Francesco Risso looks exactly how you'd imagine the creative director of Marni to look. He wears giant knitted hats and bigger trousers; kilts and platform boots and leather trenches. While some designers prefer to fade into the background, a brief and shy bow at the end of a show in black jeans and black t-shirts, Risso is a proud maximalist, the kind of designer who wears an asymmetrically-striped zebra jumpsuit and a giant rabbit's head to bathe in applause. Subtlety isn't his, nor Marni's, style.
Which brings us to Risso's second collection created from the confines of our New Normal. Turning away from the dark, soft and comfortable collections designed by some of his Milanese peers, Risso has instead delivered fashion that is voluminous, bright and bizarre. "This Marni collection took shape as a romantic ode to dressmaking at its most tactile and intimate," he writes in the show notes. "A loveletter, actually: blatant, at times even proudly banal, so intense and overwhelming is our collective urge to feel, touch and feel some more."
"We kept asking ourselves: what is romantic and what is romanticism nowadays?" he says. "Back in the day, Romanticism, as a movement, was born as a reaction against the rational, as an opposition to social norms."
Within this context, Marni's reaction against the social norms of the moment – the hoodies, tracksuits and cashmere jumpers of the pandemic - arrives in the form of typical Marnian maximalist expression. There is sport and there is comfort here, but you have to search for it: a giant puffer jacket that is cut in angular shapes as if built from flatpack instructions; pointed Converse-esque trainers and velvet trousers spilling below the ankle. These are clothes for people who want to be looked at. Gawped at, even.
Red is the colour of the collection, a shade for drama and the aforementioned Romanticism, crushed velvet overcoats worn with lavender ruffled shirts, Adam Ant on a bender. Giant knitted shawls from the depth's of grandma's frazzled mind after an acid trip (chill out, Grandma). A piece of Marni clothing is immediately recognisable, the colour, cut and insane proportions. No one else could have designed it.
Compounding this feeling of intimacy and tactility, Risso decided to host his show from his own Milan apartment, a breakfast, lunch and dinner special that proves A) these clothes can be worn in a domestic setting if you have the imagination and B) Franceso Risso has a really nice flat. That natural light!
"This is all very intimate and very personal," he writes, "and that's why we decided to let the clothes talk intimately, domestically, during a breakfast, a lunch and a dinner among friends.
"Let’s make this day memorably strange."
As always, Marni delivers on both front.
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