skirt morphed with sweatpants; and tennis trainers sharpened into evening shoes. There were sassy do-you-see-me-now demonstrations of the made-for-digital mentality Risso rejects, like a Birkin-ish bag—that timeless, practical elegance—blown up to impossible proportions, or velvet opera gloves so big and red they looked like oven gloves.Paradoxically, Risso had started his search for romanticism by dyeing everything black. Wanting to witness the power of nature, he placed his all-black garments in the Marni courtyard, embellished them with real flowers, and watched the sun do its magic. “The corrosion made our prints,” he explained. Then, he took his tricks to the factories, girding himself with the patience needed to watch age-old dyeing techniques do their thing through the soak-dry-wait, soak-dry-wait ceremonies necessary. “It’s cathartic,” Risso said. “This patience has been romantic…not forcing it because it ‘has to be digital.’”Screened on Zoom, the presentation portrayed a familiar lockdown situation shot in Risso’s Milanese apartment.
It turned into a salon show and culminated in the kind of lunch we are all looking forward to—with a performance by Mykki Blanco that felt relatably stir-crazy. Now, we are all asking the million-dollar question of what we’ll be wearing when we reemerge. Risso’s proposal was as likely as it was far-fetched: a couture elevation of the comfort and jump-through-the-screen dress codes we’ve adapted to in confinement. And, ironically, an exuberant transition wardrobe the marketing machine might appreciate. “I hope we’re not going to forget all we’ve learned,” Risso said. “It’s about narrowing things down and not wasting time and not making bullshit clothes. It’s about being more focused.”
27 February 2021
Following the thread of ourIn Vogue: The 1990spodcast,we are closing out the year and heading into the new one with a series of newly digitized archival shows from the decade that fashion can’t—and won’t—let go of. Designed by Consuelo Castiglioni, Marni’s spring 1999 ready-to-wear collection was presented on October 10, 1998, in Milan.“It’s not the jacket, dress, or coat that counts,” declaredVoguein early 1999, “all you really need is the right shoe—sandal, slide, or stiletto—to be the sole of fashion.” Clogs shot to the top of that list after Consuelo Castiglioni accessorized her spring 1999 Marni collection with clunky, peep-toe brown-and-white versions of the shoe. Not that there was a consensus about them: The clogs were either a bohemian rhapsody or off-key. By this time the It accessory trend was in full swing, and the “ugly” shoe was acknowledged as the counterpart to whatVoguedescribed as the “fashion” shoe.In retrospect these statement shoes fall into the “man-repeller” category, i.e., clothes that women buy and wear for themselves without considering the male gaze. Castiglioni certainly didn’t buy into traditional ideas of sexiness; there was often a rustic quality to her granny-goes-boho looks. Over time, the collections became sportier, but they were never conformist.Marni “is for a woman who has an individual spirit, not someone who is following trends,” Castiglioni told my colleague Sarah Mower in 2001. “We like clothes looking like old friends. It’s clothes for clothes’ sake, not fashion for fashion’s sake,” chimed in Lucinda Chambers, who worked closely with the Castiglioni.The spring 1999 collection was presented on models with gilded eyes who looked like latter-day flower children. They were dressed in layered diaphanous pieces, some with delicate embroidery, others with graphic insets. The clogs—a 2020 work-from-home dream, as it happens—grounded the collection. Castiglioni, who left the label in 2016, was never a fantasist; she always kept things easy and real.
31 December 2020
Speaking to Francesco Risso before his Marni shows is usually like solving a riddle, or realizing your backstage filter coffee may have been spiked. He’ll matter-of-factly tell you about “welded connections between two imponderables,” “the mystery of the mind’s neuro-connections,” or “the marriage of Truman Capote and Che Guevara.” But this season, on a video call before his digital presentation, there was nothing abstract in the state of Marni. “I don’t want to make any statements about this show, but this is the idea of it: the people, the individual stories, the lives, the awakenings, my awakening, and the connections,” Risso said, his micro-curls newly brightened like some platinum Gene Wilder.Unlike the tales of mindfulness, epiphanies, and baked goods we hear these days, Risso’s memories of quarantine felt like a ride through Willy Wonka’s sinister chocolate factory. “Lockdown felt very oppressive. I have a big dog, and whenever I’d go out, I had police sending me back home. It was strange; bad,” he recalled. While they sounded funny, stories of the Marni studio “making things at home with blankets [and] curtains, [and] dyeing things in their bathtubs” had a more introspective rather than creatively explosive impact on Risso’s approach for his spring proposal. The events of 2020 made him feel caged and powerless. The fragility of freedom was at the heart of this collection.After he finished it, he sent looks to friends and family around the world: Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City, London, Milan, Paris, Dakar, Shanghai, and Tokyo. In a digital showcase livestreamed from all of those locations (bar prerecorded sessions from the Far East due to the time difference), his diverse cast of non-models performed what Risso called his “Marnifesto”: “An experiment of collective neo-humanism, which is so individualist, but actually, this has been collective. It’s celebrating Marni not through theIbut through thewe,” he explained. It was, quite simply, unity in diversity: Through live-recorded everyday scenarios like walks through traffic, trips to the park, band practice, or grocery shopping, it was an illustration of how we’re less fragile together.Working on the collection, Risso had pulled his most-loved pieces from the Marni archives, re-created them, took them apart, and stapled them back together in new ways.
If that was an illustration of fragility versus strength in itself, so were the constructions: unraveling knitwear, de- and reconstructed tank dresses, a rigid, box-fresh leather jumpsuit about to get crinkled. It all felt somewhat “charity shop,” but that inevitably comes with the territory of fragility. Twenty-five coats had been made out of outerwear from old collections, patched together and painted with poetic words sent to Risso by friends through correspondence over the past season. “No stones can withhold me,” read one, no doubt a reference to quarantine. Another was painted in seaweed-like florals with the wordlovegraffitied across the back of its collar.“I can’t talk about hems and drapes and stripes,” Risso said. “I’m more inclined toward thinking of this as a work that’s been more collective than ever. It’s devoted to freedom, self-expression, to celebrating the hand that painted all those objects that create the canvas of Marni.” He didn’t just mean his studio, but the wild and wonderful characters who fill his unconventional mind, and indeed his nonconformist reality. Given the platform of his livestreamed video, they made Risso’s at times outlandish creations feel more real. Emancipated from the staged situation of a runway, you could actually see how the Marni universe manifests IRL.
25 September 2020
“What is beauty, really?” asked Francesco Risso during a Zoom conversation about his new Marni resort collection. “My concept of beauty is always linked to the idea of rebellion. On one hand, there’s a profound appreciation for a classic sense of beauty, but on the other I feel compelled to rebel against it and dissociate it from stereotypes. I always feel the urge to express this dynamic in my work.” He continued: “At Marni we want to break free and liberate ourselves from this stereotypical idea of beauty. The label’s fundamentals have always revolved around the celebration of a multidimensional idea of beauty, more open and extended.”A diversity-embracing approach notwithstanding, Risso recently found himself entangled in controversy, when images from Marni’s fall advertising campaign were heavily criticized by the internet community, with accusations of racism and cultural appropriation. The photos were consequently taken down and the designer issued an apology on his Instagram account in which he acknowledged that the learning process brought about by this experience was as necessary as it was painful. “Diversity has always been part of my experience; my personal life is testament to that. I fully embrace diversity—it’s just the way I’ve lived my life and the way I am,” said Risso, who’s in a 12-year relationship with the Black designer Lawrence Steele.A multilayered idea of beauty is central to the new collection. The look book was shot via FaceTime during quarantine by British photographer Jack Davison on a wide-ranging cast of young models and friends who were sent samples that they styled themselves. “Their individual reaction and their imaginative attitude has proved extremely energizing, and truly rewarding for me,” said Risso. From a creative standpoint, he worked at “passionately blending Marni’s past, present, and future,” as he explained. “Designing this collection, we’ve instinctively ventured into the definition of our essence. Instead of reverting to external conceptual or visual inspirations, we decided to look inward, to extract and distill our very own most expressive qualities, stripped down to their Marni reality. It felt like a joyful liberation.
”All the Marni signifiers were here: the delirious pattern-clash of floral prints (more naive and less conceptual than usual); the play on extravagant deconstructed volumes and silhouettes; the bohemian-grunge feel colliding with the formality of tailoring and with the ease of retro-sporty references.The collection’s unfussy immediacy was apparent in the virtual showroom visit I was granted via Zoom. Three different rooms were reproduced exactly like Marni’s IRL workspaces, with each look able to be explored from different angles. In fact, the collection was actually designed with this new virtual medium in mind. “It isn’t less bold in the least,” pointed out Risso. “It’s just that the point of view is clearer and sharper.”
10 August 2020
Marni could not host a presentation this season due to the coronavirus pandemic. In these extenuating circumstances, Vogue Runway has made an exception to its policy and is writing about this collection via photos and remote interviews.Marni’s pre-fall collection will deliver to newly reopened stores this week; it was designed and produced in the Before—that is, before the coronavirus outbreak hit us, tsunami-like. Now that lockdowns have been eased in most European countries, the After’s collective mood seems to be slowly lifting, with life apparently resuming a more optimistic “new-normal” pace. Fashion designers, having spent the last couple of months questioning the industry’s practices, are now back at work with their teams in their studios, though access remains off-limits to external visitors. This review was conducted over a Zoom call.“We’re all wearing protective hazmat suits when working at testing prototypes, patternmaking, and trying on samples,” said Francesco Risso, his voice sounding slightly metallic from the other side of the screen. “We all look like NASA employees.” Yet despite the limitations, the mood chez Marni is now considerably lighter. “We’re back full force, more vital than ever, full of esprit, and with lots of projects for the future,” he enthused.Not being able to see the clothes up close, I steered the conversation toward the conceptual focus of the collection, asking Risso what led his narrative at the time of development and how he feels about it now, after all that has happened. “The idea we worked around for pre-fall was Undress Your Mind,” he said. “The necessity of a new essentialism, of a reduced, purer aesthetic, of a more concentrated offer was already there, and very much part of our conversation at Marni at that time. Looking at it now,” he continued, “it feels almost prescient in its direction, and utterly on point on what our attitude will be going forward.” But how can a desire for timeless classicism be convincingly expressed at a label known for its creative eloquence? “We went thoroughly through our extensive archives; our legacy is truly amazing,” explained Risso. “The need to streamline and reduce isn’t at all at odds with what we are. You just have to do it à la Marni.
”Not a designer used to shortcuts or crowd-pleaser references, Risso looked to the unconventional sobriety of the Beat Generation and the indulgence and sensuality of 1920s flappers, as well as the timeless stillness of certain Nordic landscapes for inspiration. He mixed and stirred all these ingredients into his very peculiar repertoire; his Marni is a cabinet of curiosities, its vernacular continuously disassembled and reassembled as through the eyes of a slightly bonkers connoisseur. Playing with hybridization, he patched together opposing tropes: A proper checkered peacoat was softened by a languid, asymmetrical blanket thrown over the shoulders with a languorous feminine gesture; a straight-cut classic white wool car coat was blown up to humongous proportions; and a black leather biker jacket was combined with a voluminous tentlike checkered cloak with results that were charmingly twisted.
3 June 2020
“It’s our version ofAlice in Wonderland,” said Francesco Risso backstage at his Marni presentation, as the fabled hair artist Julien d’Ys added magical gold and silver dust to the faces and lacquered hair of the girls in the lineup. The collection, as Risso explained, was “collaged from the beginning to the end—from macro to micro to fractal. It’s about putting together remnants.” This meant coats and tabards worn over mini- or maxiskirts or boot-cut pants, all pieced together from scraps of leather and the calico that dress toiles are made from. There were also what appeared to be fragments of existing garments, such as a cardigan dress seemingly created from several different pieces of knitwear, each element linked with the crude stitchery of a child in a craft workshop. The remnant scraps produced in their manufacture, Risso noted, had been regenerated to create smaller elements such as the purses shaped like Victorian carpetbags or the old-fashioned wrestlers’ shoes. This sort of repurposing has been a trope of fashion since Martin Margiela first started reimaging the possibilities of the industry’s detritus back in the late 1980s, but in Risso’s hands it takes on an appealingly childlike quality that is all his own. Risso describes the effect as intentionally DIY, and the deliberate naivete continued with the magnificent finale pieces made using scraps of humble cotton fabric jigsawed together with shards of cut velvet woven by hand in a factory in Venice on looms that were originally designed by Leonardo da Vinci—a vanishing, time-consuming craft that Risso understandably wants to “protect and exalt.” “They are basically our new furs,” he said of these precious objects with the grandeur of the holy vestments that were once made from similar textiles and depicted in Renaissance paintings. These striking dresses were pierced with skin-revealing openings framed by metal elements cast from clay that Risso and his team had molded themselves for the purpose. “The collection started with a question,” Risso said. “Are we in a psychedelic world and we need to be more grounded, or are we in a caged world and we need to be freed by psychedelia?” In contrast to the phantasmagoria of the finale pieces—and in the spirit of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming spring blockbusterAbout Time: Fashion and Duration—Risso was also fascinated by the effect of time on clothing and textiles.
That sense of grounding was translated into fabrics that had been prematurely aged, suggesting that the garments had been left too long in the sun (with streaks of bleached-away color) or dappled by the corroding effects of years of washing and pressing or by damp and humidity. That notion of textiles that have seen a lot of use continued front of stage too, as editors sat uneasily on sagging mattresses and the girls stepped out on a carpet of rumpled calico to a breathy soundtrack mix that enhanced the otherworldliness of Risso’s refreshingly quirky vision for the brand.
21 February 2020
The fall Marni Experience unfolded as follows. The audience was directed to a cavernous dark space, trespassing similarly dark tunnels outlined with thin, colored neon lights. A door to an alternative reality perhaps? Who knows—but designer Francesco Risso loves a state of unsettled perception. The tunnel opened onto a pitch-black space with a labyrinthine neon-lit floor layout, with barely perceptible human silhouettes scattered around. The audience was kept standing. The Marni-clad, diverse crowd emerging in slow-motion from obscurity as if in hypnotic trance was actually a dance collective, directed by Italian choreographer Michele Rizzo, who worked with Risso to bring the performance to life.Awakening (very slowly indeed) from their state of apparent stupor, the dancers started moving and swaying to trance music, holding onto their spots as if glued to them. Then they started moving about at a snail’s pace. One started wondering: What’s the narrative? A sense of mild exasperation insinuated itself into this reviewer’s perceptive system.Then the beat and the energy changed abruptly and the Marni-clad collective started marching about as if propelled by a sudden urge, circling around in manic mode, until the pace wound way down again.Focusing on the clothes was challenging. The transporting feel of the performance was rather overwhelming. But from what one could see, they looked pretty great. The fashion repertoire was varied and multifarious. Humongous tailoring mixed with sleek, almost unassuming archetypal shapes. Coats were bisected, jackets were dilated, sweaters fragmented and juxtaposed. Scraps of fabric were pieced together in fabulous patchworks. Prints were crazily appealing. Nothing seemed to make sense—yet all coalesced beautifully into Marni’s stylish madness.But there’s no Marni show without a piece of entertaining Risso narrative, which exploded backstage after the performance like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. “This was just a dance!” he exclaimed, slightly annoyed. “It’s a dance which takes us to the end of love. The end and the beginning of love.” OK, please do expand. “I was thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’sThe Masque of The Read Deathand about Prince Prospero,” said Risso. For those with limited knowledge of the American master’s macabre oeuvre, the story goes that Prince Prospero locks himself in an abbey with a crowd of friends for a masquerade ball, attempting to escape the plague.
The Red Death infiltrates the abbey with exterminating results. “Today it was our court of Prince Prospero’s noble friends dancing to the end of love and locked in our castle,” said Risso. “They are a collective in a never ending party, wearing multiform uniforms… objects with a life of their own, heirlooms, something we have to protect.”The clothes were made from assemblages of old scraps of fabrics, leftovers of ’50s deadstock, hand painted floral velvets, hybrids made out of satin and leather. They looked beautiful in their flow of haphazard improbability. There was method to the madness: Risso’s poetic way of addressing new methods of creating and producing clothes (recycling, upcycling, assembling, reusing) is a serious, consistent approach—it just seems a bit more bonkers than average.
11 January 2020
Marni’s Resort reads as a sort of prequel to a narrative trilogy, which was subsequently expanded in designer Francesco Risso’s men’s and women’s Spring 2020 fashion shows. The imaginative Risso conjured up for this pre-collection a surreal fictional subtext, one in which kindred spirits Elizabeth Taylor and Che Guevara seduce each other in the deep of the South American jungle. To further thicken the already quite improbable plot, extras like a gang of smart-dressed Guerrilla Girls and the flamboyant Frida Kahlo were recruited to provide fashionable cameos.More often than not, storytelling fails to translate into a readable style (in fact, it’s a term so preposterously overused in fashion that it’s lost any meaning). Yet in Risso’s hands, the hourglass-y glamour of Liz Taylor and Che Guevara’s debonair militant attire came together in a series of rather convincing propositions. The by-products of this unlikely union were more beguiling than belligerent. Martial-inspired coats were given a feminine twist, cinched at the waist with elasticated anatomical corsets, and womanly décolletages graced curvaceous zip-up bustiers that looked like cropped vintage bathing suits from the ’50s. The bustiers were worn with snap-buttoned straight skirts in thick leather, as if cut from the leftovers of a surplus military coat. Elsewhere, the classic camouflage patterns of guerrilla uniforms were hybridized into floral motifs in a vivid shade of green, underlining the collection’s mischievous pull between discipline and sensuality.Construction-deconstruction dynamics were also at play on shapes: A field jacket with huge pouch pockets could be disassembled and transformed into a cropped, daintier version, while a shapely dress straight out of the ’50s was reincarnated as a slender, minimalist shift, the only memory of its past life lingering in a contrasting asymmetrical panel pinned askew at the front, as if by chance.The polarity between feminine shapes and militant uniforms was elsewhere mitigated by echoes of the sumptuous aesthetic of Frida Kahlo and by the feminist flamboyance of the Guerrilla Girls. These could be perceived in folksy black silk dresses with puff sleeves, or in heart-shaped bustier numbers with juxtaposed side-draped aprons, painted with abstract flambé patterns. The clothes conjured images of rather stylish seditionaries.“Resort was the first foray into the jungle,” said Risso.
“It’s from here that we started exploring the guerrilla spirit, which evolved in the men’s and women’s collections into a more overt stand on sustainability, social responsibility, and engagement on protecting the environment.” He continued: “We involved in the process artists like Judith Hopf, who regenerated all the discarded plastic that served as backdrop for the men’s show into the women’s phantasmagorical recycled jungle.”The men’s looks presented here were subdued and urban, almost classic. Car coats in Harris tweed, straight-cut blazers worn with ankle-cropped pants, and four-pocket safari jackets in thick cotton canvas were more fit for the everyday wardrobe of a geeky guy about town than that of a hot-blooded revolutionary. “It’s because El Che met with Truman Capote and they got engaged!” enthused Risso, elaborating on the trilogy’s storyline. According to the designer’s surreal tale, the diminutive American writer falls desperately in love with Guevara. And what about the poor Liz? She probably left the ménage à trois to wander about the Amazon; for all we know, she might’ve even joined the Guerrilla Girls.
12 November 2019
On a day in which people the world over took to the streets as climate activists, it was a relief and a pleasure to sit on recompressed-cardboard benches under a recycled plastic jungle (reused from a repurposed prior set built of reclaimed waste) to watch Francesco Risso’s Spring-Summer 2020 show for Marni. Bravo to a major Italian house for putting sustainability front and center! And kudos to Risso for showing a collection that had charm and beauty by the bucketload and upcycled textiles, organic cottons, and “recuperated” leathers. He wanted to create a “joyous protest”—“an homage to nature and our sense of humanity”—and he succeeded.Risso loves metaphors, and he often starts his collection from a rather abstract narrative place. This collection began with him imagining a tropical disease—ergo the jungle setting—that leaves its victims hallucinatory, dizzy, trepidatious, or succumbing to a “beautiful vertigo” (“the WTF of this particular and hard moment”). He wanted to create looks that cause “ecstatic sensations” and “nice shivers.” He wanted, essentially, to make fashion that gets under your skin.The results are deeply romantic: balloon-smock tops paired with fit-and-flare skirts from which ruffled petticoats spill. Some are in lustrous satins, raw edged and weighty in the best way. Others are in prints of deliberately naive, semi-fauvist paintings done by Risso and his team in the studio. The colors are bold—green ivy and wicked magenta, say. The silhouettes are conservative (long of line, neo-Edwardian, or ’50s couture) but slashed and exploded. Many of the pieces are aprons (masquerading as dresses) paired with full skirts. Sweaters hang asymmetrically. It is territory shared in the fashion landscape by Junya Watanabe, Raf Simons, and Molly Goddard, but it’s totally Risso and so right for Marni. His clothes are shrewd but romantic, conscious but dreamy. His protestors walked only in flip-flops (recycled rubber?), but there is nothing casual in the thinking behind Marni.
20 September 2019
Marni designer Francesco Risso’s battle cry for a more sustainable ethos couldn’t be more different from what other designers are doing or saying (or not doing and not saying) about the issue. He does it his own way, speaking the oracular lingua franca of the visionaries, through a narrative vortex layered with trippy hyperboles and genial metaphors, challenging you to find a method in all the apparent madness. Which, by the way, there is.Starting from facts, he gathered today’s show guests in the industrial Marni headquarters, and had them stand on a floor dotted with giant red and yellow polka dots. A humongous fishnet was hovering about their heads, full of plastic debris collected from the oceans and from waste. The visuals hinted at a clear message. Called Act1, the Spring show was a conscious approach to engage in a deeper conversation on ethical values and a sustainable fashion practice: “We are here today to confirm our position in the world and to move towards action,” said Risso. “Let’s be vocal about our beliefs.“Backstage before the show, the designer, sporting a white shirt with a hairy Bugs Bunny’s head patched on its back, was in cheerful mode: “Welcome to the wedding!” he exclaimed, starting his narration, which went as follows:“We’re here, standing under the brutality of this Plastic of Damocles, to celebrate the marriage officiated by MCMagma, a shamanic non-entity which is the spirit of transformation, between Truman Capote and Ernesto Che Guevara. One day, Truman decided to leave his Swans and his life of lost beauty to free himself, joining Guevara in the rebel radicalism of the jungle guerrilla. The dress code is camouflage meets carnival, the marriage being between inventive rebels and ‘50s control freaks, all looking for the Noah’s Ark in a completely corrupted fauve nature. Our nature. So there is rebellion, bur it’s a beautiful rebellion and beauty is also rebellious.”And Marni’s lanky rebels did indeed look beautiful, like endangered eco-parakeets sporting a fabulous plumage of crazily stunning ritual totem-hats, made by artist Shalva Nikvashvili out of discarded anything: paper, feathers, plastic, fur, leather. Pinned on the lapels of slim tailored suits or knitted scarves were objects of beauty, like silver brooches made by Japanese artist Kazuma Nagai, depicting mutating animals, dancing crocodiles, or the extinct flightless dodo bird wearing a gas mask “ready for the emergency, as we all are,” explained Risso.
The marriage between Truman and Che actually produced some pretty smart clothes. The graphic formality of tailored suits alternated with safari suits splashed with fauve brushstrokes, and cashmere and alpacas were mixed with plastic and brocades in hybridized suits in a vivid color palette. It all blended into a rather elegant, controlled chaos with an artistic vintage flair.Having witnessed Act1, we’re eagerly waiting for Marni ActTwo, when artist Judith Hopf will forge a new artwork regenerating all the plastic collected and displayed at today’s show. Today’s show raised expectations: One hopes that statements will be followed by consistent, honest, and incisive actions by the label, bringing about true and meaningful changes. Risso definitely has the creative stamina to put his poetic, powerful vision to good use.
15 June 2019
While prepping for Pre-Fall, Marni’s Francesco Risso watchedThe Terror, a series about an 1845 Royal Navy expedition to the Arctic Archipelago gone horrifically awry. He was fascinated not only by the rather alarming twists and turns of the story, but also by a sort of subtext, which skirted a finer line between aesthetic appeal and deeper meaning.“Obviously I was drawn to the elegant formality of the uniforms the officers and soldiers were wearing, dark and cut with austere aplomb,” he explained. “Yet the more the story progressed, the crew being irredeemably trapped in the ice with no way out, the more they became disheveled and disarrayed. This tragedy felt somehow like a signifier for finding release from an oppressive culture.” He continued: “The soldiers were also forced by the extreme circumstances to get acquainted with indigenous Inuit tribes. They were so transformed and tainted by their mysterious shamanic culture as to almost dissolve and melt into their hallucinatory white glacial landscape.”The metaphor suggested byThe Terror’s spooky denouement definitely fueled Risso’s visual and stylistic repertoire. The pull between formality and psychedelia and the reconfiguring of a new order from apparently haphazard, chaotic pieces are familiar narratives for this designer, but he pushed things this season, calling his approach “pragmatism gone ballistic.”The utilitarian elegance of uniforms served as the collection’s canvas: Classic, almost strict masculine shapes and compact proportions were translated into elongated dusters, sleek car coats, and double-breasted peacoats in thick, consistent fabrics like felted and pressed bouclé, glossy bonded leather, padded satin, shearlings, and ponyskins. But like a ship colliding with an iceberg, this backbone of apparent calm exploded into a mad cavorting of crazy assemblages and hybrids. One coat was cut from a woolly Irish blanket in front and connected at the back with a full shearling hide, its hem left in its natural state. The same folksy feel was in evidence in a tailored coat in deep-blue bouclé wool, slashed at the waist and assembled with a black leather hide, the two contrasting parts pierced together with metallic rings in an ingenious collision of sophistication and primitivism. The recurring use of natural materials was also a nod to the no-waste, responsible approach Risso is keen to promote going forward.
The crashing of references progressed inexorably to a decorative climax: psychedelic brocades and Lurex jacquards; hand-painted shearlings reminiscent of Oceanic and African Art; a bit of ’60s Japonisme; and Inuit-inspired prints were mixed together in a lively mix of opera coats, military shirts, tiered shift dresses and skirts with half-plissé side panels.There’s method in this madness: “I’m designing pieces with a special personality and character, quite unique and extraordinary. They’re meant to last,” Risso mused. “This is my contribution to a mindful, intelligent way of approaching the design process. It’s also a positive, joyful attitude I’d like to convey. We live in such terrible political times, so narrow-minded and oppressive on every level, we need to take a stand and act, finding new solutions and motivating different behaviors, being pragmatic but also imaginative. Crucial, significant issues can be reclaimed with creativity, positivity, and fun.”
15 May 2019
In the world of fashion, Marni has long been the thinking woman’s guilty pleasure. And so how fitting that today, at his Fall 2019 presentation, the label’s creative director, Francesco Risso, offered a show about pleasure without guilt—or as he put it: “Hereticism but on a different level.” His premise, which he titled Neuroerotik, is that women’s lives are governed by two forces: the promise of the cerebral to imagine past what is known, and the insistent drive of hormones and chromosomes, pushing us toward sensual experiences our brains don’t want to comprehend. It’s the rational versus the irrational but with a deliciously kinky and optimistic twist. Both tendencies, in Risso’s view, allow one to “map new pleasure-scapes”—and how cool is that? “Just imagine that from today you start putting a tape on your knee,” said Risso backstage while putting finishing touches on his pleat-wearing, chain-slung, scarf-dragging sexual warriors, “and that becomes your erogenous point instead of your nipple . . .”So many possibilities open up when you can train your mind to see a knee as a nipple. It means that red, black, and white panels that bear no relationship to one another size-wise are connected only by rows of disused wedding rings. It means that the dropped sleeves of a swaggering coat might not actually be connected to the body of the coat, but a second layer with a quirky humor all its own. It means that what appears a graphic and garish modular pattern when seen from a great distance might reveal a face or a classical rose print. It might mean that your long sleeved gown of red silk, slashed in back but still cozy like a night dress, is covered in piercings and more rings, although these resemble the embellishments of, well, piercings and not discarded unions. Everything in this Marni collection involved some sort of duality—the chain harness was both silver and gold, the skirt had two waistlines, the jacket was a bolero . . . or not. The best pieces were the ones that contained their contradictions with ease: the pieced dresses with a scarf tie at the neck, the long retro numbers in charmeuse with their elegant tucks and knee-grazing chains (ooh—watch those nipples!), the pixelated polka dot gowns.This was not an easy collection, and it wasn’t delivered with a soft touch. The soundtrack veered fromThe Shiningto a number by Kas Product that featured a shrieking cat.
The boots and shoes were massive, sometimes studded—the footwear of storms and storminess more generally. But there was also something moving, and unfathomably chic, about Risso’s neurotic, erotic vision. In some ways, he seemed to be fashioning a response to these dark times, much as Miuccia Prada did earlier this week. She defined romance as an ideal of goodness and agency in a monstrous moment. For her, romance provides the narrative escape routes we need to think both through and past the totalitarian present. For Risso, the curious twists of the mind are our bulwark against anything proscribed or preordained; our brains and our passions will, in his view, set us free. It’s empowering and wild, which, one could argue, is the whole point of fashion.
22 February 2019
Backstage before today’s show, Marni’s Francesco Risso could’ve easily been mistaken for one of the models patiently waiting to step into the black boom box built inside an industrial space as the set. Risso sported what looked like a spongy hybrid coat/bathrobe in a black-and-white, vaguely nondescript diamond pattern, worn loose, unbelted and trailing, topped with a wool matching-not-matching beret with a dangling pom-pom at the end. He looked like the crazily stylish fashion template around which he has built the new Marni aesthetic.Risso has an oracular, almost esoteric way of explaining his collections’ meaning. His narrative definitely doesn’t lack charm. “I wanted to address the elephant in the room,” he said. “The puppeteers out there who are busy playing soccer with our planet, hanging their coats on elephants’ tusks—they don’t realize that these neuro-tribe movements are emerging from the streets and they’re invading the space: This for me is the sense of this collection. They are atypical kids, extravagant and not diagnosable types. You have to imagine an invasion, like in a 3-D Risk game.”Inside the black boom box, while a rather disquieting remix of Claude Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune” was booming, the aforementioned neuro-tribes made their appearance, stomping their banana-sock boots, wearing what looked like a gentle parody of conservative suiting. There were ginormous blazers and matching trailing pants in wool bouclé or moleskin in dark classic colors, “imposing like if they were dressed with moveable apartments,” mused Risso.The conservative, slightly David Byrne–esque, magnified suits slowly unraveled, morphing into grand-scale, full-on pyrotechnics. It was a riotous, sensually crazy, Dionysian psychedelic extravaganza of knitted jumpers or layered pajamas printed in acid-bright patterns. These were inspired byAllegro Non Troppo, a ’70s animated movie by the Italian director Bruno Bozzetto, which was a parody of Walt Disney’sFantasia. “They’re disheveled, disassembled, they are Les Enfants Terribles du Paradis,” enthused the designer.Like a pagan ritual reaching its climax, when delirium unfolds into a sort of quiet stupor, the show’s rhythm regressed into a more muffled atmosphere;l’après-midiof the young fauns approached the twilight zone. Volumes, proportions, and colors reverted to slimmer, neat incarnations, almost bromidic in their graceful, sensual blandness.
Bromidic à la Marni, of course; you could feel that the neuro-tribe’s ferocious energy was ready to bite back.
12 January 2019
The wordobsessiveoften punctuates a conversation with Marni’s Francesco Risso, the concept being sometimes reinforced by the use of the termcompulsive. This is telling of the peculiar tension that tinges every aspect of Risso’s work; a relentless, almost spiraling reiteration of themes and meanings seems to be inherent to his aesthetic. Yet his recurrent obsessions are often hybridized and crossbred with disparate sources of inspiration. Resort highlighted this attitude rather compellingly.While prepping for the collection, Risso found an equally obsessive-compulsive match. It came in the quite extravagant form of an antique Victorian album of collaged images: a rare, gem-like object made in 1856 by an aristocratic English lady, who cut-and-pasted photographs, magazine clippings, postcards, and family mementos. The ornate book was probably intended as a celebration of the marriage of her daughter; at that time, such exquisite domestic works of art were meticulously composed by women in the luxurious privacy of their upper-class mansions, serving as treasured narratives of the family’s history. Yet for all of their touching naïveté, those handmade scrapbooks can actually be considered as early examples of mixed-media artistic collages and cut-outs, an art form powerfully embraced in more modern times by female artists including the likes of Hannah Höch, Annette Messager, Nancy Spero, and Kara Walker. Also: That quiet, deeply human cut-and-paste process had a sort of prescient quality, as the very same creative attitude defines today’s fashion aesthetic, where slicing apart references and templates and then reconfiguring images, shapes, and identities has become an integral part of our visual language.The Victorian album’s fastidious juxtapositions have a hypnotic quality that clearly resonates with Risso’s aesthetic compulsions. “It was the best mood board ever. Mesmerizing,” he enthused. Risso translated its visual feast into pyrotechnical, dense floral camouflage prints (“like a crazily tended garden,” he said) that flared up rounded, pouf-shaped, voluminous dresses. Playful and romantic in equal measure.The assemblages also brought about suggestions of an aristocratic past, when sports were infused with formal elegance.
Hence elongated, lanky, sporty-not-sporty silhouettes twisted Marni-style into hybridized specimens, like knife-pleated tennis midi skirts in blown-up pastel houndstooth paired with shrunken equestrian jackets, or gigantic racing-inspired stripes in bubblegum pink printed across a fluid oversize tunic topping trailing palazzo pants, or else a boxing robe/dressing gown lusciously tied with a satin bow and dripping with sequins.
22 November 2018
Oh, the longing for the value of the human touch in fashion! Francesco Risso put his finger on the beauty of the handmade and the happy accidents that happen when a collection is made in a creative studio rather than on computer screens. “It started with the processes of the work in the studio, and thinking of it as a painter’s canvas, which keeps changing and modifying in the trials and mistakes—suddenly, that becomes the work itself.”The painter’s blank canvas is very similar to the toile fabric designers use, and the process of 3-D draping of fabric on the body to judge what looks right is a sculptural one. This collection captured the vitality of work in progress—the spontaneous moment when a tacked- and pinned-together assemblage of fabrics suddenly comes together and looks lovely just as it is. It had the same feeling as when an artist instinctively knows when a painting is finished. The skill is in the decision to stop before tidying up and overthinking ruins it all.So, when did Risso see that the moment had arrived? “It was when all these personalities came out,” he said. “It felt like Dr. Frankenstein bringing the Venus de Milo back to life—a remote future of disheveled nymphs, 3-D Amazons!”Wherever those characters sprung from, this collection was basically a blockbuster of an exhibition of the kinds of clothes and accessories that artistic and intellectual women absolutely crave. The side-draped skirts, the buttery leather chopped-up corsetry, the coats with finger dabs of paint or naive painted flowers, the pops of raspberry and blue in the collage-y prints, the wonkily lopped-off biker jackets—a brilliant catalog of a wardrobe for Marni collectors. No doubt about it: Risso has found his groove here.
23 September 2018
Leave it to Francesco Risso to give a much-needed jolt of quirky fun to Milan Men’s Fashion Week. But beyond his apparently bonkers manifestos and childlike sensibility, the designer’s system of thought is actually quite profound; after all, children are able to intuitively grasp the essence of things quicker than anyone engaging in analytical reasoning.For Marni’s Spring collection, Risso turned his antennae towards the idea of sport and how it affects body image perception. It’s a mighty subject, and quite relevant today. He gave it a good conceptual and visual shake-up. “We’re here today to attend to imaginary Olympic games,” he announced backstage before the show, which was held in the cavernous underground parking lot of Torre Velasca, a residential brutalist tower built in the late ’50s in Milan’s center. Risso had the audience sitting on big bouncing gym balls. “Imagine putting on the filter ‘Dream’ and seeing a brigade of imperfect athletes, tall and short, lanky and chubby: every body type is permitted in these Olympics,” he declared. “We have mini superheroes and maxi-antiheroes. All the sports of all times are represented, long-forgotten sports and forgotten athletes; their bodies are imperfect and flawed and vulnerable like Egon Schiele’s drawings. Because tenderness is stronger than strength. And what really counts is the love and respect and awareness we feel for our body, however imperfect it could be. So now we look at these Olympics, feeling a little inebriated while drinking Gatorade Plus.”So out came a perfectly bizarre armada of perfectly imperfect athletes, snaking along the winding catwalk in the belly of the building, looking as far as possible from muscular gym buffs. They wore perfectly quirky uniforms, analogical mash-ups of low-tech, wonky sporty pieces that might have been found in an attic and repurposed with a mischievous grace.The sweet-looking, vulnerable-enough, and deeply human anti-athletes sported wonderful high-waist skater shorts in felted mohair that looked soft like children’s pajamas, paired with oversize rolled-up nylon windbreakers printed with blown-up digital abstract drawings by German artist Florian Hetz. The ever-utilitarian body bags were given a new lease of life, improbably morphed into wraparound zippered bombers. Humongous spongy bathrobes exuded a feminine feel, printed with delicate patterns inspired by the work of American painter Betsy Podlach.
Worn with matching shower slippers, they looked as if stolen from a gym locker room by a chubby, not-so-sporty, naughty kid.c
16 June 2018
Sitting with Marni’s Francesco Risso while discussing the inspiration behind his collections is like boarding a full-speed merry-go-round from which you get off with a slight sense of vertigo. For Marni Pre-Fall, the conversation spanned children’s cognitive behavior to Dada and primitivism; it would’ve even sent Dr. Spock’s and Marcel Duchamp’s heads spinning.“In this collection, I wanted to confront the idea of elementary shapes created through intuition and immediacy, a spontaneous process almost unaffected by logic. That’s why I was so taken by the Dada movement and its irrational, disruptive approach, a rejection of bourgeois conventions which led to an appreciation of the primal and unfiltered energy so well expressed by a child’s formidable and effective intuitive approach,” mused Risso.Dada’s tools of the trade were instinct, nonsense, absurdity, and irrationality, together with a consequent fascination with primitive art. In 1930, when Dada founding member Tristan Tzara opened the Exposition d’Art Africain et d’art d’Océanien in Paris, people were stunned. “Primitivism is a metaphor, a quest for innocence and the essence of human nature; it is deconstructing a shape until its archetypal non-structure is laid bare,” speculated the designer.Risso’s obsession with children’s intuitive way of learning is constant in his work; it’s the fuel that always ignites his creative mindset. Logic is often overturned, in favor of a sort of childlike stream-of-consciousness process, as cryptic as it is efficient in bringing his vision to life. Pre-Fall’s silhouettes somehow looked as if out of a kid’s drawing of archetypal shapes; proportions were blown up and inflated, sometimes askew; details were magnified: big, pointy collars; exaggerated buttons; unfinished trailing threads; irregular contrasting stitches as if made by an apprentice tailor or by a little girl sewing her doll’s dresses.Patches of primary colors were put together as if playing the board game Mastermind, assembled almost haphazardly, while scribbled marigolds by Frank Navin were exploded into humongous patterns. The American artist also contributed to the creativity-through-the-eyes-of-a-child feel with his bijoux, charms made with replicas of the little plastic doodads found in Cracker Jack packages. Even the low-tech, flat-form Big Foot sneakers looked chubby and cartoonish, “like a kid wearing his dad’s shoes,” as the designer explained.
It all sounds bonkers, but don’t get fooled: The results actually looked quite ravishing.
5 June 2018
How can fashion go forward in these dissonant days of overproduction? At Marni, Francesco Risso arranged his guests in a set that posed questions about the philosophical face-off between technology and nature. Technoprimitivism, he called his collection. “The contrast between our irresistible love of innovation and technology,” he said, “and the other side, the movements of the soul that you cannot bring to a technological meaning.”To watch, we were seated on bales of wadded-up, discarded fabric and piles of old carpets, sandbags, and sleeping bags. Old clocks were stacked in one corner. Vintage shoes were poked between vacuum-packed lumps of sheets. As an installation, it felt like the artfully arranged contents of a hoarder’s garage. Backstage, Risso said that it was “about collecting, obsessively putting things in order” and also “to express human waste, in some way.”Somehow, what evolved posited Marni as a halfway house between polished, high-styled fashion and a possible future where the use of recycled fabrics could—should—be considered beautiful. High-shine, brilliant Yves Klein–blue and toxic-green belted coats were raw cut, trailing threads. They were followed by collages of blanket wraps, nylon raincoats, and hooded duffle coats, and brightly colored layerings of knitted tunics over superwide pants.Then it got more interesting. As all fans of Marni know, this is a label that specializes in dresses and vintage-flavored prints. Risso served them up. His ’30s/’40s dresses had the spontaneous air of sampling toiles, perhaps put together from scraps of leftover fabrics lying around the studio—a theme that culminated in two ruched, glittery sequined numbers.Further questioning in the postshow melee turned up the fact that those materials weren’t pieces of reused fabrics but had been sourced through the normal channels, via Italian mills. But there was one moment in this show where Risso did push the aesthetic further along the sustainable route. Check out the flecked, felted coat at number 25 in the sequence. It was made from compressed, recycled textiles: a repurposing of carpet underlay or utilitarian insulation material. High fashion needs more of this ethical creativity.
25 February 2018
Francesco Risso’s vision at Marni exists as a material subconscious: fascinating, full of energy, and beyond comprehension. How else to explain the wayward monkeys and chairs screen-printed onto tailoring and robe coats; the push and pull of shrunken and puddling shapes; the wilderness leg warmers and neon-inflected sandals? To hear him account for it, such feisty textures, graphics, and layers reconnect with the inner child that so many of us neglect in favor of reason or logic. “The seriousness of a child at play,” he said, in a variation on the message he offered up with his first collection.This time, however, Risso seemed even more eager to take us deeper—perhaps even darker; because for all the artsy, craft aspects, including the illustrations by Frank Navin, they were put to use in ways that felt more mature, if not also more established in the vernacular of Raf Simons. This will likely work in Risso’s favor; by jostling between manic naïveté—all those blanket layers and mismatched proportions—and a comparatively sedate take on Italian sportswear, he seemingly established a greater number of entry points into Marni circa 2018. Remember, these looks can easily get disassembled into combinations that feel more familiar.But the designer’s approach probably continues to generate interest among fashion’s directional set because it feels disassociated from reality in the right way. The runway was staged with seating consisting of obsolete televisions and abandoned bumper cars snaking together as found objects turned into land art. Before arriving inside, guests had to wait a solid 10 minutes while local antifur protesters targeted the brand based on Marni’s outdated connection to the fur industry. Risso used none of the real stuff, for the record. “It was part of the experience,” he mused. And it’s worth closing with his own interpretation of that experience: “Is it euphoria? Is it intuition? Or is it a spoonful of sabayon?” The secret’s always in the sauce.
13 January 2018
Francesco Risso, Marni’s creative director, delights in horror movies, for which he has a connoisseur’s eye. To get a flavor for his penchant, just have a look at his Instagram account, @asliceofbambi (a telling name). When asked how his flair for exquisitely twisted fairy tales translates into his new Resort collection, he said, “Horror movies are about extreme love. They’re about romantic gestures of dramatic, excessive proportions. Like when an impossible love affair ignites a state of monstrous madness.”Riffing on the concept of perverse, extreme romanticism, Risso almost literally put his aesthetic parameters under a magnifying lens and worked the collection around blown-up, emphatic volumes. He defined the look as “Neo-Deco.” “I was fascinated by the Constructivist patterns from the ’20s and ’30s, a peculiar mix of opulence and geometry, which translated into visually dramatic, abstract oxymorons,” he explained. Risso certainly has no lack of articulate descriptions.Shapes here had the freestyle, idiosyncratic feel that is a distinctive Marni trait and that clearly resonates with the designer’s sensibility: “There’s a place inside me for this attitude, or at least there’s a place for it in my wardrobe,” he mused. Mismatched prints and frilly ribbons dangling askew added a touch of whimsy to softly sculpted forms with a workwear feel; huge collars extended into ruched hems for trapeze shirtdresses in crisp poplin. Describing trousers as voluminous is an understatement, their generous proportions wrapped in circular twists and pleats. Elongated column dresses were deceptively languid, their humongous floral patterns conveying instead a strong, energetic vibe, with fox stoles added for offbeat glamour. Liquid satin ensembles suggested a fluid, sensual movement, yet they looked sharp in their asymmetrical cut. A sense of provocative eccentricity was the hallmark of the collection and was inherent to Marni’s aesthetic, which seems to suit Risso’s own vision just fine. It definitely felt oxymoronic enough.
9 November 2017
Guests at Marni’s Spring 2018 show entered the venue through a dazzling, curious garden filled with outsize roses and enormous purple allium, twirly young topiary, and mature sheltering trees. According to Francesco Risso, the inspiration came from “two English gardens as seen by Tim Burton . . . with candies”—which is an elliptical reference to Willy Wonka and the imagination room that lies at the heart of the fictional chocolate maker’s factory.Which brings us to Risso, who now presides over the imagination room of Marni, and whose sumptuous, deliciously playful, and utterly perverse impulses are not dissimilar to those of Roald Dahl’s much-beloved character. This is Risso’s second catwalk offering in womenswear for the Italian brand and, by leaps and bounds, the most fully reflective of his personal aesthetic. And in a Milan season of largely quiet clutter—more of the same when it’s good, just more banal clothes when it’s not—it is a triumph. Risso offered a celebration of fashion history, 1920s to the present, deconstructed, reconstructed, precious but vernacular, glamorous yet generous.His starting point was the notion of a young woman on a skateboard with the languor of the ’20s in her posture. Her life, or that of her family or her culture, has been a “lucid accumulation of accidents” and her dress sense reflects all that higgledy-piggledy: she chops a ’50s cocktail dress to make a top, then opens the seams, explodes the silhouette, and voilà, it has a drop waist. She embroiders tiny pink roses on an old white mink that was probably her grandmother’s dressing gown in the first place. She takes a rich blue brocade that should be used for an evening dress and makes massive, puddling rave pants. She paints on her kitten heels and her frocks, often with the humor and deft hand of David Salle circa 1979 (yes, Salle lent the prints of girls smoking after Risso cold called him). She takes every double-knit ’60s maillot she can find, splits the crotches, and calls them camisoles.You get the picture. Think large proportions and all the artsy sexy awkwardness one loves from Marni, those clothes that cool girls adore and dull men puzzle over. Add incredible interior workmanship—lining details and inner pockets, a notion of “hidden beauty” so often promised in ready-to-wear but rarely delivered—and a slate of rarified textiles (duchesse, brocade, horsehair, taffeta) recontextualized as utilitarian.
Consider old pearl-and-metal jewelry bent and twisted haphazardly, one part granny, one part Calder.And just enjoy it. The duchesse skirts have elastic waists. A new handbag (the Claus) feels like a furry pillow. The slip dresses are embroidered with Gobstopper rhinestones. Don’t dismiss the curious runway assemblages as “intellectual” fashion; Risso is at one with the lotus eaters. As Charlie Bucket says of Wonka’s oeuvre, “Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy.”
24 September 2017
Francesco Risso’s Pre-Fall collection was his earliest outing as Marni’s creative director, presented quietly in January. On planet fashion, time flies at light speed, so insanely quickly you feel like you’re navigating a parallel warped universe. Since then we’ve seen two of his menswear collections and one women’s collection on the runway. Why, it feels like he’s already been there forever.“I was thinking about mystery boxes,” explained Risso when asked about the inspiration behind that first collection. Talking to him is great fun; he’s generous with his insights. His synapses are definitely open. Risso likes found objects; designing is a process of discovery and surprise. “I imagined every outfit as being a warm cocoon that opens up to reveal a dense, intricate inside,” he said. Coats, capes, and parkas in vibrant colors were ample and comforting, but they exuded a deceptive calmness. Once opened, one was hit by a tornado extravaganza of prints and colors. Underneath were dresses with hanging hems; asymmetries and draping abounded, bows sprouted up in unexpected places, and polka dot foulards morphed into huge blankets. “I wanted to convey a sense of shock. A vertigo, a visual delirium,” laughed Risso. Well, he hit the mark; it looked quite brilliant.Despite his carefully tended off-kilter sensibility, the designer has a bourgeois streak: If you’re Milanese you can detect it in a flash. It’s warped by a capricious urge that relishes rule-breaking—setting the visual bar higher in eccentric territory. The lavishly lined coats and suits that Risso concocted came with a pedigree, referencing the chic tailleurs that were worn in the ’50s and ’60s by the best-dressed ladies. Severe on the outside, perverse on the inside. Please come closer: You’ll want to take a look.
21 June 2017
The risk that comes with titling a collection “Lost and Found” is that people read too closely into the former at the expense of the latter. The reward is that it opens up the pursuit of discovery. For his second men’s show as creative director of Marni, Francesco Risso ushered guests through a darkened tunnel entrance that gave way to a bright industrial space where rows of color-blocked benches perched atop what were ostensibly clear, blow-up rafts. The effect was that of levitating subway seating, which, even if not the intended interpretation, set the stage for an outing that projected the odd, cerebral charm inherent to Marni. The clothes, as Risso explained lyrically afterward, were meant to “surf the typography of a city,” “invoke diverse objects,” and acknowledge the “nobility of coincidences.” Knowing this might help make sense of the randomness with which sailboats appeared on suiting and Hawaiian floral motifs merged with bookish retro ones.There were, however, signs of effort directed towards the assembly of the pieces themselves—not just how they came together at the end. Extra roomy pants ultimately fit just right—as though they had been borrowed and properly resized. Shirts weren’t simply deconstructed and reconstructed; they were creatively collaged and layered—sometimes held together with crochet seams, or tacked with superfluous swatches of fabric as DIY flourishes underscoring individuality. Of course, the fact that octogenarian ceramic artist Magdalena Suarez’s name accompanies all her uneasy drawings means that the guys attracted to these pieces can’t claim to have done the art themselves. But anyone who accessorizes with an illustrated running bib or sport bonnet as neckwear is essentially asserting his taste for outsider art over that which is blue chip. Risso, in other words, is presenting wearable clothes with a nonconformist touch. And while it may still be unclear where he’ll end up, he’s expressing himself boldly until he gets there.
17 June 2017
Francesco Risso fielded a backstage compliment on his debut collection (“It looks very Italian, [with a] ’70s vibe!”) with grace, even though he looked a little taken aback to hear it. “Well,” he smiled, “it’s about femininity and the women around me—so that must lead to being Italian!” This young and still fairly unknown designer does indeed come from behind the scenes of one of the strongest of female fashion cultures in Italy—Prada. Risso succeeded Consuelo Castiglioni at Marni, and now he’s taken on the other female-led, avant-garde house in Milan. In the next breath, he paid homage to the leadership of both houses. “Consuelo was always about freeing men and women from stereotypes. They are very inspiring women.”Suffice it to say, a visceral reaction to his collection set in around halfway through the show, with the entry of a brilliantly put-together combination: a shaggy purple coat with an orange collar, a high-necked orange crochet, a pale blue jersey checkerboard T-shirt, and hipster flares. From there on out, it was flower prints—Marni’s home territory. Risso came into his own with blurred-out ikats, punchy translations of ’70s Italian psychedelia, and delicate English sprigged cottons (styled in a new-generation way with sporty drawstrings and random layerings of bras on top of this and that).It’s far too early to call judgment on a talent in his or her first season; this is the systemic mistake made by an industry typically run by corporations who hire and dispose of creative talent at an increasing rate of knots. Still, on view here was freshness and potential—the kind of new-generation energy Italy really needs.
26 February 2017
Francesco Risso signaled his debut asMarni’s creative director with a runway marked by three digital art chambers alternating between striped vortexes and Second Life-style domestic scenes, which models walked through as if passing from one period of the brand’s history into the next. What were they wearing in post–Consuelo Castiglioni world? Noticeably rumpled clothes, for starters. Indeed, anyone trying to piece together the backstory might conclude that this season’s protagonist was too busy coding to consider ironing his micro-plaid pants and thrift store suits—all a tad too roomy (perhaps he’d also skipped a meal or three). When probed post-show for the general idea, the Prada alum explained, “It’s when you see a person on the street and you think, ‘Wow, what’s happening there?,’ but through the vision of a child.” He added: “Like a child on a computer tapping one plus one; it’s like announcing the vulnerability that you want to bring ahead to your adulthood.”If this description didn’t entirely add up, it did suggest that Risso was contemplating the gray area between youthful experimentation and grown-up self-expression, which, to be sure, has been a Marni tenet through and through. Risso also carried over the idea of oddball hero pieces, whether the coats in assorted fur checkerboard squares, or the quilted checked sweatpants with matching vests. As the show progressed, it became clear that the modified pajama suits and fur-patched jackets were designed to be seen. As in, no matter how much time this guy spends in front of his computer, he’s hardly antisocial. And when he goes out—be it to a gallery opening or a rave—he’s accessorizing his hand-painted outfit with a DIY utility belt or bucket hat repurposed from a shaggy throw pillow. Overall, this outing was creative in a way that will excite some guys and seem unhinged to others. For now, it paints a favorable picture of Risso as someone who feels no obligation to play it safe.
14 January 2017
If we were to imagine the Three Graces of abstract/conceptual design, cult leaders in thought and style, there'd be no doubt about Rei Kawakubo and Miuccia Prada being the first two, and Consuelo Castiglioni would surely be the third. What they all have in common is they are women of few words who have never allowed the noise of "fashion" to impinge on what they feel like doing. Their oblivious creative detachment allows new things to develop, usually first thought quirky, weird, and "artsy" (meaning definitely not man-attracting sexy ), but they all carry a worshipping sisterhood of mainstream refusers with them. Castiglioni'sMarnispoke directly to them today with a serene expression of the fusion of architectural planes and decorative techniques only she can pull off, though many try.Those who know how to read Marni collections, from the experience of encountering them in a store, know it's not head-to-toe prescriptive: You get in and you play and you integrate. That's what the opening white-to-beige-to-buttermilk section looked like—a modular composition of tops, skirts, coats, and pants, variously wrapped and tied with threaded-through nautical rope. The hip-widening poacher-pocket bags (a classic man-scarer) were optional strap ons.From there, she began dealing out beautiful dresses, ingeniously resolved asymmetries of pleats, drawstrings, and billowy sleeves. Issey Miyake's Pleats Please has been quoted on other runways, but Castiglioni's plissé experiments were her own, sometimes picking up a sense of peasant costume or Greek classical sculpture. Whether treated to her inimitable saturations of color (mint, raspberry, chocolate, bleached yellow, white), or to her prints with their dappled surfaces and micro florals, it was work that could only flow from this practiced hand. When designers are great, they can make clothes that can take us to another place mentally while allowing us to feel comfortable in the physical reality we have to deal with every day. That's what Consuelo Castiglioni, fashion's quiet goddess, has always succeeded in doing, and her audience stood to applaud her.
25 September 2016
There’s a kooky offness toMarni’swomenswear offerings, an intriguing quirkiness inherent in its signature combinations of daffy jewelry, oddball prints, strange colors, and out-of-whack proportions. Generally, it’s so wrong it’s right—all of that strange stuff adds up to something intriguing and engaging. A goofball elegance. Hitherto, it’s been lamentably missing from their menswear—maybe it’s a trickier sell? Or maybe Consuelo Castiglioni just took time to get her guy into his runway groove.Whatever. Who cares? This Spring season, Marni got its man down pat. It was brilliant to see.For Spring 2017, Castiglioni got stuck on Velcro. No pun. Well, maybe a little. It’s a simple idea, but it was deftly handled. She ran amok with the stuff, hacking shirts open and suspending them from tabs in bands of contrast colors; slapping Velcro on bands and belts to twist and distort the fit of cotton poplin tops; or simply substituting it for buttons on otherwise straight-up tailored jackets. It was all were reminiscent of the kind of easy-fasten shoes you give to preschoolers who can’t handle laces, there’s often a childlike glee to Marni’s clothes, no matter how sophisticated the end results may seem. Most interestingly, most every piece of the tailoring was sliced open in back and re-fastened with Velcro panels. Those clothes looked like hospital scrubs. A few of the floral prints wound up looking like microbes under a microscope. How dorky. How Marni.There were plenty of details that felt like they would appeal to that kind of Marni man—and even if you’re not one, you know those guys exist. The Marni man is gangly, skinny, invariably behind horn-rimmed spectacles, nose buried in a book, probably the source of inspiration for a Wes Anderson film. He’s interested in science, in art. He doesn’t own a television. He possibly wears corrective shoes—or maybe just like shoes that seem a little orthopedic. And he’ll hopefully have enough money to spend on satisfyingly tricked-out gear like this, full of details and buttons and tabs to keep busy hands entertained for days. The stereotypical masculine love of the “gadget” applies to these clothes. Geek chic. He’s carried a briefcase since he was 6—Marni offered a whole bunch more.That was a bit glib.
On a deeper level, it felt like Castiglioni finally nailed how to convey her Marni man on the stage of the runway—how the clothes should fit, how they should move, how that final “fashion” image should look, to express her message of masculinity. There is a message, too: intellectual, awkward, an interesting man in interesting clothes. Men who we are, finally, interested in getting to know more about. Bravo.
18 June 2016
To say that there’s no satisfactory tag to apply to theMarnicollection is the highest compliment to Consuelo Castiglioni. To give us something that jolts fashion out of its nostalgic complacency is extremely rare, and originality is impossible to capture in a sound bite. Yes, there were wonderful balloon-sleeved blouses, shoulder-molding cutaway capes, and stretchy ski pants, but anyone who tries to call that “Renaissance sport” or “Papal modern” ought to be laughed out of town. The thing to define is much subtler than that: What we saw was Castiglioni’s sequence of form and color, texture and accessories, clicked together in a groomed, classy vision of modern elegance. The sort that cuts through doubt and confusion—and just makes you want to put on your dangly earrings and dark lipstick and go out looking like that.Castiglioni never talks much about the emotional impulses behind her collections. “This time, the proportions were important; I wanted roundness,” she said, “and something romantic, but in a modern way.” Then she described the fabrics—which were often compact and molded, to give smooth structure to elliptical shoulder lines and dresses that stood out from the hips—and her surface techniques, which on at least two occasions were so eye-trickingly inventive you just couldn’t tell what was going on. What looked like a rectangle of shiny royal blue plastic sprayed onto a black-and-white menswear coat actually turned out to be a bugle-beaded hand embroidery following an organic pattern that had been enlarged many times on a computer. So too the velvety blue-and-white swirly pattern on an egg-shaped dress—derived from something digital, but then loomed as a jacquard in the couture way.Castiglioni has always been an experimenter in fabric and conceptual forms, but this time the whole put-together piece stepped out of the wearable art class to become stunningly chic. Why so? Something to do with the imprint of aristocratic Italian taste—its enviable eye for placing things together that have both richness and simplicity. To take just one amazing example: a black tabard top, short in front and with a kind of train, worn over a blouse with balloon sleeves in an abstract harlequin print, caramel-color stirrup pants, black pointy heels, and a pair of ’60s-influenced chain earrings. What do you call that—sporty elegance? Oh, never mind. Ours is not to name but to know.
Somehow the woman who used to be categorized as Milan’s hippie, eclectic eccentric just sent out a collection that places a new Italian glamour front and center on the fashion agenda.
28 February 2016
Femininity and angularity, languor and dynamism, instinct and rationality. The play of opposites is whatMarniis all about. For Pre-Fall, Consuelo Castiglioni stuck to the formula that defines her unique style. No need to stray from it; there was plenty to like in the collection, which offset quirkiness with a sense of elegant restraint.Pre-Fall collections are typically for smoothing raw edges, making the taste simpler, less spicy, easier to digest—a three-star Michelin chef’s recipe made more palatable. But the ingredients are so distinctive at Marni, a toned-down version doesn’t loose its intensity. Asymmetries and lean volumes were a recurring motif, as were details like coiling frills and furry pom-poms on pointy hems. Elsewhere, roomy slacks in thick corduroy dragged on the floor or were gathered at the ankle with cuffs, and crisp masculine tops were collarless and buttoned at the back, as if by mistake.Hybrids abounded, their designs rooted in geometry. An apron-cum-dress-cum-vest had loose, sliced panels that curved gracefully at the back; felted wool jackets grew dynamically cut lapels. A capelet-tabard-stole mash-up in patchwork fur wrapped around the waist. Macro flounces of the sculptural type graced a rectangular tunic/vest, worn with jumbo palazzo pants. Furs were neatly bonded; paillettes lit a dark palette with impromptu spark. Prints were idiosyncratic, as they usually are in the Marni universe: lozenges, pirouette figures, geometric confetti. It all came together in a rhythmic balancing act of apparently fractured elements, as if seen through a kaleidoscope. Lady Marni is a complex character.
19 January 2016
Consuelo Castiglioni has her woman down pat: She’s theeccentrica, dressing for herself, rather than others. Occasionally flashy, but never ostentatious, mixing day and evening, precious and junk with enthusiastic abandon. Regardless of the theme of Castiglioni’s biannual women’s collections, there is always a sense of theMarniwoman walking amongst us: She is frequently front row at the label’s shows, swathed in paillettes and tweeds and fur the color of boiled sweets, celluloid jewelry clattering as she applauds.The issue comes each January and June, when Marni presents its menswear collections, because the male incarnation of the Marni muse is far less distinctly defined. Castiglioni eschewed the runway for more than half a decade, showing her menswear on the rack and via lookbook. This time last year, Marni opted to step back onto the podium. Which brings with it a host of new challenges and demands. Namely, it becomes not about pieces—the coat, knit, or fur you gravitated towards on the rails in Marni’s showroom—but about the look, and about elucidating the person you eventually see wearing it. Stepping onto the runway means stepping up your game.Marni isn’t there yet with its menswear. There’s a certain ungainliness to their male offering, as if we’re looking at the son of the Marni woman, rather than her potential partner. Which is, of course, fine: Youth is something plenty of designers try to sell to us, with their skinny suits and cropped pubescent proportions. Yet it’s more that the runway message at Marni thus far winds up feeling underdeveloped. A work in progress, waiting for a growth-in-confidence spurt.So it was for Fall 2016, which had some great pieces—wide-cut coats, tight-buttoned blazers, a color palette of mustard, maroon, and eyeshadow blues that occasionally hit the right note and zinged—but not enough to sustain the energy a show demands. Castiglioni said this collection was about intimacy, that the message was personal. But many of the clothes felt anonymous, albeit well-executed and, sometimes, desirable. The first is an accusation you can never level at their female counterparts, regardless of your taste. The label’s signature furs were present in nutria scarves and knee-length coats, in slightly odd shades—courgette green, gingery red. They formed highlights, touches of theeccentricoCastiglioni seemed to have sadly cast asunder, for the Marni man at least. They were sorely needed—them and more.
Consider this a plaintive cry for next season, from the would-be Marni men. They are legion.
16 January 2016
Mentally undressing models is not the usual activity of a fashion reviewer. We’re here to evaluate clothes, not bodies. But atMarni, the mind couldn’t help inquiring: Whatwashappening under all those triangular, asymmetrical layers? The suspicion—hope, even—was that it might be a simple, anchoring slip, as the back views of some ofConsuelo Castiglioni’s looks gave a glimpse of satin and straps. From the front, the rigid leather and ponyskin camisole-like aprons and tunics of her first outfits seemed a clue that she was presenting an abstracted thought about the key garment of the season. Later on, the shape reappeared—at times as long dresses in oversize sport mesh, other times as plain wool structures with geometric chunks cut out of the skirts—and always amongst assemblages of other garments. That adds up to a lot to put on, all at once.Marni is a brand with a woman-friendly reputation for color and print, and this collection did have plenty of it. Castiglioni proved her eye for the right orange red, tobacco brown, and bottle green, which few designers would dare place in the same collection as egg yolk yellow, primary blue, and shell pink. But it was with her giant leaf prints on graceful elongated tunics over fluid trousers that the collection really hit its stride. It was then that the anxious viewer stopped worrying about what it would feel like to manage all those semi-garments and began to appreciate the chic neo-moderne metal and dangly acetate earrings and chunky lacquer bracelets that are such a Marni draw. No one will ever want this brand to go minimalist, but when Castiglioni shows a little less, she makes her customers want her more.
27 September 2015
Consuelo Castiglioni's Resort collection was one more reminder why "quirky" is a word that has always followed Marni like a faithful pup. Why, in the midst of a collection of typically idiosyncratic forms and clashing fabrics, should there suddenly appear a pony-skin and leather cowboy shirt, cropped over a denim bra and high-waisted jeans? Or a pink patterned velvet jumpsuit looking like something from Anita Pallenberg's closet circa '68? Actually, the questions answer themselves. Why? It's Marni. Just like the Urban Dictionary says, "quirky" is "weird in a good way," and Castiglioni is a past mistress of the outré. The sideways-slipping silhouettes, the peculiar proportions, the inverted layers that provoke the eye are staple ingredients of one of the most consistent visions in fashion. Lately, it's felt a little like Castiglioni was trying to dial down the quirk. Her interest has been more in purity of form. But, for some designers, Resort is playtime, and, this season at least, Consuelo joined them. There was a conversation going on between proper and perverse in her clothes, the way that strappy tops in eye-popping prints were layered over prim long-sleeved tops, or a very covered-up dress, falling primly to mid-calf, was cut from an equally loud floral print. In fact, it was the prints and patterns that kicked the collection into high gear, with a little help from those curiously luxurious fabrics that Castiglioni is so partial to. Her favorite was a crepe satin. But she liked the wrong side, thematteside. Quirk it!
23 June 2015
It's six years since Consuelo Castiglioni last showed her men's collection on a catwalk in Milan. Big shows lost their appeal for her as a way to communicate the Marni menswear message, and a series of artful lookbooks did the work perfectly well in the interim. So why the change of heart? As Castiglioni said after her show, "It's still our boy, he's no different."It was actually the success of a one-off presentation at Florence's Pitti Uomo in January that revived her interest in putting the clothes back on the catwalk. In making a real production of it, in fact, by transforming the Marni space on Viale Umbria with mirrors and a slightly canted runway that offered unexpected, even disorienting perspectives. That suited the collection, whose union of utilitywear and tailoring had its own little surprises: a three-quarter-length suit sleeve on a white poplin shirt, for example, or a jolt of surreal tropical print peeking out from under a sober gray coat. The palette of blue, burgundy, and tan was classic Marni. So were the slightly awkward proportions. The sandals with socks would probably have looked more outré if the rest of Milan hadn't taken up that particular affectation this season. Anyway, the sandals-socks combination suits the Marni man because he's always had an air of the earnest student about him. That certainly hadn't evaporated with this presentation. But then came lush ponyskin pieces—a gold coat, an inky jacket—as reminders that Mr. Marni isn't averse to showing off. And he's glad to be back on display.
20 June 2015
When Consuelo Castiglioni mentioned "twisted femininity" as a reference point for her new Marni collection, it didn't really strike an oh-that-sounds-new chord. Marni has always walked the skewed side of the street. But what did look new the minute Sophia Ahrens hit the catwalk today was thefierceness: Amazonian tunic, major belt, python boots and matching cross-body bag strap, hair dragged up and off the face, brows knit. Woman going somewhere, and best get out of her way.Backstage, there was talk about the cult movieHanna, with Saoirse Ronan playing a girl who was raised as a vigilante/assassin. Castiglioni was in love with the notion of a purposeful woman on the move. Her collection was infused with a sense of rawness, urgency—propelled by the ominous, pounding slab of John Carpenter music that Frédéric Sanchez had chosen for the soundtrack. Seams were ragged, fabrics raw-cut. One of the most striking effects was a floral print transformed into a jacquard that was brushed till it was part bald, part thick-piled. There were dresses that looked like bolts of fabric had been draped around the body and belted into place, no time for a finishing touch. The use of fur had a similar rough-hewn, patched-up flavor.But the sheer power of the look was much lessHannawarrior than vintage Hollywood. There was also talk backstage of Hitchcock heroines: not the Technicolor blonds, but the black-and-white stars—Ingrid Bergman inNotorious, say—except they tended to be victims. It was more an iconic ball-breaker like Joan Crawford who registered in Julia Nobis' finale look: a high-necked silk blouse attached to fur sleeves paired with a flaring tweed skirt appliquéd with a black velvet floral pattern that could almost have been something tribal, like the stenciled patterns earlier in the show. You could picture Mildred Pierce on a 21st-century rampage.The militant mood never let up. Those cross-body bag straps were Castiglioni's Buster Brown belts. And the major silhouette—the lean, elongated top over flared pants slit open at the hem—also had something of Mao's militarized women who would take Tiger Mountain by strategy. But it was an utterly convincing and forceful expression of Castiglioni's evolving vision. How far she's come.
1 March 2015
The practical consideration of Pre-Fall is that the clothes are going to linger longer in stores than any other season of the year. But how to anticipate shelf life? It's almost an invitation to play it safe. Consuelo Castiglioni opted for elegant elongation, a longer silhouette than usual for Marni and cinched for emphasis. And she showed a fluid bell-bottom trouser style, also new for the label. It dovetailed with the '70s redux theme that's rattling around fashion yet again. So far, so straightforward.But Marni is usually about color and texture, and, to a surprising and reassuring degree, Castiglioni let herself go with drifts of alpaca, intarsia-ed into a gilet and a jacket, and the fairy-tale fuzz of a sheepskin skirt that was attached to a fitted suede bolero. The prints that are a house signature were dark but no less graphic than usual. The interplay of feminine and masculine elements was subtle but forceful: from the simplicity of a shirt cuff on a windowpane shift and shirttails on a plain navy tunic to the complex mixed message of a dress adorned with heavy paillettes in sturdy khaki melton topped by an elongated version of something that in another life would have been a quilted hunting vest.The jewelry was, as usual, absolutely spectacular, with earrings and brooches in spherical, sculpted '70s shapes that mimicked the geometries of the prints.
20 January 2015
Marino Marini and Panda Bear set the tone for Marni's Fall 2015 presentation, which took place in Florence during Pitti Uomo. The former's abstract equestrian sculptures loomed over the runway in the museum named after him. The latter's new track "Boys Latin" filled the atrium with a pulsing, joyous rhythm.The collection was a juxtaposition of elegant and primal. Sculptural shapes came in the form of richly colored tunics done in bonded suede with zips and single vents. Oversize trenches and robe-like collarless coats added a loose, relaxed element. Fur—and there was lots of it, including alpaca, sheepskin, and goat—brought an animalistic vibe, while the tailoring was precise and sturdy-looking, with mismatched checks and flared pants.On the whole, designer Consuelo Castiglioni's new offering wasn't a collection with an agenda. There was no big push toward any particular trend or silhouette here—although it may have been the only place in Florence where you could find men wearing bell-bottoms. But there were many single pieces—those suede tunics and collarless coats, in particular—that were strong enough on their own to make it a Fall 2015 collection to remember.
15 January 2015
Marni is turning 20, and to mark the anniversary, Consuelo, Gianni, and Carolina Castiglioni turned Rotonda della Besana, a famous 18th-century building complex, into a massive flower market, selling not just plants but also witty, colorful garden accessories à la Marni. "Our own way to celebrate," said Consuelo. "No retrospective. We wanted to do something more in our spirit."The collection Consuelo showed today was also very much in the Marni spirit: a unique combination of the experimental, the graphic, and the purely feminine. The show opened with a blank canvas, a toile—the breathing space between what was and what will be. It ended with that same raw foundation, except that now it was decked with torrents of mirrors and crystals and explosions of raffia flowers.So we were definitely on a journey with this collection. From first look to last, the immediate impression was of a new kind of physicality for Marni. That first look—a plain linen shift, raw-edged—was tied with a judo belt. There were pieces that were almost monastic in their plainness, but when they turned on the catwalk, they had deep, sensual Vs at the back. Outfits wrapped and layered would erupt into a flurry of white cotton ruffles. And there was a steady accumulation of color. Picture that original toile as a canvas on which an artist splashed and smeared and worked stuff out.It was hard to pick highlights. Perhaps the pieces made from cut chiffon embroidered on canvas, a beautiful effect that looked like densely piled ruching. (Consuelo called it "summer fur.") Or the glam leather jackets bonded with lacquered flowers. Or the simple momentum of an asymmetrical skirt swirling around the body. But the flower market brought something else to the fore: the sheerly organic quality of Marni, the notion that one thing breathes life into the next. Consuelo had recently been in Bhutan, and the long sleeves and big cuffs of the school uniforms there impressed her so much she built them into her new collection. But there were also old Marni prints that reappeared here on jacquard silk. As a 20th anniversary collection, it was a perfect way station between the past and the future.
21 September 2014
Perhaps it was something as mundane as utility that tripped up Consuelo Castiglioni's men's collection in recent seasons. There was once such a winsome quality to the line. And then it became a lose-some/winsome, strictly pragmatic offering. That is not to say it didn't have its own arcane appeal, but it was interesting to come to Marni's latest show for men and find a utilitarian directness that also embraced some of the wayward spirit that makes the women's collection so enduringly fascinating. Prints, for example, always a staple, were in-your-face strong, as an ink splash or a paint stroke or a childlike floral. The signature ingenuity was evident in a suit jacket that reversed to what could pass for a hiking jacket. There were full, floaty dusters adding a different kind of volume to a collection whose visual presentation has too often seemed targeted at pigeon-chested ephebes. Castiglioni had French model Vincent LaCrocq photographed for her new lookbook, and that, at least, could be construed as an acknowledgment that it is, in fact, men who wear Marni. And such potential customers would presumably be gratified by clothes that flattered masculine gravitas. Even the regatta-striped shorts punched above their weight.
21 June 2014
Consuelo Castiglioni's Resort had the couture-ish soul we've come to expect from Marni—the sculpted silhouettes, the painterly fabrics, the handcrafted oddity of sheer chiffons weighted with crocheted hems—but the collection's heart belonged to a leggy dynamic sportiness that had distinct echoes of the '60s. The geometric intarsias, bandeau tops, zipped polos paired with miniskirts, and micro briefs under maxi coats, all with high-energy footwear to match, had an unusually girlish zing for Marni. The same athleticism infused even a coat cut from shimmering raffia, its back and sleeves in bonded jersey.The label's skill with skins was utilized to the energetic max with a little shift in forest green leather, which unzipped to reveal a flash of mint green leather lining, or leather jackets bonded with floral motifs, like the tulip planted on a hide shaded dusty rose. A bird-of-paradise print added a tropical flavor, but the most summery graphics were the regatta stripes artfully placed down one leg of a pair of trousers in white cotton drill.
17 June 2014
"Our world, but more than usual," said Consuelo Castiglioni after her Marni show. She's ever a woman of few words, but those words really counted for something today. Her catwalk offered a graphically distilled edit of everything that makes Marni Marni: oddball sportiness, intense artisanship, incongruous incursions of fur, ambiguous fabrics, couture-worthy attention to cut. But the standouts in the collection were the outfits that embodied the curious dialogue between the mundane and the marvelous that Castiglioni is able to maintain season after season. They came at the end of the show, combining skirts in prosaic military felt and bodices in natural canvas with pagan eruptions of feathers and paillettes and baguettes and what looked like grass (in actual fact, Dutch duck!).A creative tension between the sophisticated and the primitive will always color the personality of a house whose business is based on fur—Fendi's the same—but it's not always as motivational for Marni as it was today. Castiglioni indulged herself with big pelts artfully striped and intarsia'd into lush cocoons, and played them against neoprene'd outfits that were, in some cases, as athletic as a tracksuit (left-field, high-fashion revisions of this particular ensemble seem to be an under-the-radar theme in Milan this season). Outfits that were bifurcated by substantial zips were swathed in shaggy fur hoods, fusing industrial present and tribal past. There were also exaggerated silhouettes to compound the impression of a Marni woman who was almost aggressively confident—less quirk, more guts. More everything, in fact, than usual.
22 February 2014
The collection notes for Consuelo Castiglioni's Pre-Fall referred to "gritty expeditions," casting the Marni woman as an urban explorer. That would explain the somber substance, the almost masculine sturdiness of the clothes. Sure, there were flurries of comparatively lighthearted frivolity—plissé silks, dyed foxtail stoles and fur scarves, mini lengths in girlish pink, an abstract floral print, aleopardspot! —but they were largely concealed beneath heavier fabrics, stiffer silhouettes, and weighty layering, like jackets over coats. Solid accessories anchored the grit with a flourish, like Chelsea boots with gold toecaps or a bag in pony based on Castiglioni's own bicycle bag.Never mind Pre-Fall, this proposal often felt Pre-Winter. Those drawstring shorts in shearling, for instance—and the other shearlings, shaggy all over or shaved in front and shaggy in back. The last few Marni collections have taken a more serious, structured stance, possibly suggesting a shift of sensibility in Castiglioni herself. This one certainly did nothing to alter that impression.
14 January 2014
Consuelo Castiglioni's collaborations with artists haven't exactly been shout-it-from-the-rooftop affairs, but they've yielded some interesting little wrinkles in her menswear collections. This season, for instance, the work of three very different outsider artists was duplicated on shirts and tees, the most distinctive being a sort of vandalized floral.That was just one facet in a Fall collection that was, Castiglioni claimed, full of them. "Every type of man, except an astronaut," she said with a laugh. So, missing a Marni moonman, we got instead a pocket catalog of style, from classic tailoring, to sporting and military references, to a hit of youth culture in a long bomber (like an elongated MA-1 jacket) and shorts over leggings.Castiglioni's menswear has always paled beside the character she injects into her women's collections. You almost wish that one would transfuse the other, add more sparky style to the utilitarian substance of the Marni man's wardrobe. For Fall, that wish came a little bit true with elements of Marni's Pre-Fall creeping across to the men's line: a fuzzy mohair coat, for instance, or the detachable fur collars that could be used to luxe up any old outfit, especially in bright green mink. In fact, fur was all over the collection, bringing the menswear much more into the Marni fold. A goat coat layered over a beaver vest was the most extreme example, though the Bermudas in goat fur threatened to turn any man who tried them into the Great God Pan.
12 January 2014
There were two Marni shows this morning. The first played out as planned, with Sid Vicious howling "My Way" on the soundtrack as the models walked. The second was bedeviled by a power outage, which meant that, after a lengthy delay, the models eventually had to take to the catwalk in complete Sid-less silence. It was such a perfectly serene complement to the character of the clothes themselves that it was hard to imagine seeing them any other way, let alone with a Vicious holler drilling into your eardrums. So let's make that one for the Happy Accident.With her sporty visors, platform flip-flops, and bomber jackets, Consuelo Castiglioni did her own expert take on the athletic spirit that has gripped Milan this season (maybe Olympic fever had a particularly long gestation period in Italy). She also had a response to the boom in fashion flora: Her flowers were graphic, Japanese-y, ranging from a "Jack and the Beanstalk" vine to pixelated blossoms to allover petals that spectacularly hardened into jagged flints for the startling green suit at show's end. They were the strongest expression of the organic quality that shaped the collection.The clothes were at their most seductive when they were quiet: a sage green sarong; origami-folded pants; pieces cut from cotton organza, as ghostly as toiles; the long coats belted over voluminous trousers with huge cuffs. The throwaway glamour of the look evoked, in an entirely nonspecific way, the mood of the Man Ray portrait of Nancy Cunard with her armful of bangles. Aristo languor. Eccentricity, but strength of character. Marni in excelsis.
21 September 2013
Since Marni recently took over an old factory as its new multipurpose venue in Milan, it was tempting to see the huge industrial space as an influence on its menswear for Spring 2014, the first collection to be shown in Spazio Marni. "Industrial" was the word that Consuelo Castiglioni came back to when she was talking about the utilitarian spirit of the clothes: the huge parkas, the zips and ribbed waistbands, the sleeveless blazer, the snap-on details (like the apron on a pair of shorts), the flat, dry fabrics. But there's always a curious duality in Castiglioni's clothes for both men and women. They're never exactly as they seem. Those parkas, for instance: Their volume was capelike, almost romantic in an odd way. The utility was tweaked with a sporty spirit that felt fresh for Marni, as in an oversize, soft-shouldered bomber or a jacket with raglan sleeves in denim. A print of big polka dots was actually placed (technically complex, the very definition of a private pleasure for print cognoscenti; a pleasingly bold graphic for everyone else). And, however solemn the clothes appeared, they were superlight to the touch.Marni's menswear is usually subtle to the point of barely there insinuation, but this season, with the women's Resort collection in a showroom on the other side of Milan by way of comparison, there was a real sense of integration, and maybe even momentum. Barely there insinuation looked, for once, like hidden strength.
22 June 2013
The paradox of fall's lush severity reemerged in Marni's Resort collection—not as lush, not as severe, but still precisely structured, controlled—and still nibbling at paradox. Or maybe it was just Consuelo Castiglioni's natural affection for eccentricity that inspired her to line a sophisticated jacket in double-face wool crepe with worn-looking white cotton, or hem a suit, also crepe, in a thick wool fringe, or leave the collar unfinished on an otherwise lush brocade coat. A collection founded on one of Castiglioni's most impressively straightforward celebrations of femininity was undercut by the distinctly masculine slouch of a parka or an almost-military coat, and what might almost pass for a tracksuit. At a pinch, the bags (a cyclist's satchel) and sandals had a kind of no-fuss athleticism.On the whole, though, what stood out most was an intense womanliness. The designer was partial to a boxy tunic shape cinched over skirts or pants at the waist—or slightly higher—with a bowed belt. Skirts fell straight, just below the knee, or flared out peasant style. Add an elbow-length sleeve, and the effect was sleek enough that it made even a bordering-on-kitsch wallpaper-y print look like the height of sophistication. The richness and darkness of the color palette helped, too.
12 June 2013
Walking into Marni's show this morning, one change was glaringly obvious. The entire space was wrapped in a backdrop, a woodland-in-winter scene whose severe beauty immediately established a mood. "It's a really new atmosphere for us," agreed Consuelo Castiglioni. "Austere but romantic."The austerity already insinuated itself with last season's monochrome, but here it was even more stripped to the bone. Masculine flannels and tweeds were cut into strict, angular silhouettes, diagonally zipped, and paired with riding boots. But Castiglioni softened the hard edge with feminizing details—bustiers, corseting, pleating slashed to reveal organza inserts. And the clothes caught fur like a contagion. It spread from lavish stoles to gloves, bags, and boots, from a glossy band of beaver on a skirt hem to a capelet of the same on amaîtresse-stern coat-dress of charcoal flannel. The sobriety of a flapper-y gray tweed shift was entirely compromised by a huge yeti ruff. Alpaca was feathered into coats of an equally shaggy Himalaya-ness.The tension between the precise cut of the cloth and the tactile depth of the fur was clearly the crux of that "new atmosphere" Castiglioni referenced. If it was severe to the eye, it was soft to the touch. Maybe that was where the romance came in, as an almost surprising vulnerability. Tom Pecheux's red lip and Paul Hanlon's androgynous hair suggested as much. Even without the fur, the hard lines were softened. A boxy jacket and skirt, as plain as anything Castiglioni has ever designed, were shown in brushed mohair. And a stark black leather jacket was bonded to lush velvet. If that doesn't define the designer's hybrid of the romantic and the austere, it's hard to imagine what else could.
23 February 2013
Consuelo Castiglioni doesn't typically go in for the androgynous look. The Marni customer is a dress-wearing, print- and embellishment-loving girl. For Pre-Fall, though, she switched things up, casting masculine suits and military-inspired outerwear as supporting characters for feminine dresses in effusive floral prints. Belts, hitched high on the waist, gave the boxy shapes the girlish, A-line swing typical of Marni. Fuzzy extras like yeti gloves and fox and mink stoles with detachable nylon hoods in contrast colors provided the quirk. Count on Castiglioni to whip up the most creative furs around. This season's main contender is a white shearling peacoat with a gold foil exterior. Not even a pair of men's pants could dispel the shimmering charm of that.
20 January 2013
Consuelo Castiglioni's collections for men pose a curious problem. If her womenswear is a movable feast of color, texture, and provoking intelligence, her men's equivalent has often seemed like the sartorial equivalent of watching paint dry. Anddryis so often the word that comes to mind when one reflects on the resolutely low-key nature of clothes whose tonal changes and shifts in silhouette can be measured in micro-ticks, rather than the electric jolts that power the women's collections. Fall 2013 didn't upend that state of affairs, but it did introduce a gratifying wild card in the form of art director Dean Langley, who is working on a photo book about the collection that will be privately published by the Castiglionis in a month or two.Langley's vision for the project is a severe, monochromatic distillation of the post-punk seventies. "No Wave" is his own reference point. Maybe it was a professional awareness on Consuelo's part of seeing things through another's eyes that brought a sharper, stronger edge to the clothes. Coat hems were unfinished; trouser hems adjusted with straps, like a combat pant. There was an industrial feel to the metal closings on a leather jacket or the duvet layer that zipped off a gray flannel jacket. An exploded floral pattern on a pair of trousers could almost have been one of Paul Simonon's bleach splatters for The Clash. But there were also the signature touches of surreality that make Marni so special. An item as classic-conventional as a parka turned to reveal a back panel of rich nutria, like the beast within was now without. An equally classic oxford cloth shirt was infected with gray knit, as a long vertical band or as half-sleeves.It was, said Consuelo, the first time that a music element had been incorporated into the clothing, inevitable when you're collaborating with an English art director of a certain age. So the clothes had a beat. And, if it wasn't quite the rhythmic throb of rebellion that the designer fancied, it still put a little no wave lead in Marni's pencil for fall.
11 January 2013
The Marni invitation is usually a card of saturated color. This season's was blank white, the name embossed tone on tone—change was clearly afoot. On the catwalk there was a white cotton sundress that was as simple a thing as Consuelo Castiglioni has ever shown. That's what she was after: "More clean, more fresh, more light," she said. The prints that made Marni's name no longer seem to interest Castiglioni as much as proportion, and the best way to illustrate that is with a monochrome palette, a conclusion which, thanks to Cristobal Balenciaga, feeds the essence of haute couture. Not saying that Marni approaches such heights, but there was plenty in Castiglioni's black and white experiments with controlling volume today that echoed the shapely sophistication of a couturier.Still, the girl can't help it. She loves herself a graphic. The show opened with a section in checks created by an artful interplay of nylon jacquard tape and cotton ribbon. It was an airy, light embodiment of Castiglioni's game plan, and a well-judged appetizer for a series of sober, solid-colored outfits that focused on pure shape. But then Castiglioni dropped in some print: a sack-backed spectacular with a front panel of plastic paillettes that vibrated with hyper-color was a stunning reminder of Marni's authority in this area of idiosyncratic style. There was more to come in the form of a coat infil coupéover a skirt in a matching print.But it was the blankness of black and white that had clearly captured Castiglioni's imagination this season. It was easy to see why, when a handful of peplumed beauties made their way down the catwalk. Even easier with a closing outfit of a crow black coat shaggy with glittering splinters over an embossed skirt with the gloss of an oil spill. Also infinitely worthy of mention: the shoes inspired by designer Carlo Mollino, with platforms of Lucite or metal, and the jewelry, small and perfectly formed from wood.
22 September 2012
The resolutely low-key personality of Marni's menswear is occasionally a drag, especially given the wayward creativity of its female counterpart. You find yourself pouncing compensatorily on incremental changes like they were something precious, when often they are merely "precious." But the Spring 2013 collection rocked that placid little boat with its invigoratingly strong and coherent through line.And lines—and stripes—were what it was all about. The straight silhouette was elongated still further by the high closing of three-buttoned jackets. Striped cotton shirting was reconfigured as a parka, as the sleeves on knitwear, as a lining for jackets or trouser waistbands, which were designed to be folded down. That last detail had the kind of utilitarian edge that is a signature of Marni menswear. It was even more obvious in a worker's uniform of an indigo shirt and elasticated-waist pants, overdyed to give a light-absorbing depth of color.One feature of the collection that harked back to low-key Marni was the subtle use of sophisticated technical details. The band of color around the hem of natural canvas jeans was actually a placed print, an extraordinarily evolved way to achieve a relatively simple effect. Shirt collars were laser-cut, jackets cut on the bias for added texture. The label's famous fabric research yielded a nylon that did persuasive double duty as cotton jersey sweatshirting. Bonding added substance but not stiffness to a cotton mac and leather jacket. Not quite as subtle but still impressive were chunky-looking oxfords that werealmostas light as a feather.It wasn't just the lines; the collection also got a graphic kick in the ass from its prints, which played across shirts, tees, and cotton canvas suiting. Consuelo Castiglioni had fallen in love withWild Animals, a picture book by Dutch artist Rop van Mierlo, from which she borrowed a handful of images for tees. She also commissioned an exclusive original. The creature she chose was the ostrich. With which thought we leave you.
22 June 2012
Consuelo Castiglioni stepped back from her Resort collection and found herself disconcerted by its structured, almost couturelike precision. So she decided to mix it up a little. Dissonance, she decided. Something opposite, to add a little creative tension. Only she knows how she got from that point to cowgirls, but her decision guaranteed that the new lineup was an engaging face-off between grand old chic and Grand Ole Opry. The piped yokes and studded shirts, snap-closing blousons, and dipping hems were more Dale Evans than Dolly Parton. Circle skirts guaranteed that these were clothes you'd want to twirl in, and that suggested a whole new energy for Marni.Castiglioni's H&M collaboration was a smash, and she just became a grandmother for the first time. So, why not push the boat out? There was some logic in the western influence—it gave the designer a chance to explore some pretty graphic volumes—but it was more fun to see a riverboat gambler's frock coat translated into a dress or the decorative details of Mr. Nudie's country-and-western rococo (like a crystal-studded placket) carried over intoa Marni collection.Consuelo brought it all back home with a group of natural linen pieces stunningly embroidered with raffia. Echoing her summer hideaway on Formentera, the beads sat like berries in the midst of an organic fantasia.
19 June 2012
Maybe it was Paul Hanlon's Vidal Sassoon-influenced, heavy-banged, dead-straight dolly-bird hair that cued the response, but there was a 1960s edge to the Marni collection today. It was helped along by the white stockings, drop-waist silhouettes, and decorative elements like metallic discs and the big rhinestone brooches that defined a neckline. Two coats—one red leather, the other butter yellow patent—had a pop art zing. Mind you, against that relative rigor, there were also Orientalist red accents, gold brocades, a lean black tunic with slit sides over three-quarter-length pants, and red kabuki-soled shoes with gold metal toe caps, all of which looked like they'd been borrowed from Suzie Wong's closet. But that too was a sixties reference.Those associations may have reared their heads because Consuelo Castiglioni was brooding on a linear, architectural statement about volume with her new collection. That line of thought was a really big deal in the sixties, and the bold blocks of color here fitted with it. The extravagant print stories that are a usual Marni signature were noticeably absent. Therewereprints, but the graphic presence was confined to a tulip pattern and a naïve floral tracery.This time, the strength was in the shapes: the oversize shoulders of a snakeskin coat, the drape of another in a gold-flecked rockabilly tweed, the swing of a cape. It meant the collection was much more straightforward, maybe more restrained than usual. One interpretation: Castiglioni's collaboration with H&M had allowed her to get a lot of classic Marni out of her system, offered her pause for reflection, and pointed her toward a possible future. Expect more changes.
25 February 2012
The mix is what defines Marni. Season in and season out, Consuelo Castiglioni piles pattern upon pattern, clashes print with print. Her more-is-more aesthetic is trending at the moment; our eyes have adjusted of late to head-to-toe florals and neon shades. Even so, Castiglioni still has a way of making your eyes pop. With an egg yolk yellow sheepskin coat, say, or a brocade tunic and matching pants in mint ice cream green, the detachable collar in pastel sequin sprinkles.Her custom blend for pre-fall is a little bit rockabilly and a little bit jock, leavened with the label's signature sweetness. A fur and houndstooth coat worn with blue and white striped leggings, for example, was followed by a spongy royal blue top and a white tulle dirndl accented with fluorescent orange dots. Adding to the eclecticism: gold toe-cap ballerina flats and kilties with rubber soles and tufty fur totes. Even Marni acolytes might shy away from a tartan top and trousers set, but for every look like that, there was a simple green leather unlined coat.
22 January 2012
Consuelo Castiglioni defined her new men's collection as "classic pieces from the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies, viewed by a young guy in 2012." Sartorial classicism offers a man the kind of security that comes from the confidence of knowing he looks properly put together, but Castiglioni's young guy was clearly someone with a loosey-goosey take on tradition. He might throw a sizable V-necked sweateroverhis suit jacket. The banker stripes on his shirt ran verticallyandhorizontally. A detachable jersey collar added a pop of color to some of those shirts. And collarless coats were doubled with matching jackets to create a trompe l'oeil lapel effect.But if security was open to reinterpretation, Castiglioni played it straight with the notion of protection. Jackets, pants, and bags were quilted. Shoes had soles thick enough to lift feet out of the urban muck. And, most importantly, fur was used as an under-layer. "It's not to stand out, it's to staywarm," the designer insisted. Practical though that idea may be, there was also something endearingly primitive about it. Castiglioni seems to delight in such deliberately naive associations. One of her shirt prints was tiny aboriginal stick figures.
13 January 2012
Maybe it's a counter-reaction to the penny-ante horrors of reality TV, but Milan's designers are reaffirming their appreciation of the finer things in life. A couture sensibility stalks the land. Consuelo Castiglioni said that the essence of her Marni collection today was shaped by a prelapsarian innocence and purity. "But with a twist of the classic," she added. There was actually no need at all for the "but." The two notions were entirely compatible. The elegant, ladylike shapes of the new collection loaned themselves admirably to the sophisticated/naive shtick that has made Castiglioni's label a byword for alt-bourgeois chic. Just like hair-meister Paul Hanlon's unhinged bouffants—done but undone.It may have been one of Castiglioni's strongest collections if only for the simple fact that it was about clean, clearly defined lines. Almost everything was anchored by an organza underpinning, which elongated the silhouette to fit the stocking-socked heels. Over that, Castiglioni could float something as sparkly as a candy wrapper, tufty with trailing strands of Lurex, and get away with its paradoxical precision.
24 September 2011
Marni's men's collection is like an indie music label in the days when such a notion actually meant something. When Consuelo Castiglioni settled on sportswear in the 1970's, "before it got too technical," as the soul of her new collection, she opened the door to another of her quixotic trawls through a lo-fi past, the kind of time zone where boys bared pale legs and paired sandals with thick woolen socks. But where such looks have occasionally been a little bit bloodless, this time Castiglioni anchored the line with sturdy outerwear (particularly a spectacular pair of parkas) and solid footwear, very much in the spirit of her working man's wardrobe for Fall. Her alt-sportswear theme came through in what could pass for color-blocked workout wear. But alongside all that, she also indulged the connoisseur of the Marni shirt with worn-in fabric mixes (a knit collar on striped cotton, checked linen with jersey sleeves) and some very graphic prints that perfectly captured the idea of "future vintage" that was floating round Milan.
18 July 2011
Presenting your Resort line alongside the couture shows can be a risky proposition; garments lovingly labored over by hand have the potential to make the machine-made stuff look flimsy by comparison. Consuelo Castiglioni didn't have that problem with this Marni pre-collection. Not just because the fabrics had a substantial hand, from the sturdy black canvas appliquéd with gold leather she used for a smock and an A-line skirt to the spongy crepe of a pair of flaring, seventies-ish trousers. There was also the fact that a few of the silhouettes owed something to traditional couture shapes—take the rounded, three-dimensional look of the sleeves on a tunic, or the tulip cut of a long skirt.Prints once again figured big here. Geometric tile patterns echoed those on the label's Fall runway, but were several shades bolder; while an oversize violet keyed into the season's developing trend for tropical flowers. The Marni girl will find plenty here to keep her happy until Spring.
4 July 2011
It started in the pre-fall collection: the trimming of the quirk, a new emphasis on elegant compatibility rather than eccentric clash. Those impulses blossomed in the latest Marni show, into something where you could imagine a whole new audience sighing, "Ah, now I get it." Consuelo Castiglioni's own mantra was "severe elegance." She cited the rigor of Martha Graham, the precision of modern architecture. "I want to go back to the start, with simplicity and discipline," she said before her show. Long, lean, clean lines were elongated still further by platform shoes. But an even clearer means to Castiglioni's end was to make things match. Like the opening coat and skirt. Or the skirt and jacket a few looks later that seamlessly blended into the backdrop and the floor covering. Or the top, skirt, and bag a few looks after that, which were all cut from the same cloth. At one point, there was even a suit—or at least a double-breasted coat-dress over a skirt—in basic black. But, lest we forget this is Marni we're talking about, the coat had a swingy shirttail back.True, Castiglioni may have streamlined her sensibility, but she scarcely mothballed Marni's spirit. With all the emphasis on complement, there was still room for a fitted sheath whose short sleeves were composed of jutting black paillettes, or a sensational suit in a dissolving tartan. Suits are generally a safe option in fashion. The security offered by one of Castiglioni's versions was perhaps less reliable but more rewarding. And in keeping with that notion, the collection's leathers and furs were a little less than straightforward. The leathers, for instance, were bonded, which gave them an armorlike solidity. The furs, on the other hand, were toyed with—a beaver coat looked like it had been dip-dyed in jade green; mink jackets were carved into diamond patterns. There was a nonchalant decadence in such indulgences that suggested that the severity of Castiglioni's new elegance is ultimately anything but.
26 February 2011
Consuelo Castiglioni's Fall collection for men was hard-working, hard-wearing, and all the better for it. She injected the same utilitarian edge into her pre-fall range for women, with the same happy result. Even when the patterns, colors, and layers began to pile up in time-honoredMarnifashion—hand-painted yellow tweed over ruffled black and white polka dots, say—it felt like Castiglioni was keeping a lid on the signature quirk by emphasizing compatibility rather than clash. Multi-striped jacquards paired with windowpane-checked stockings might once have been a Technicolor challenge, but here they were sleek and accessible.Castiglioni's self-control was at its most impressive with the strong, straightforward outerwear, much of it puffa-based in muted military tones and accessorized with very functional mitts. When there wasn't quilting, there was shearling, artfully arranged on one coat in two different textures (sheared and curly) to create a trompe l'oeil effect.After all that function, Castiglioni indulged her love of form with a fabric-coating technique calledvernice, which loaned a lacquered shine to skirts and jackets. And she had a riot with her jewelry: old vinyl 45s melted and ingeniously reconfigured as necklaces of fortune cookies and flowers.
23 January 2011
One curious subtext in Milan this season has been the name-checking ofWall Street-style corporate sharks as style inspirations, but Consuelo Castiglioni looked to their exact opposite: the salt-of-the-earth blue-collar joes. These were clothes at their most utilitarian, cut from heavy, dry, hard-wearing fabrics like gab, felt, fleece, and a cotton/nylon blend. It was a good season forMarnito launch a denim line. The fabric was originally created for just such a worker's jacket and generously cut jeans.br/> Solid shoes looked fit for the factory floor. Even a dressier piece like the double-breasted coat in gray felt had a rough-and-ready, no-nonsense feel. Same with an unstructured suit in khaki cotton. But that isn't to say that there wasn't a fashion sensibility at work. What looked like a jacket and pants, also in khaki cotton, was in fact a boiler suit. Plain dark navy shirts were sweetened up with tone-on-tone prints: flowers, hearts, polka dots. A multi-pocketed jacket in washed leather was given extra movement with wool ribbing. And there was a sizzling jolt of red—which is rapidly emerging as the season's favorite accent—in a mohair crewneck.It was surely the directness of the inspiration that made this one of the strongest Marni men's outings in a while, and the collection was scarcely all work and no play. There were astrakhan hats and scarves, and a collaboration with Borsalino yielded some dandy trilbies.
15 January 2011
Backstage after her show, Consuelo Castiglioni seemed particularly happy with the collection she had just sent out. She felt she'd delivered the goods for the kind of self-possessed modern woman who would relish the Marni mandate: the polarizing print and color combinations, the surreal silhouettes, and everything else that made this outing a return to the willful, eccentric spirit of old after several seasons of relative serenity.If the alchemy didn't always work (the asymmetrical ruffles in today's collection would infantilize any woman who wore them), Castiglioni found valuable structure in the athletic undertow that's being felt in Milan this season. The hair and makeup had a go-fast aerodynamic quality. The models wore leather helmets like bathing caps. And there was an element of scuba and cycling gear in the fitted tops and the shorts that underpinned a lot of the outfits. The perforated leather coats at the opening of the show were an abstract echo of the athletic mesh that later appeared as the detailing in side panels, shoulders, and backs. They also initiated a group of laser-cut leather pieces whose directness felt new for Marni.But directness isn't really this label's MO. Instead, it was the randomness of a different outfit— a racing top with diagonal stripes over shorts with stripes going in the opposite direction, all of it wrapped in a honeycomb-printed asymmetric ruffled skirt—that spoke in Marni's tongue. Castiglioni found a bridge to conventional aesthetics when she covered that same top-and-shorts combination with a crocheted organza shift. Later, she added inserts of macro-paillettes to the organza. The unlikely resulting hybrid—athletics and luxury, in this case—was a finely honed expression of the Marni signature.
25 September 2010
A retro strain ran through Consuelo Castiglioni's Resort collection. Aside from the swags, ties, and ruffles and the emphasis on an hourglass silhouette, there was a governess-y tinge to a high-waisted skirt with a green striped satin blouse as well as to a rust-colored bibbed blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves. Castiglioni name-checked the Bauhaus for its influence on the graphic print of a long summer dress, and that design movement's resolutely unromantic quality hovered over the clothes. The costume jewelry, on the other hand, was all boldness and sensuality. Outré and prim in the same outfit: Castiglioni excels at that kind of face-off.
4 July 2010
"A graphic, anti-romantic study in proportions" was Marni designer Consuelo Castiglioni's description of her new men's collection. Cryptic, yet to the point, just like the clothes themselves. Castiglioni explored proportion in short-over-long layering, like a rain-cape (a kind of hoodie shrug) that was worn over a windbreaker, or a cropped blouson layered over a sweater and a double shirt. Doubling—and tripling—was another layer statement, as in a tri-level jersey tee, or a double-sleeved shirt that had gusseting down the side so that, as a Marni representative indicated, it "swung out" when you wore it. (Finally, the barn-dance mobility you've been craving.)There was more to engage the mind in some of the sterling outerwear in which Marni excels. For instance: a rubberized linen parka, a jersey-lined windbreaker, and a red raincoat that snapped all the way up the front and the back. This kind of sophistication was counterpointed by the faux naiveté of T-shirts that looked like they'd been hand-painted (or maybe just run over with a paint roller). And in that counterpoint is the personality of Marni's menswear. It almost steadfastly rejects easy acceptance—and then it throws you a curveball like the Doc Martens-influenced shoes in cobalt blue, or the sunglasses with mirrored cobalt lenses, resistance to which truly is futile.
20 June 2010
Unless you are a fully committed follower of Consuelo Castiglioni's studied eccentricity, the art of wearing Marni has to be subtraction. It's a fact evident amongst the crowd shuffling into the early morning show, checking out each other's clothes (the usual tribal preliminary at every gathering). Here is proof that a striking piece of shearling, a knit with a singular color, a fur accessory, and so on can be proudly carried off by chic women whose personal style has nothing to do with the full-time Marni freaks.This season, the subtractors might have to work a little harder. As total looks, this collection had some wacky ideas: big, jazzy seventies upholstery-type patterns smothered all over suits and matching bags; tops with 3-D stand-out peplums over bulky skirts; and Bermudas, Bermudas all the way, even one pair with bias flares at the knees. Still, for the gimlet-eyed shopper, there were, as always, gems to be smuggled out of this collection, the kind she can wear in the safe knowledge that they're not going to add 15 pounds and a slight look of the unhinged to her appearance. Two skirts in aqua wool, one cut in a circle and the other with a flirtatious flip in the back; the perforated leather boots; and the richly pailletted tops, as well as the fur-front vests—these could all be effectively deployed to perk up a normal wardrobe.There's no doubt that the Marni sense of color is exceptional—and a big part of the attraction, as it makes for favorite pieces with a long life. This time, Castiglioni's palette—brown (the shade of milk chocolate) and ocher, dusty pink and oxblood red, and that zinging bright turquoise green—was, as always, beautiful and artistically chosen.
27 February 2010
The Marni woman's innate eccentricity found expression in Consuelo Castiglioni's pre-fall collection, less in an extravagant jumble of color and print than in the repurposing of strictly utilitarian items like the nylon rain cape the Brits call a pac-a-mac, or the quilted jacket known as a husky in the English countryside. Husky quilting in its distinctive green metamorphosed into a cutaway jacket, high-waisted shorts, a skimpy little all-in-one, and a long dress that could pass for eveningwear à la Marni, worn with a quilted belt that looked like a tiny skating skirt. The pac-a-mac was flipped to form a handkerchief-hemmed skirt and paired with a gold lamé top, another exercise in glamorous utility (or utilitarian glamour). The collection added new meaning to the notion of separates by offering pop-on hoods and capes and elbow-length leather-and-quilting armlets (there were matching boots) to build an outfit, with shearling mitts, like yeti paws, as a finishing touch. The ingenuity and toughness of these pieces made up for more whimsical items, like the frilled pajama pants in a flesh-toned crepe, in the same way that the exploded houndstooth was a much stronger pattern than the bleeding polka dot. In fact, this was one Marni collection where the hard edges had all the charm—and it was all the better for it.
7 February 2010
Many thoughts chase through the mind while watching Marni. To start with, you're curious about what's new: This time, the girl's got a hippie head scarf tied over artfully disheveled hair; dangly flower earrings; a terra-cotta duster coat over odd, stripey leggings. You wonder if you're getting the point—are the silky, floppy trousers and jackets pajamas? You fret over how difficult the muted plaster pinks, mousy beiges, and rusty browns are to name. You smile at the fact that Marni polka dot comes in spots of variegated sizes. You clock a subdued Deco twenties thing going on in the knits. You like the high-waisted, vertically striped knitted skirts, and write down "return of kitten heels." You note the vague link between some puffy-collared, putty-colored sleeveless jackets and the military trend. You're sure you get that dangly earring now. You get a bit bored. You perk up at the bright red and yellow blurry fifties flower prints and the sequined jazz-age chiffon bits and pieces. And then, when the finale finally comes, and the girls file out at high speed, you think, "Oh, that looks good, all together."In other words, it felt like a longish haul to sit through this Marni show. It could have done with a harder edit and more of Consuelo Castiglioni's much-loved summery print and color. But then again, the cumulative effects are gently compelling, and if this collection won't change the face of fashion, never mind: Its followers will like it just the way it is.
26 September 2009
"She's a kooky, really rich girl, who likes to play a little with couture pieces but mixed in a young way, slightly haphazard and mad." That was Consuelo Castiglioni's party line on the Marni girl she envisaged for her Resort collection, though you could say that same description fits the Marni girl pretty much any season. There was the same attention to fabric research in silks that look hand-printed, for instance, or in a tweed tulle shot with Lurex. And there was the same vintage-y feel in a dress, say, with pintucked bodice and plissé silk, or in loafers worn with deliberately baggy socks (very Mary McCarthy). But, if anything, the seductive Marni madness was more muted than usual. Delightful details like chalked-on pockets and lapels for cashmere knits were still there, but the subtext of the collection was complement, not clash.
29 June 2009
Marni for Fall was a rich, dark layering of texture and iridescence pulled together with a unique, brisk, and realistic elegance. Quite how Consuelo Castiglioni does this is hard to convey, because the list of components can read like a recipe for wild and eccentric confusion. For starters, there were mink earmuffs and trapper hats, fur mitts and ski gloves, goggle sunglasses, garlands of antiqued gold flowers, woolly checkered tights, and stacks of bangles. The clothes, too, were a description-defying conglomeration of fabric, fur, and knit: grid-patterned metallic brocade, plain felts, patchworked jacquards, evergreen fox, chintzy roses.For all that, Castiglioni's deft handling of palette and proportion made this one of her most controlled collections yet, as well as a distinct step away from the loose-lined assemblages she often deals out. That was down to the simplicity of shape and the sporty elements woven into the mix. Squared-off boxy coats and tunic dresses were interspersed with subtle interpretations of jogging pants and parkas. One tweed coat with a fur panel in the back came with a protective parka shell to peel away and tie casually at the hips. In total, this qualifies as one of Milan's most inspiring collections, refreshingly carried off without a hint of backward-looking reference and considered in a way that achieved a rare balance between creativity and reality. These clothes don't demand any stretch of the imagination to see exactly how, and where, they'll be worn.
28 February 2009
Consuelo Castiglioni likes to talk about her Winter Edition pre-collection as the basis of a Marni wardrobe. A black shearling cape, a Kelly green plaid trench, and a long brown leather vest all fit with the concept of "trendless pieces to keep and wear forever." Still, it felt much sportier in sensibility than her runway shows, with racing stripe pants, zip-front track jackets, and a black-and-white check—like the starting flag at a car race—on a drawstring-neck shift dress. But there was plenty of Castiglioni's signature quirkiness, too, including doll-print T-shirts that play back to thevideoshe made to promote the line.
26 February 2009
It's one of the highest accolades for any label when it can be said, by all and sundry, insiders and outsiders, that it "owns" a look. Marni has reached that serene plateau of development and is reveling in undisputed ownership of print, color, and the magpie mix-up. That means never having to grasp nervously for an extraneous trend. Downbeat dressing? Restraint and somber color? Not heard of here.Among her multi-textured, many-layered spots, stripes, blurry checks, painterly abstracts, harlequin lozenges, and splashy fifties flowers, Consuelo Castiglioni wove in an untrammeled sense of optimism and continuity. Her striped and frill-fronted cardigans; sparkly loop-fringe mini boleros; and dense, shimmery embroideries of multicolored spiky plastic paillettes were just some of the star moments. The bigger success, though, is how Castiglioni flings it all together, ties it up in the middle, adds a kneesock and a clunky platform, and yet still somehow manages to stop short of busy confusion. That simple/complicated knack is what keeps Marni lovers coming back for more, as well as the knowledge that the collection is a cherry picker's bonanza full of pieces that lend themselves to myriad personal styles.
23 September 2008
It's highly unlikely that the name of "Helen Schjerfbeck, the early twentieth-century Finnish portrait artist" will ever again be invoked as a fashion influence. But that was only one of the unlikely features of Consuelo Castiglioni's latest men's collection for Marni. Details like the semi-trapeze volume of the shirts, the deeply pleated swing back on the jackets, and the three-quarter sleeve on a coat suggested—to these eyes at least—women's haute couture. And Consuelo was buying the idea, though her preferred terminology was "elegant volume." Still, it wasn't exactly elegance that came to mind when the elasticized waistbands of underwear began to appear. They had shirts tucked into them! And they were worn under shorts with a curiously generous seat.That's not the first time a disconcerting boarding-school boy chord has been struck in a Marni show, but it highlights a frustration with this collection. While the women's range forges on into spectacular new territory, with the show as an opportunity to present what amounts to a manifesto, the men's is so subtle (and consummately wearable when it hits the shop floor) that it just lies there on the catwalk—unless it's given an incongruous little stylist's twist. That said, you could take away proposals such as the "new" suit (matching car coat and pants) and some very appealing accessories.
23 June 2008
In a season when "simplicity"—or, more accurately, a redefinition of the dead term "minimalism"—is preoccupying fashion debate, Consuelo Castiglioni filled in the blanks with color. She has a painterly eye for an offbeat choice of shades: dove gray against sugar pink, emerald with beige, sharp yellow and dusty mauve, muted pastels butting up against the odd shocking-bright hue. The shapes? Well, they were the lumpy-fit Marni classics that have unwittingly spawned a zillion cruder replicas: loose tunics, clunky cropped pants, quirky capes and dresses with sleeves cut to pouf out in unexpected directions.Layered up, it made a statement about color-blocked, tiered dressing and contrasting textures, topped off with dyed-fur gilets and capelets (a reminder of Marni's beginnings as a fur house). Truth to tell, there wasn't enough forward momentum in the clothes to break new ground—even in the prints, which were mainly limited to a couple of shadowy checks and a swirly pattern, possibly inspired by stained-glass windows. Still, the accessories picked up the slack: Stripe-printed tights and socks, leather gauntlets, nerdy-chic sunglasses, furry backpacks, sequined tie-on neckpieces, and open-toed platform knee boots were all quirky items that will keep the faithful very happy indeed.
19 February 2008
What is it about tops for men that close at the back? They suggest a helplessness so deeply transgressive that it's a wonder more designers don't tap into their power. Consuelo Castiglioni offered a tunic top in her latest collection that closed with a zip all the way up the spine. "Would you zip me up?"—a line of pre-party domesticity in a thousand Hollywood movies. Except, of course, it's always the woman doing the asking.Castiglioni is scarcely a sexual politician of Miuccia Prada's ilk, but her new Marni collection nevertheless posed a question or two about the contemporary male. Restraint bordering on restriction was a subtext. Aside from that back-zipping item, the collection was defined by a kind of capelet/shrug. When this fragment of a turtleneck reined in a suit jacket, it had a kind of armorial flair. It also embodied the collection's short-over-long proportion, as in jacket sleeves cropped over much longer shirt sleeves, or a bifurcated navy sweater. There was an intrinsically goofy boyishness to such a look; the glasses with their heavy resin frames helped. But what brought one up short was the plangent tones of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My" on the soundtrack. Did this most elegiac of songs offer a clue as to what Castiglioni was trying to say about that contemporary male? And the fact that the furs, a Marni signature, were weasel (surely a fashion first) was simply more grist for the mill.
14 January 2008
Marni has evolved into a staple formula that has moved from the eccentric margins to become one of the brands upon which Italy's pride as a style leader rests. Consuelo Castiglioni's taste in arty textiles, lately sharpened up with an injection of shiny techno surfaces, is absorbed by the mainstream within nanoseconds—a double-edged compliment many designers would kill for. How's she reacting to that pressure? Apparently by blanking it.Instead of rushing forward, Castiglioni took the don't-mess-with-success approach for Spring. Her easy-on-the-body loose-waisted shifts with their wonky-but-right abstract gathers and tucks have been seen before, though each merits praise as a one-off canvas for an exceptional print. This time, the color register ran through forest-y and watery greens to purple, mustard, grays, browns, cornflower and iris blues—only interrupted by a short blast of fluorescent orange somewhere in the middle. That inevitably drew the restless eye to seek out the things that are different in this collection. Qualifiers in that category were the stark white dress with plastic stones implanted in the neckline, cute petaled cone hats, tinsel bags, and the sharp half-moon sunglasses, which might jolt the market for giant face-covering shades in a new direction. Otherwise, Castiglioni didn't seem overly concerned with breaking too much new ground. That's sound from a brand-consistency point of view, though it slightly dashed the hopes of a crowd hungry for stop-the-press news out of Milan.
25 September 2007
No one could ever accuse Consuelo Castiglione of lacking a sense of humor. For spring, the Marni designer offered the perfect simulacrum of the kind of outfit a particular species of Englishman might wear to the beach on a cloudy day: dark-gray knit top, long navy shorts, socks, and sandals. And, in fact, that outfit touched most of the bases of the collection. The shoe of choice was indeed the sandal, and the palette was a resolutely sober symphony of grays and blues. (One wag in the audience suggested that the clothes would be better viewed through the piece of pink acetate included with the invitation—it would've added a healthy tinge to a collection that was subdued to the point of summer-denial.) The little-boy edge of the shorts with socks was amplified by tiny Peter Pan collars on shirts. Shrunken tailoring extended the notion. And it was a tad disappointing to find almost none of Marni's cultish signature shirt prints on the catwalk. There was one that featured brushstrokes or shadows, another a broken grid on a shiny graphite. Where the house remained most true to its spirit was in outré fabrics like techno paper (for shirts) or the nylon that was used in blazers and cabans. And the most promising accessories were the sunglasses, which sported a vintage sci-fi feel.
25 June 2007
Legion are the women who want to be in the Marni-girl gang these days. On the runway, designer Consuelo Castiglioni's knack for layering up sporty-techno bits and pieces with shiny black PVC and odd shots of bright color and print is pushing this label out in front as one of the most refreshing forces in fashion. Last summer, she simply put sport-leggings under her favorite tunics, and the world ran after her. Now that she's sneaking elements of technical outdoorsy clothing into her wardrobe, the same thing will happen again. One glance at Marni's genius nylon platform-soled ski boots will set off a fan avalanche, guaranteed.It's partly the designer's talent for striding ahead without breaking continuity that does it. Her Marni girl has often been typecast as an eclectic, original spirit, but Castiglioni's no woolly thinker: She follows her ideas through from one season to the next, and people love her for it. Thus, she's playing with the same sort of shapes, like plain loose tunics and gray parallel pants, but is now mixing them up with nylon T-shirts, neoprene vests, PVC skirts, and down linings, then cinching it all in with a hefty webbing belt. If this sounds a bit of a mess, it's not—the really clever part is that the cheerfully arty charm of Marni carries it all along. This season it's there in the bright, multicolored marbled prints; the color blocking of magenta, royal blue, and green; the shaggy beaver and goat-hair coats. In the end, Marni achieves a unique, offbeat glamour along with a life-enhancing playfulness that is irresistible.
20 February 2007
Marni's menswear catwalk debut joined the parade of Milanese designers paying homage to what the show notes called "the classical man's wardrobe," but Consuelo Castiglioni's sense of classical was anything but conservative. For starters, she underscored her silhouette statement by kitting out her men in cashmere jersey leggings, which emphasized the boxy volume of the jackets up top. The cardigan jacket she presented as an informal alternative to conventional structure was well in keeping with the luxe-boho ethos that launched Marni to the world—same with the astrakhan coat or the winter-white blazer in washed leather.But, as Castiglioni has made quite clear with her women's designs, there is now much more to the Marni label than artisanal bohemia. In fact, the lean precision of this men's collection might appeal to anyone still jonesing for a Helmut Lang fix. It wasn't just that superfluous detail was removed or hidden. There was also a sense of a reduction to essence in a navy overcoat, a single-button suit, or a trim parka. The geometric blocking printed on a shirt was the linear antithesis of Marni's already-classic retro-styled shirt prints. Perhaps that's what this collection was ultimately all about: new classics.
16 January 2007
The test of a designer's true popularity is the number of industry professionals who turn up to her show wearing her clothes, and by 10 a.m., as the audience assembled in Consuelo Castiglioni's edge-to-edge coats, egg-shaped dresses, quirky sweaters, and clumpy heels, the gathering looked like a Marni convention. They got what they came for: a collection of simple-seeming but ingeniously cut pieces, sharpened with a new dash of sportiness and accented with shots of bright patent to modernize the neutrals of spring.Castiglioni worked on the tough-to-wear difficulties inherent in the concepts of "volume" and graphic tunic-dressing that surfaced in last winter's round of collections. Her to-the-knee tunics were pulled in at the front with a threaded-through chunky belt that then left the back to float free. Under that, she put cropped sport-leggings and high, patent-leather, wood-block clogs.Marni's signature dropped-shoulder looks and circular cuts were made up in light, papery, waffled, and coated fabrics in shades of white, stone, slate gray, and plaster, and there was a re-introduction of prints—some commissioned from the artist Richard Prince. The negative here was a slackness in the edit, and to non-converts, much of it came over as predictable. Still, the faithful left happy and—as is customary with Castiglioni— the news from her show (this season it's going to be the breezy anoraks and sporty pieces) will carry far. Afterward, asked how she feels about being so widely copied, she smiled: "It's a bit not nice. But in a way, it's a compliment."
25 September 2006
Marni menswear treads softly and carries a big stick, its unshowy subtleties inspiring an almost irrational devotion in a small, but growing, band of disciples. Those acolytes will be pleased to know that the Spring collection sees a return of Marni's signature vintage-looking prints, slightly toned down but still with a graphic edge that brings to mind curtain fabric in the Bates Motel (and all the more irresistible for it).Displayed in a showroom rather than on a runway, these clothes featured a wealth of the arcane detail that Marni-ites expect. One dart on a tailored jacket opened at the bottom to create a hidden pocket. Cashmere knits were worn inside out, which lent them a slightly fuzzed texture. Fabric treatments gave gabardine a sheeny tonic effect. Jackets and coats folded into little bags, pac-a-mac style. And cotton shirts had drawstring hems, a tidy option for men who like to leave their shirttails flapping.These quietly skewed touches are a big part of Marni's appeal, the sartorial equivalent to a secret handshake. And the fact that more and more men are succumbing to the cult is obvious from the burgeoning range of accessories, functional here in big canvas totes, almost glamorous in leather bags with a coated finish.
29 June 2006
It's not easy to take those current buzzwords—"restraint," "sobriety," and "volume"—and interpret them in an understandable, attractive way. At Marni, however, Consuelo Castiglioni had it all worked out. From her first outfit—a straight-from-the-shoulder tunic over a narrow skirt sharpened with white gauntlets—she presented a collection that took on plainness and ease in a way that was positively chic.The success of Marni's new minimalism came from the clever way Castiglioni treated offbeat combinations of fabric, texture, and color. She did slouchy, low-crotch menswear pants, and brought lightness and movement to a structured gray double-knit jersey top by patchworking it to chiffon in the back. She also made sense of graphic cap-sleeve dresses, balloon sleeves, and her signature edge-to-edge over-belted coats by showing them with gray ribbed tights and great three-quarter-length quirky boots, which came with a tiny slice taken out of the toe.The collection made potentially somber tones of gray vibrate beautifully together, offset against navy, burgundy, and pale, plastery shades of pink and ecru. Marni's gentle rigor carried through to long, slim jersey evening dresses, high-belted in contrasting slivers of patent. These marked a bold step away from the loosely assembled, flower-print, hippie-dippy beginnings of the label, but the measure of its success lies in the fact that Castiglioni has moved forward in a way that seems less like a big departure than a natural progression along her own arty road.
20 February 2006
Consuelo Castiglioni is a case study in Milanese fashion. In a city where so many lines scramble to latch on to every passing trend, she has steadily progressed from the margins to a position of influence—like Miuccia Prada before her—by staying true to herself. We all know what "Marni-esque" means: It's shorthand for a guilelessly studied assemblage of fifties and sixties prints and anti-fitted shapes, which are now copied all over the place.For spring, the Marni pieces we expect were there: the short, wide raglan-sleeve fifties jackets, the loosely fitted summer dresses, the duster coats pulled in with belts—all made with that familiar air of happy accidents at the home sewing machine. This season, the offbeat colors—ochre, ecru, salmon, emerald, charcoal, violet, pimento, and washes of blue—were drawn from Castiglioni's modern art studies (she cites Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, Ross Bleckner, and Ugo Rondinone). But it's her odd eye for an accessory that's now coming through strongest. The quirky mix of patent leather, string, resin discs, plastic plaques, big clunky buckles, and foil sequins worked into belts, bags, and jewelry adds something completely new to a look that now has fans shopping in hordes.
26 September 2005
Just when we thought we had the Marni girl down as a sunny second-generation flower child, a hoarder of pretty bright prints and bonkers haberdashery accessories, she turns sober on us. For fall, she seems to have entered a fugue mood, which, in a way, is understandable, considering the general drift toward grayness in the fashion weather this season. On the other hand, black, brown, navy, shades of beige, and (yes) gray aren't naturally the colors that suit her playful character, and that cast a cloud over this collection.Marni's deliberately imprecise cut, curvilinear volumes, gathered egg-shaped skirts, and three-quarter-length sleeves, as well as the homemade fifties dressmaker quality of the clothes haven't changed. That will be enough to please the ever-increasing band of international followers who've hooked up to the ragtagnouvelle vagueMarni caravan. But designer Consuelo Castiglioni hasn't altered her simply belted, regular-looking fur coats either, and that's more problematic. Marni started off as a pioneering revivalist in that category, but a sense of creative standstill added to the impression that the collection as a whole is marking time. Even the solid, sensible slingback platforms and leather bags, now shorn of their dangly doodads, added to the general sense of downbeat calm. It was perfectly fine, but when next spring comes, the girl needs to start moving cheerfully on.
21 February 2005
With her country-fresh pink cheeks, bird's-nest hair, and enviably serene smile, the Marni girl projects an easy, all's-well-with-the-world outlook. Step over her threshold, and you're in a place of slightly batty loveliness, where clothes have the touching resonance of sunny days, and getting dressed seems like a series of happy accidents.Designer Consuelo Castiglioni picked up her spring vibe from a couple of handcrafty, nostalgic artifacts: a Hessian place mat naïvely appliquéd with birds found in Portobello market and a bright-green flower-printed cotton sixties swimsuit from the L.A. vintage store Jet Rag. She teased out the essence of those oddly contrasting artifacts and wove it in to her existing passion for fifties kitchen-curtain prints, mattress stripes, and glitter-shot fabric.Result: a collection of pretty egg-shaped skirts, Empire sundresses, duster coats, and shrunken knits, often pulled together with sparkly belts or a humble piece of string. The Hessian table mat turned up as a burlap, birdie-embroidered skirt, and the swimsuit pattern in cheerful printed terry boleros and frocks. Castiglioni also made her first excursion into eveningwear, in bunchy pearl-gray taffeta dresses. As with everything else in this collection, they were charm personified.
27 September 2004
The typically dreamy, barefoot-in-the-kitchen Marni woman has become increasingly chic over the past few seasons. For winter, she's done her hair in a cool rockabilly quiff, donned high-heeled pumps and a fur shrug, and apparently purloined pieces from her man's wardrobe to go with her own favorite vintagey finds. "I felt it was time to be a little more grown-up," designer Consuelo Castiglioni said, "and to have a certain luxe, but without ostentation."Castiglioni did "eccentric" years before the fashion community began to use it as a term of approval. So, it was interesting to watch her clean up her silhouette, cinching waists with corseted obis, and calm her colors to classic beige, gray, navy, and bottle green. If that sounds a little dull, it didn't play that way. While the gray flannel trousers and fine-gauge sweaters looked new, there were also quietly confident renditions of all the things—three-quarter-sleeve coats, romantic prints, chiffon dresses—that the label's followers love to collect.Most interesting, though, is the turnaround in the look of Marni's furs. The house started out with a mission to change perceptions about fur by creating playfully irreverent, undone patchworks and shapes that would look like completely different animals from the things Mom used to wear. Now—lo and behold—fashion has gone full circle. Marni's fall furs look almost exactly like softer renditions of fifties and sixties shrugs, boleros, and capes—and are all the more irresistible for it.
25 February 2004
Consuelo Castiglioni’s early Marni collections sometimes looked like the artlessly lovely results of a girl’s home dressmaking classes, but she has moved on from all those seasons of naïve rosebud cottons, evolving to a point of graceful accomplishment. And while her work has always been distinguished by her affection for vintage-style fabrics and love of color and print, she also knows how to work those feelings in the right seasonal direction. For spring, she conjured a delightfully easy, nonliteral look out of the current obsession with the fifties.A salmon pink-striped three-quarter sleeved coat opened the show, worn over a silky skirt in beige with white polka dots. Another coat, this one in lime, came with the polka dots billowing out from a loose lining. The deft color mixes—teal, turquoise, mint, raspberry, biscuit, and silver—looked mouth-watering, as did the prints: amusing versions of scribbly fifties curtain material, made into witty plastic swimsuits and canvas duffel bags.The Marni twist—quite literally—came in the curved cutting and piecing techniques Castiglioni used to skew the retro silhouette, producing intriguingly puffy, rounded sleeves and dropped shoulder lines in jackets and coats; sexy, narrow bias-cut striped pants; and subtly rethought T-shirts and knits. But for all the experimentation—which also showed up in the technically enhanced, laundered couture fabrics—this was a collection that made summer dressing look beautiful and effortless.
4 October 2003
Where have all the flowers gone? The fall breeze has blown the faded roses clean out of the Marni garden, leaving something sharper, shorter and chicer in their place. Consuelo Castiglioni shifted her scene this season, away from country-house antiquey fabrics toward an artsy reinterpretation of late-’60s retro.Her eclectic bohemians have forsaken their wispy layers for high brown leather boots, smart knee-length shorts and minidresses in Sonia Delaunay–esque prints. Everything Marni looks more finished—literally. Instead of raw edges, the curving inside-out seams on dresses and tweed patchwork mélanges were outlined in satin binding. The late-’60s feel came from the off-key spectrum of pinks, browns, royal blue, chrome yellow and strange greens (a color chart that is becoming standard for fall) and cute little items like bibbed pinafores.Most strikingly, the covert luxe that has always been an undercurrent of the Marni trademark turned overt. Fox shrugs and lightweight chubbies and the cool, slightly distressed green leather jackets and coats had a glamour that put the collection in step with seasonal trend. Marni devotees—a style tribe used to wending their own alternative ways—are about to wake up and find they're in fashion. But will they miss their flowers?
3 March 2003
Seems like the Marni hippie chick has been on a trip uptown. She still loves pretty prints and fabrics derived from antique furnishings, but for spring, she’s taken a style diversion, adding both haute accessories and biker references to the eclectic mix.Designer Consuelo Castiglioni’s favorite things—shrunken jackets, print dresses, stripy pants and delicate lacy camisoles—were all there, present and correct, in her summer collection, as was her knack for casually layering one precious, romantic piece on top of another. But those familiar ticking stripes this time came in satin, cut into pants and asymmetric skirts. A tougher, glossier Marni was also playing around with sexy leather vests and zip-detailed pants. Most surprising of all, Castiglioni flung off the clogs, hippie belts and ethnic bags: all her accessories for spring looked like an homage to vintage Hermès, from the stack-heeled canvas sandals to the chunky belts laden with gilt hardware.
29 September 2002
Consuelo Castiglioni is the pied piper of gentle whimsy, drawing an ever-growing crowd of followers along her personal fashion path. Marni’s clothes never seem brand new, but come across instead like a haul of pretty vintage things remade and remixed with a naïve hand.For fall, the Marni trip is all about faded multicolored bedspread patchworks, printed silk, chiffon and plaids that have been through the wash and come out soft and crinkled. Innocent cotton smocks, ’70s-feel suede patchwork coats, tiny brown suede jackets and capes were mixed up with cropped pants and fragile blouses with trailing asymmetric hems and chiffon scarves. Marni collectors will love the childlike spontaneity of details like the random placing of a bunny-rabbit appliqué, or the fact that some of the clothes are worn inside out with the seams showing. But this collection was hardly the answer to a poor girl’s dreams. Castiglione married into a family of furriers, and she hewed to the family tradition by working in unlined mink (worn with the patchworked piecing on the outside), cropped tenuki fur jackets, a feathery striped fox coat, and raw-edged wallaby stoles that tie on with ribbons.
3 March 2002
Marni designer Consuelo Castiglioni turned out a timely, finely tuned collection with a folksy, romantic feel.Castiglioni began with her most ambitiously layered looks, then gradually pared them down as if to allow the audience to take in the abundance of details. Few labels can pull off mismatched prints better than Marni; here, striped trousers and low-slung girly skirts stood out under sweet floral tops decorated with silver paillettes. Bright blazers, frayed-edge jackets, and a great mink vest that can be reduced to half its length with the pull of a zipper all looked just right. Nomadic fashionistas, meanwhile, will be drawn to Castiglioni's large, low-slung bags laden with pins, rhinestones, dangling chains and furry tails.Milan's news of the day: For the first time ever, Castiglioni showed several carefully crafted men's looks, providing a relaxed alternative to the strict tailoring that has dominated most recent menswear collections.
30 September 2001
In a season marked by an absence of color, Marni designer Consuelo Castiglione bucked the all-black trend and delivered the type of sentimental yet modern clothes that will provide a welcome alternative for women who crave a romantic touch.There was nothing heavy about Castiglione's papery dresses with loose ties, embroidered wrap skirts and flower-appliqué coats. Instead of the tight, vampy miniskirts that have taken over many runways, Castiglione showed flowing A-lines with pretty marigold prints, boxy and comfortable jackets with colorful square patterns, and lightweight, comfortable V-neck sweaters. Contrasting leather sashes, dark stockings and large circular totes worked wonderfully, though the Japanese-inspired wooden shoes Castiglione used may not be for everyone. For evening there were antique-looking dresses with distressed straps, beaded inlays and multiple see-through layers, as well as a striking champagne skirt.
4 March 2001
Marni's well-turned-out girly looks provided a welcome respite from the '80s-inspired fashions that have dominated the season so far. From the clean-cut topstitched overcoats to the breezy shirts and comfortable country skirts, designer Consuelo Castiglione delivered wearable, perfectly chic clothes.Seersucker stripes, delicate embroidery and optical prints were all mixed and matched to great advantage; '50s-style skirts, full and layered, looked new with graphically colored two-tone spectator pumps. Boot-cut pants, a black ruched short jacket and an asymmetrical handkerchief top gave the collection a modern edge. For evening there was a striking boat-neck sequined top, pleated wrap skirts and a couple of light sheared furs.
4 October 2000
Marni's presentation relied on youthful and easy-to-wear dresses and separates in bright pink, green and yellow over white and beige. Polka dots and abstract motifs in light cotton dominated, but there were also flowing country-girl skirts with subtle embroidery and traditional gingham prints. The translucent layering of light fabrics added a playful touch to the feminine silhouette. The look was completed with flat shoes and boots—some of which were also decorated with eye-catching polka dots.
30 September 1999