“‘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 grey and platinum, sporting a BrownMill tee emblazoned with the legend Leading Our People To The Promised Land, the look somewhere between angel and satyr—started to laugh. 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 nestling 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 was stood amidst racks of clothes in gorgeous, hallucinogenic, searingly bright colours, distressed mohair, papery leathers, mystical cobwebs of beads, and psychedelic panné velvets, the pieces punctuated every now and then by enormous and 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 feel 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 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.”
In regards to that last assertion, with his spring 2023 collection Risso put his clothes where his mouth is. With a colour palette inspired by the changing light over the course of a day in the Italian countryside (something he observed while holidaying in his homeland) he offered up a strong collection that felt more streamlined and minimalistic than those he has done lately, despite the intense colourations and textures going on. There were classically tailored square shouldered coats, blazers, and suits (Mitchell looked particularly snappy in his lilac-y velvet one). Fantastic flock velvet jeans, cut to be super-flared.
Filmy rib knits contoured close to the body, some with ‘sleeves’ trailing from the waistband, or extra neck holes, which created circular decollete cutouts, regardless of the gender wearing them. “The body is completely the protagonist in this collection,” Risso said. “Everything is built in jerseys, knitwear, things that, actually, they go with the body rather than against it. Even the leather is the softest leather that exists.” The collection had other conceits based on the circle, be it the swooping looped trains on the dresses or the groovy abstract sunrises rendered in satin on tees.
That was another universality. While Risso might have been thinking about his days from dawn to dusk in Italy, haven’t we all been attuned to the cadence of time in our lives? (I mean: How many sunrises and sunsets did you like during the lockdown, particularly those primal Stonehenge-y type ones in Manhattan; a reminder that life could go on with the same rhythm as breathing.)
As for Risso, he’s already thinking about where on earth the sun might rise on his next Marni collection. He’s in no rush to go back to Milan, not until the brand’s 30th anniversary in 2024, at least. Travel does more than just broaden the mind, in his view. “I can’t wait to be on the other side of the planet but, also, to see how it can burst the bubbles that we like to create in fashion.”
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