“I flee from myself—I fear the encounter with who I truly am,” said Antonio Marras. But fashion allows him to make tangible the contrasts within and give space to everything that is both tempestuous and calm. Marras loves to tell stories, and with the resort 2025 collection, he became the narrator of a fairy tale set in an enchanted garden where nature overtakes the human hand that designed it. “Where perfection creates dissonance, the impulse of nature creates harmony,” said the designer.
The Hanbury Botanical Gardens, on the promontory of Capo Mortola, set the scene for the collection: Thomas Hanbury—an English philanthropist, businessman, and navigator—chose Liguria in 1869 to acclimatize plants from around the world, creating a cosmopolitan oasis where diversity intertwines freely. Fior di Sardegna was the title of Marras’s collection because—as Emily Dickinson wrote—being a flower is a profound responsibility. Poetry is a constant in Marras’s aesthetics and philosophy, and this time he imagined dressing Eva Mameli Calvino, the first woman in Italy to obtain a degree in botany and the mother of the famous writer Italo Calvino. Prints born from the scanning of herbaria were interrupted and expanded by solid colors, blurring the line between masculine and feminine. Contrasts took shape in clean lines and 1970s references, in refined embroidery and check patterns, between stripes and damask fabrics, in parkas broken up by pink. Romanticism, at times androgynous, became a tool for palpable lightness and innate delicacy. From chiffon dresses to military fabrics, tulle details to menswear tailoring to sequins, knitwear to couture techniques (where sneakers were the new addition), Marras reflected that sought-after inconsistency that has always defined his identity.
