MARNIFESTO: AN EXPERIMENT, NOT A RUNWAY SHOW

When you think about Francesco Risso’s creative direction at Marni, you can always expect a complex cluster of thoughts behind each one of his collections. For the recent Spring/Summer 2021 collection however, Risso set his feet on reality and decided to represent the current times we’re living through people going about their daily lives wearing Marni all over the world.

It has lately become very common for designers this year to set focus on the people wearing the clothes rather than trying to establish new style trends. In a year where we all got to experience what seemed to be a highly restrictive lockdown, it now feels like a breeze of fresh air to see people trying to express themselves more than ever in daily life – and Marni seems to have hit the spot when it comes to representing what coming together even from a distance looks like.

This season, Marni forgot about the idea of a runway show, models and places, and turned to the simplicity of embracing reality through joyful liberation and self-expression in a live video shot from different places in the world such as New York, Dakar, Shanghai, Paris and Tokyo.

The idea of the collection was developed through the lockdown, as Risso found himself deconstructing old Marni garments (as well as what he could find at his house) and constructing new clothes to then ship them to friends and relatives all over the world, letting formal styling become personalized and real. This led to different styles with a retro vibe like loose-fitting dresses, boxy tailoring, asymmetric hemlines, graphic blocks (a Marni carry-over staple) and variations of sportswear turned into deconstructed grungy looks. In Marni’s words, this collection was “an experiment of neo-humanism”, which is individualism made collective, all to portray how we are less fragile if we come together and embrace reality.