Antonio Marras Pre-Fall 2023 Collection

Benjamin Piercy was a Welsh civil engineer who in the 19th century decamped with his family to Sardinia to build the island’s railway lines. To make the expat life easier for his wife and children, he built a sumptuous villa in the middle of the Sardinian nowhere, a vast, underpopulated countryside whose nature at the time was wild and intact. The villa and its famed garden, full of exotic natural specimens imported by the adventurous engineer from his travels in faraway places, elicited the curiosity of Antonio Marras. His great storyteller’s imagination was put to work, and he came up with a pre-fall offering inspired by Piercy’s wandering daughters.

Romantic and whimsical, the collection was full of patchworked pieces that Marras concocted in endless variations. Bouquets of dry flowers, branches of autumnal foliage, rambling ivy, and feathery ferns were appliquéd on repurposed surplus parkas, ballerina dresses, and knitted jumpers. Colors were faded and misty like autumn in the woods. “I imagined the engineer’s daughters taking long walks in the garden, gathering flowers, keeping them to dry between the pages of a book, and then sewing or embroidering them onto their blouses, kimonos, or on their small blazers and pleated mini kilts.”

Marras’s exuberance cannot be tamed, and the collection overflowed with multiple, often contrasting propositions—mini and maxi, fitted and loose, lean and puffy, masculine and feminine. Opposites attract and coexist in Marras’s romantic universe. That’s his well-honed formula, ever regenerated by the power of his flamboyant imagination.