There’s a kooky offness to Marni’s womenswear offerings, an intriguing quirkiness inherent in its signature combinations of daffy jewelry, oddball prints, strange colors, and out-of-whack proportions. Generally, it’s so wrong it’s right—all of that strange stuff adds up to something intriguing and engaging. A goofball elegance. Hitherto, it’s been lamentably missing from their menswear—maybe it’s a trickier sell? Or maybe Consuelo Castiglioni just took time to get her guy into his runway groove.
Whatever. Who cares? This Spring season, Marni got its man down pat. It was brilliant to see.
For Spring 2017, Castiglioni got stuck on Velcro. No pun. Well, maybe a little. It’s a simple idea, but it was deftly handled. She ran amok with the stuff, hacking shirts open and suspending them from tabs in bands of contrast colors; slapping Velcro on bands and belts to twist and distort the fit of cotton poplin tops; or simply substituting it for buttons on otherwise straight-up tailored jackets. It was all were reminiscent of the kind of easy-fasten shoes you give to preschoolers who can’t handle laces, there’s often a childlike glee to Marni’s clothes, no matter how sophisticated the end results may seem. Most interestingly, most every piece of the tailoring was sliced open in back and re-fastened with Velcro panels. Those clothes looked like hospital scrubs. A few of the floral prints wound up looking like microbes under a microscope. How dorky. How Marni.
There were plenty of details that felt like they would appeal to that kind of Marni man—and even if you’re not one, you know those guys exist. The Marni man is gangly, skinny, invariably behind horn-rimmed spectacles, nose buried in a book, probably the source of inspiration for a Wes Anderson film. He’s interested in science, in art. He doesn’t own a television. He possibly wears corrective shoes—or maybe just like shoes that seem a little orthopedic. And he’ll hopefully have enough money to spend on satisfyingly tricked-out gear like this, full of details and buttons and tabs to keep busy hands entertained for days. The stereotypical masculine love of the “gadget” applies to these clothes. Geek chic. He’s carried a briefcase since he was 6—Marni offered a whole bunch more.
That was a bit glib. On a deeper level, it felt like Castiglioni finally nailed how to convey her Marni man on the stage of the runway—how the clothes should fit, how they should move, how that final “fashion” image should look, to express her message of masculinity. There is a message, too: intellectual, awkward, an interesting man in interesting clothes. Men who we are, finally, interested in getting to know more about. Bravo.
