Guests at Marni’s Spring 2018 show entered the venue through a dazzling, curious garden filled with outsize roses and enormous purple allium, twirly young topiary, and mature sheltering trees. According to Francesco Risso, the inspiration came from “two English gardens as seen by Tim Burton . . . with candies”—which is an elliptical reference to Willy Wonka and the imagination room that lies at the heart of the fictional chocolate maker’s factory.
Which brings us to Risso, who now presides over the imagination room of Marni, and whose sumptuous, deliciously playful, and utterly perverse impulses are not dissimilar to those of Roald Dahl’s much-beloved character. This is Risso’s second catwalk offering in womenswear for the Italian brand and, by leaps and bounds, the most fully reflective of his personal aesthetic. And in a Milan season of largely quiet clutter—more of the same when it’s good, just more banal clothes when it’s not—it is a triumph. Risso offered a celebration of fashion history, 1920s to the present, deconstructed, reconstructed, precious but vernacular, glamorous yet generous.
His starting point was the notion of a young woman on a skateboard with the languor of the ’20s in her posture. Her life, or that of her family or her culture, has been a “lucid accumulation of accidents” and her dress sense reflects all that higgledy-piggledy: she chops a ’50s cocktail dress to make a top, then opens the seams, explodes the silhouette, and voilà, it has a drop waist. She embroiders tiny pink roses on an old white mink that was probably her grandmother’s dressing gown in the first place. She takes a rich blue brocade that should be used for an evening dress and makes massive, puddling rave pants. She paints on her kitten heels and her frocks, often with the humor and deft hand of David Salle circa 1979 (yes, Salle lent the prints of girls smoking after Risso cold called him). She takes every double-knit ’60s maillot she can find, splits the crotches, and calls them camisoles.
You get the picture. Think large proportions and all the artsy sexy awkwardness one loves from Marni, those clothes that cool girls adore and dull men puzzle over. Add incredible interior workmanship—lining details and inner pockets, a notion of “hidden beauty” so often promised in ready-to-wear but rarely delivered—and a slate of rarified textiles (duchesse, brocade, horsehair, taffeta) recontextualized as utilitarian. Consider old pearl-and-metal jewelry bent and twisted haphazardly, one part granny, one part Calder.
And just enjoy it. The duchesse skirts have elastic waists. A new handbag (the Claus) feels like a furry pillow. The slip dresses are embroidered with Gobstopper rhinestones. Don’t dismiss the curious runway assemblages as “intellectual” fashion; Risso is at one with the lotus eaters. As Charlie Bucket says of Wonka’s oeuvre, “Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy.”
