At the Marni show, a sense of childlike wonder
Francesco Risso, less than a year into his tenure at the helm of Marni, is very much the new kid on the block at the men’s shows in Milan. It’s a position he seems to relish, or at least to remind you of.
Marni has always been eccentric. Risso’s innovation is to make it kiddy-ish, too.
“A well-to-do boy falls in permanent vacation,” read the notes he distributed at the Marni show as a kind of mission statement. Not a bad description of a job in fashion, despite all the work that goes into lifting these baroque, often-six-figure spectacles off the ground.
For the Marni show on Saturday, Risso designed the collection and, with Marni’s team, the space, including the leather, wood and pool-float benches as well as the darkened, black-curtained passageway through which guests passed to enter.
It put you in mind of Alice falling down the rabbit hole, an impression amplified by the collection itself, whose ballooned and shrunken shapes and sizes (“XS, M, L: his game of sizing is absent-minded”, the notes read) conjured Lewis Carroll’s heroine’s becoming 25cm tall after taking her tasty potion, Drink me!
To Risso’s credit, if he bottled Marni, you might.
The muted wackiness he is plying at the label is appealing and charmingly odd. It probably seemed all the more exciting given the dwindling offerings in Milan. For the fashion week travellers schlepping through griddling heat this week, it felt fresh.
The look is a mishmash collection that slots into fashion’s reigning mania for mothballed vintage (priced, of course, like new). Risso’s suits are pieced together, their hems hanging undone (not the first designer to try this trick), shirts pressed carelessly, collars flying.
There are whiffs here of other labels: a little Gucci; more of Prada, where Risso worked for several years. But he has incorporated a naïveté all his own — a novelty sailboat print, a carelessness about layering: shrunken shirts over longer ones, boxer shorts peeking out from below shorts hems.
Some of it, frankly, veered into the silly. But it will yield merry bits like striped shirts and wide pants (the new skinny pants, again), and some clomping, race-striped shoes.
Risso may be leaning hard on youth, but artists have mined this vein with success before. Like Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, who Risso commissioned to draw childlike prints. Suarez Frimkess, a ceramicist, has long been wringing poetry from emblems of childhood such as Popeye and Mickey Mouse. She’s an undersung wonder, nearing 90 years young.