Expect the unexpected from Marni’s Francesco Risso—a predictable designer he is not. For starters, today’s venue was a cavernous space located in one of the tunnels sneaking under Milan’s stazione Centrale, entirely plastered in white paper, with cubic seats and lightning poles (at times disquietingly oscillating) included. Not great for claustrophobics, but utterly atmospheric. White paper is one of Risso’s obsession—when he brought his fall 23 on tour in Tokyo last year, he covered the indoor arena and podium of the Yoyogi National Gymnasium with an inordinate amount of immaculate sheets of Japanese paper.
To prep for this collection, he and his team gave the same white-paper treatment to their studio at Marni headquarters, lining every surface as to make them disappear, in a radical attempt to keep out visual distractions, banning images, moodboards, or any excess of conceptual stimuli. “It all started with Virginia Woolf,” said Risso, rather cryptically. In one of her letters he happened to read, she invited friends to a weekend in the countryside, asking them to “bring no clothes.” It certainly wasn’t about spending happy times in birthday suits, rather an exhortation to come as they were, to be themselves, stripping back the symbolic implications of restrictive clothing. “That reading was a revelation,” said Risso, as it prompted him and his team to act on the deconstruction of the creative process. “We wanted to put Virginia Wolf’s invitation into practice—letting go of the needs we usually believe we need.”
Working without visual references brought to the surface an instinctual, almost primal approach to design; shapes and volumes were stripped of everything “para-essential,” and returned to a state of purity, taking away all superfluous information. Pockets, buttons, darts, and any detail that wasn’t necessary to glorify “the soul of the shape” were hidden or “reduced to shadows.” In a radical, extreme attempt to dematerialize the shape itself, surfaces of geometric capes, bell-shaped dresses and ovoid coats were almost concealed under thick glazed layers of curly gestural paint. The hirsute textures of circular furry blousons were gelled and then hand painted to achieve a spiky, feathery finish; the surface of an egg-shaped parka in black flocked velvet was covered in printed scribbles as if to erase it with frantic, almost hysterical urge. Concise and artistic, they were bravura pieces of exceptional presence.
