The collection arrived with a question hanging over it: What should a brand do when its most devoted fans want the past, but the present demands something new? Meryll Rogge, the Belgian designer newly appointed at the helm of the Italian house, did not pretend the tension did not exist. She walked straight into it.
| 📌 Key Facts |
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| 🎯 Meryll Rogge makes her debut at Marni with Fall 2026 📚 The collection revisits the brand’s 1993 minimalist origins 🧵 Silhouettes focus on sharp proportions and controlled structure 🖤 Muted tones and black dominate, punctuated by restrained pastel 🔩 Hardware becomes a central design element 👜 Accessories deliver the strongest commercial impact 📉 OTB Group faces margin pressure amid creative transitions 🔄 The collection represents a recalibration, not a revival |
Rogge comes well-equipped. A Royal Academy of Fine Arts graduate in Antwerp, she worked under Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten before launching her own label in 2020. She will continue to run it alongside her new role. Her personal history with Marni is not a recent development. She has described Marni as formative to her understanding of fashion – a brand that shaped her aesthetic long before she was considered for the position.
That familiarity showed. Her first move was to delve into the archives, not to copy them, but to understand Marni’s origins. She was surprised by what she found: the earliest collections, from 1993, were stripped bare. There was no color, print, or embellishment. Just materials and silhouette. This almost ascetic restraint reappeared in her debut, where muted tones and abundant black were occasionally punctuated by small hits of pastel – present enough to register and restrained enough to mean something.
The silhouette she chose was equally clear-eyed. Small coats with fitted shoulders and proper knee-length skirts. A hip-slung skirt that sits slightly low. The proportions read as contemporary without reaching for novelty. Once that framework was established, the collection moved through variations with the confidence of someone who had done the homework and then set it aside.
Marni’s founder, Consuelo Castiglioni, built the brand on a particular kind of sophistication: bourgeois in its materials and bohemian in its spirit, never entirely comfortable with prettiness. Rogge absorbed that reluctance.
Hardware appeared throughout the collection, serving both functional and decorative purposes, transforming fastenings and studs into deliberate design elements. Furry textures, long associated with the brand, were revisited in shearling and short goatskin coats. Key prints returned: stripes moved forward and dots came back as large discs loosely attached to tops and skirts. Graphic florals remained sharp and modernist without softness or sentimentality.
The accessories were among the strongest elements. Chunky metal jewelry occupied an appealing space between the pastoral and the urban. Bags and shoes carried a subtle Western flair, including pony-print calfskin boots and top-handle bags with intricate embroidery and bold hardware. These were pieces with a point of view.
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The menswear was less resolved. Boxy cardigans, extra-long shirts, and wide trousers placed the men’s wardrobe between a grandfather’s closet and a thrift store, with a faint cowboy influence. The women’s clothes had more character and a livelier spirit. However, a sharper sense of luxury would have elevated the collection as a whole.
Context matters here. Rogge’s predecessor, Francesco Risso, pulled the house in a more experimental direction, which proved to be divisive. OTB Group, which has owned Marni since 2012, recently reported a significant drop in operating margins and attributed part of that to creative shifts at several of its labels. Rogge was handed a brief that essentially requested she recalibrate, not replicate, the Castiglioni years and recover the sense of purpose that made them significant.
Her answer was neither a restoration nor a reinvention. It was a recalibration, returning to the house’s founding principles of wit, wearability, and cultivated oddness. She asked what these principles would look like in 2026. The Marni she is building remains recognizably Marni. For now, that may be exactly what the house needs.
