Backstage before today’s show, Marni’s Francesco Risso could’ve easily been mistaken for one of the models patiently waiting to step into the black boom box built inside an industrial space as the set. Risso sported what looked like a spongy hybrid coat/bathrobe in a black-and-white, vaguely nondescript diamond pattern, worn loose, unbelted and trailing, topped with a wool matching-not-matching beret with a dangling pom-pom at the end. He looked like the crazily stylish fashion template around which he has built the new Marni aesthetic.
Risso has an oracular, almost esoteric way of explaining his collections’ meaning. His narrative definitely doesn’t lack charm. “I wanted to address the elephant in the room,” he said. “The puppeteers out there who are busy playing soccer with our planet, hanging their coats on elephants’ tusks—they don’t realize that these neuro-tribe movements are emerging from the streets and they’re invading the space: This for me is the sense of this collection. They are atypical kids, extravagant and not diagnosable types. You have to imagine an invasion, like in a 3-D Risk game.”
Inside the black boom box, while a rather disquieting remix of Claude Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune” was booming, the aforementioned neuro-tribes made their appearance, stomping their banana-sock boots, wearing what looked like a gentle parody of conservative suiting. There were ginormous blazers and matching trailing pants in wool bouclé or moleskin in dark classic colors, “imposing like if they were dressed with moveable apartments,” mused Risso.
The conservative, slightly David Byrne–esque, magnified suits slowly unraveled, morphing into grand-scale, full-on pyrotechnics. It was a riotous, sensually crazy, Dionysian psychedelic extravaganza of knitted jumpers or layered pajamas printed in acid-bright patterns. These were inspired by Allegro Non Troppo, a ’70s animated movie by the Italian director Bruno Bozzetto, which was a parody of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. “They’re disheveled, disassembled, they are Les Enfants Terribles du Paradis,” enthused the designer.
Like a pagan ritual reaching its climax, when delirium unfolds into a sort of quiet stupor, the show’s rhythm regressed into a more muffled atmosphere; l’après-midi of the young fauns approached the twilight zone. Volumes, proportions, and colors reverted to slimmer, neat incarnations, almost bromidic in their graceful, sensual blandness. Bromidic à la Marni, of course; you could feel that the neuro-tribe’s ferocious energy was ready to bite back.
