Francesco Risso is remaking Marni in his own image

Last September, the Italian fashion brand Marni and its 39-year-old creative director Francesco Risso put on a fashion show that consisted of roughly 553 looks. Well, kind of. The show itself was 53 outfits, but Risso and his team also opted — in a mammoth task — to dress the entire audience too, a process that took over a week. “That, for me, was the best part of that show, like to actually meet everyone,” says Risso. “And I understood the meaning of what we do at the end of the day, which is actually making clothes for people.”

We’re seated in Risso’s office in Milan. Last time I was here, it was wintertime, dark and cosy, striped in aubergine and yellow. It has been given a summer facelift amid a tarmac-cracking heatwave, painted a pale mauve-grey. One door has the word “MARNI” hand-painted across it, reminiscent of Danny’s scribbled handwriting in Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining.

Marni was founded in 1994 by Consuelo Castiglioni, originally as an offshoot of the family’s fur business. Risso was appointed in 2016 when Castiglioni stepped down following the sale of Marni to Renzo Rosso’s OTB Group the previous year. Risso, a Sardinian-born Central Saint Martins MA graduate joined the company on the back of eight years at Prada, following stints at Blumarine and Alessandro Dell’Acqua.

Risso has remade Marni in his own image. That image is crafty, kooky, somewhat rag-tag, with lots of raw edges and exposed seams, darning and embroideries as if they had been careworn, mended, preloved. The clothes Risso dressed his audience in last September were hand-painted with the stripes that also tramline over many of Marni’s jumpers — “With the team, we were like, what is our uniform? Oh, stripes, obviously!” — numbered with hand-scribbled labels that resemble the scrawl across his office door.

His latest show, staged in Milan in February for the autumn/winter 2022 season, was “about fragility, about mending, about the secrets behind an emotional piece of clothing”, Risso says.

Alongside the hand-painted prints, shredded bias-cut evening dresses and handmade knits of the Marni collection, each model wore pieces from their own wardrobes that had a memory or a meaning to them. “There was something about these emotional objects that we bring with us, that to me felt almost like this shield to protect us from this moment of darkness,” Risso says — security blankets, if you like.

To underscore the point, Risso had his cast walk in semi-darkness, lit by torches, the audience huddled together in a disused warehouse. The models were non-professionals, people with whom he felt an affinity — members of his studio team, friends, chosen family, “even people that have been clients, they were walking in our show”.

For the second season in a row, the designer himself modelled — and alongside the clothes he designed himself, he wore a tailcoat inherited from his grandfather. “It has multiple lives in it,” says Risso. “Personally, it gives me strength in a moment where the world seems so scattered and so divided. And so difficult to live in.”

In the studio outside of Risso’s office, dresses are being prepared for the forthcoming spring/summer 2023 show — pieces are hand-painted, edges frayed, great chunks sliced out. It was that process, Risso says that he missed the most during these difficult times, namely the lockdowns of Covid-19. “All that connection. All that work of the hand. All that hand in hand work. In a moment, it was gone,” he says, mournfully.

Instead, he worked with his team remotely, and entered a frenzy of creativity. “You should come to my house, because basically I painted every wall of my house,” he laughs again. “I was painting curtains!”

As the pandemic subdued, it was time to pull everyone back together. “To reconnect,” Risso says. “Not just the people who work here, but people who have been helping me with music, friends that are musicians, artists, our interpreters, the models, the casting, everyone. Everyone that actually is part of the circle.

“And we started this epistolary work which reconfirmed that what we do is a practice, that it’s made out of not just the pyramidical egocentrical designer work. What we make is very much informed by the joint ventures of these people. And so that’s how Marni evolved in this pathway of this strange gap of two years.”

You could call it a school of Marni — a collective approach, exemplified by the multi-faceted casting and multisensory experiences of Marni’s last two fashion shows. Alongside the diverse casting, they each featured music devised by the English singer-songwriter and producer Dev Hynes and art direction by Babak Radboy, who has also worked with Telfar in New York. And both disrupted the idea of the traditional fashion show, with dozens of models weaving their way through an audience arranged not in the strictly regimented rows of hierarchical fashion seating, but organically gathered as if to celebrate.

Risso is interested in emotional responses, and these two shows for 2022 both elicited strong responses from their audiences. A few people burst into tears at the spring/summer 2022 show, inspired by the idea of communities and teams, with a choir singing and clothes based around, among other things, football kits and school uniforms as badges of belonging.

A number of critics, conversely, were irritated by the autumn/winter 2022 show staging in that dimly lit warehouse. They complained they couldn’t see the clothes, which you couldn’t. Risso is philosophical. “I was curious about how we could, in a way, create some kind of mystery where you wouldn’t know where to look,” he said — and, for him, the show is about more than just showing clothes. It’s about a mood or a feeling. The sales of the garments, after all, happen away from the runway. “And I must say, in terms of let’s say numbers, it was the most successful ever collection that we made,” he says proudly.

Another criticism sometimes hurled at Risso is that his Marni maybe isn’t very . . . Marni. Certainly his clothes don’t look like Castiglioni’s, which were often breezy and summery, rounded shapes paired with bold print, heavy platform shoes and chunky jewellery. Risso is tall and slender, and his clothes tend to tug out an elongated line. Knitwear is important — he cites Marni’s striped mohair as a huge success.

But he also sees a thread that connects his creations back to what Castiglioni was doing, way back in the day. “Marni was born with this free spirit,” Risso says. “I feel it’s re-enacting — in a way that looks so different for the outside world, but people can actually see so many of these similarities. There’s something about the rawness of the hand that I keep going back to . . . there was something like that back in the days at Marni, that fragility.”

That feeling is something Risso himself has always loved. He used to make his own clothes as a teenager — or rather he remade them, ripping and tearing pieces, stitching over and customising. He still does it today. “To everything!” Risso laughs. “Even my Marni clothes, which probably are already ripped by definition when they go for production. But actually, I cannot avoid ripping more.”

Risso doesn’t necessarily see destruction as a bad thing, he says. “I cannot find beauty if I don’t destroy, because within destroying, I can see that I can find some other side that was kind of hidden,” he says. Then he smiles. “Like a beautiful Frankenstein.”