"Our world, but more than usual," said Consuelo Castiglioni after her Marni show. She's ever a woman of few words, but those words really counted for something today. Her catwalk offered a graphically distilled edit of everything that makes Marni Marni: oddball sportiness, intense artisanship, incongruous incursions of fur, ambiguous fabrics, couture-worthy attention to cut. But the standouts in the collection were the outfits that embodied the curious dialogue between the mundane and the marvelous that Castiglioni is able to maintain season after season. They came at the end of the show, combining skirts in prosaic military felt and bodices in natural canvas with pagan eruptions of feathers and paillettes and baguettes and what looked like grass (in actual fact, Dutch duck!).
A creative tension between the sophisticated and the primitive will always color the personality of a house whose business is based on fur—Fendi's the same—but it's not always as motivational for Marni as it was today. Castiglioni indulged herself with big pelts artfully striped and intarsia'd into lush cocoons, and played them against neoprene'd outfits that were, in some cases, as athletic as a tracksuit (left-field, high-fashion revisions of this particular ensemble seem to be an under-the-radar theme in Milan this season). Outfits that were bifurcated by substantial zips were swathed in shaggy fur hoods, fusing industrial present and tribal past. There were also exaggerated silhouettes to compound the impression of a Marni woman who was almost aggressively confident—less quirk, more guts. More everything, in fact, than usual.
