Francesco Risso unveiled his second Marni collection in lockdown during the ongoing digital fashion week in Milan.
The collection combined both menswear and womenswear garments in forty-two new looks presented with a digital lookbook and a fashion film in three episodes, delivered at breakfast, lunch and dinner time where models shared in joyful meals together, a reminder of pre-pandemic life.
The clothes were equal parts cozy and fantastical, featuring bold colors and shapes, which were achieved through volume, darts, construction and deconstruction, zippers, and ruffles – make that lots of ruffles.
Asymmetric dresses were gathered to create corset shapes; sweaters and padded jackets were deconstructed for oversized wraps; knit dresses showed eye-catching combinations of different patterns, and t-shirts were destroyed and then amended with a range of items that can be found at home.
There were also trippy hand-dyed trousers and frocks; crochet knit sets; object trouvé jewelry, developed in collaboration with Tom Binns; and a whole slew of It bags, some of which took on fun house-like proportions, as did puffed stoles. Just about every look was paired with a pointy-toed (sometimes heeled) spin on classic Converse sneakers.
This Marni collection is a quest for romance expressed in color and shape, both intensely tactile, at once dark and oozing a gleeful, bright rebound. Black is the color of stormy romance. It is an optical illusion, the sum of all existing colors – and this is what we revealed progressively, in fading, solarization, prints and treatments that let brightness emerge, as expanding halos, in the shape of objects – keys, scissors – that have been left on clothes as the sun rays hit them, turning them into memories. Roses and sunflowers, too, left their mark. Nature: it all gets back to Mother Earth. Nature as the pureness of the senses, uncorrupted
Francesco Risso