In the world of fashion, Marni has long been the thinking woman’s guilty pleasure. And so how fitting that today, at his Fall 2019 presentation, the label’s creative director, Francesco Risso, offered a show about pleasure without guilt—or as he put it: “Hereticism but on a different level.” His premise, which he titled Neuroerotik, is that women’s lives are governed by two forces: the promise of the cerebral to imagine past what is known, and the insistent drive of hormones and chromosomes, pushing us toward sensual experiences our brains don’t want to comprehend. It’s the rational versus the irrational but with a deliciously kinky and optimistic twist. Both tendencies, in Risso’s view, allow one to “map new pleasure-scapes”—and how cool is that? “Just imagine that from today you start putting a tape on your knee,” said Risso backstage while putting finishing touches on his pleat-wearing, chain-slung, scarf-dragging sexual warriors, “and that becomes your erogenous point instead of your nipple . . .”
So many possibilities open up when you can train your mind to see a knee as a nipple. It means that red, black, and white panels that bear no relationship to one another size-wise are connected only by rows of disused wedding rings. It means that the dropped sleeves of a swaggering coat might not actually be connected to the body of the coat, but a second layer with a quirky humor all its own. It means that what appears a graphic and garish modular pattern when seen from a great distance might reveal a face or a classical rose print. It might mean that your long sleeved gown of red silk, slashed in back but still cozy like a night dress, is covered in piercings and more rings, although these resemble the embellishments of, well, piercings and not discarded unions. Everything in this Marni collection involved some sort of duality—the chain harness was both silver and gold, the skirt had two waistlines, the jacket was a bolero . . . or not. The best pieces were the ones that contained their contradictions with ease: the pieced dresses with a scarf tie at the neck, the long retro numbers in charmeuse with their elegant tucks and knee-grazing chains (ooh—watch those nipples!), the pixelated polka dot gowns.
This was not an easy collection, and it wasn’t delivered with a soft touch. The soundtrack veered from The Shining to a number by Kas Product that featured a shrieking cat. The boots and shoes were massive, sometimes studded—the footwear of storms and storminess more generally. But there was also something moving, and unfathomably chic, about Risso’s neurotic, erotic vision. In some ways, he seemed to be fashioning a response to these dark times, much as Miuccia Prada did earlier this week. She defined romance as an ideal of goodness and agency in a monstrous moment. For her, romance provides the narrative escape routes we need to think both through and past the totalitarian present. For Risso, the curious twists of the mind are our bulwark against anything proscribed or preordained; our brains and our passions will, in his view, set us free. It’s empowering and wild, which, one could argue, is the whole point of fashion.