LEFT AND BELOW, RAILS
OF MARNI S/S18 LOOKS
ARE EVIDENCE OF RISSO’S
WHIMSICAL AND
YOUTHFUL APPROACH‘My boyfriend sometimes finds cut-up pieces
at home, or hems on the floor, sleeves
discarded. I can never feel comfortable unless
I have made something my own. I was always
like that – there was a time where I also
attacked my family’s wardrobes, tearing up
my sisters’ clothes and my mother’s clothes.’
Some saw his appointment at Marni
as a similar act of destruction. There were
disgruntled whispers about the fate of
founder Consuelo Castiglioni, who left the
house in late 2016, and the decision of Renzo
Rosso, president of the OTB Group, which
owns Marni, to bring in an outsider from
Prada to disrupt one of fashion’s best-loved
family businesses. Reviews so far have been
mixed. ‘I had some strange criticism at the
beginning, but I think it is honourable,’ says
Risso. ‘This family has kept this thing going
in a successful way for so many years, so
it’s honourable for people to stand up for it.’
A cheerful soul, who is as obsessed with
stories as he is clothes, Risso has no desire
to flip the house on its head with an aesthetic
U-turn. To most, Marni is synonymous with
‘intellectual’ fashion. Risso is keen that
this shouldn’t change. ‘Consuelo was trying
to make pieces of clothing that would stand
out from common stereotypes – this is as
important to me. My method starts from
a narrative, and with any narrative there are
meanings and layers of meaning. It can be
naïve but at the same time really conceptual.
For example, for S/S18 menswear, the title
of the collection was Lost and Found, and
it was talking about this boy finding himself
through finding objects in a metropolitan
environment – in that sense, it’s intellectual.’As the ‘Lost Boys’ story suggests, Risso
favours whimsical inspirations. That
menswear show all began with a photo he
spotted on Instagram of a 1930s young man,
with scrawled writing over it reading, ‘A rich
boy falling off the hill’. It got him thinking
about narcolepsy and Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film
My Own Private Idaho – he thought of River
Phoenix’s character suffering episodes and
waking up on the street wearing a new piece
of clothing that someone had put over him,
hence the layered, mismatched mood.
The S/S womenswear collection, his
fourth runway collection for the house, was
similarly esoteric. ‘I wanted to really connect
with beauty and the appreciation of how
things are made. I was trying to tell a story
about this woman who would find objects
in a house and would appreciate things that
came from different generations and then she
would unravel them and put that on herself.’
The focus on beauty and craft was
something of a backlash against the casual
mood of current fashion; the ‘extraordinary
ordinary’, as he calls it. He’s adamant that
people, especially younger generations, want
something tangible, and he’s keen for Marni
to provide that. ‘I see in kids the need for
connection – something more than being
social media-connected. They want to have
an experience. They want something real.
Marni has this incredible story with the
Marni markets [travelling pop-ups with cross-
generational products] and that has brought
about incredible social interactions – with
people and families and kids. I would love to
find new projects that allow each space we
have to generate that kind of interaction.’
It’s a good moment for Italian fashion,
given the buzz around new appointments
and rebooted houses. ‘Five years ago, Milan
was the most boring place in the world,’ Risso
says. ‘There is a great new energy. The city
has really made a big change in terms of
what art is offering, what creativity is
offering. It seems that people would rather
come here than Paris or London.’
It’s a turning point in Milan as well as at
Marni, I volunteer. ‘Yes,’ he smiles. To Risso,
fashion is all about the new and the fresh –
ideas unhindered by planning or questioning.
‘Almost like a Dadaist, where everything
was put together through intuition,’ he says.
‘I like the playfulness of Marni. And I like
the idea of seeing things through the eye of
a younger person – sometimes even the
eye of a child – it makes the objects simpler,
and more naïve, and more alive.’^ ∂
marni.com‘There is a new energy
in Milan. People would
rather come here than
Paris or London’
102 ∑
Fashion