It’s not often you see a designer crying backstage after a fashion show. But there was Francesco Risso, creative director of Marni, on the opening day of Milan Fashion Week, having to take a minute to collect himself.
The surprising thing was, you could understand the feeling. After all, it’s also not often that fashion shows, which have become a form of serial and often cynical content creation focused on which celebrity can be contracted to sit in the audience and what moment can be engineered to be the most viral, can instead become a reminder about what unites us, rather than what drives us apart. Or at least what segments us into market groups.
But that’s exactly what Risso created. It was like a treatise on the humanities, performed at the commedia dell’arte and writ in cloth. One you actually wanted to wear.
He had filled the cavernous space of the Marni headquarters with a seemingly random array of old wooden chairs — a little story about a white rabbit running through a “deep green” forest under “fractal moons” had been tucked in origami folds and dropped on each seat — all of them scattered like a random collection of molecules around a trio of baby grand pianos. Composer Dev Hynes, a longtime Risso collaborator, and two accompanists sat down to play. And out came models who wove their own ways through the labyrinth of seating, only to come together at the end. Kind of like the clothes themselves, which wove through history and memory, beginning with skinny cotton leggings that looked sort of like a cross between long johns and workout pants. Well, we all have to start somewhere.
He added shrunken jackets or boxy little capes created by knotting the sleeves together at the neck, 1950s prom dresses in bright rose prints and 1980s power shoulders and blouson tops tied into turtlenecks over trumpet skirts. A big rose print and the occasional photo of a Renaissance-esque painting or a page ripped from a book — things that, Risso said backstage after the show, had meaning to him. Everything was left relatively unadorned, so each piece resembled a sketch, dashed off; an aesthetic echo, open to personal interpretation, rather than a literal reference.
There were not a lot of accessories, save for little hats that looked like children’s sailor hats (or millinery for Napoleonic jesters) but were actually bucket hats that had been upsized, decorated or otherwise wrenched into a new shape, and some giant boas that seemed to be made of shredded paper leaves. The same garlands snaked around the skirts of full-skirted dance dresses covered in crystal roses. The leis turned out to be made of cotton, as were the fancy frocks. It was the only fabric used in the entire collection.
“To me, the thread of cotton is like a tool of resistance,” Risso said backstage. That came after he had talked about “Léon,” the 1994 Luc Besson film about a hit man who adopts a preteen girl whose entire family has been killed, and its tension between violence and tenderness. Which in turn reminded him of “the world now — it’s so cruel somehow and so inhuman.” And how the antidote to that is beauty. Yup: The thread came round again.
Because, as he pointed out, it is also the thread that connects us, and connects past to present and future, and the thread of conversation and the thread that allows you to find your way out of a maze. That’s a lot of threads, but Risso tugged on them all. In part because cotton is also a material with complicated resonance in multiple cultures. It may be the most accessible, universally fraught material there is.
Since arriving at Marni in 2016, Risso has been one of fashion’s most entertaining experimentalists, albeit one who often seemed more beguiled by his own wackadoodle concepts than actual clothes. Somewhere along the way, however, after an immersive show in 2021 in which every audience member had to wear Marni, and a “world tour” that saw him bring his work on the road to New York, Tokyo and Paris, he has turned into a great designer. And a generous one, at a time when generosity often seems in short supply. —NYT
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