The fall Marni Experience unfolded as follows. The audience was directed to a cavernous dark space, trespassing similarly dark tunnels outlined with thin, colored neon lights. A door to an alternative reality perhaps? Who knows—but designer Francesco Risso loves a state of unsettled perception. The tunnel opened onto a pitch-black space with a labyrinthine neon-lit floor layout, with barely perceptible human silhouettes scattered around. The audience was kept standing. The Marni-clad, diverse crowd emerging in slow-motion from obscurity as if in hypnotic trance was actually a dance collective, directed by Italian choreographer Michele Rizzo, who worked with Risso to bring the performance to life.
Awakening (very slowly indeed) from their state of apparent stupor, the dancers started moving and swaying to trance music, holding onto their spots as if glued to them. Then they started moving about at a snail’s pace. One started wondering: What’s the narrative? A sense of mild exasperation insinuated itself into this reviewer’s perceptive system.
Then the beat and the energy changed abruptly and the Marni-clad collective started marching about as if propelled by a sudden urge, circling around in manic mode, until the pace wound way down again.
Focusing on the clothes was challenging. The transporting feel of the performance was rather overwhelming. But from what one could see, they looked pretty great. The fashion repertoire was varied and multifarious. Humongous tailoring mixed with sleek, almost unassuming archetypal shapes. Coats were bisected, jackets were dilated, sweaters fragmented and juxtaposed. Scraps of fabric were pieced together in fabulous patchworks. Prints were crazily appealing. Nothing seemed to make sense—yet all coalesced beautifully into Marni’s stylish madness.
But there’s no Marni show without a piece of entertaining Risso narrative, which exploded backstage after the performance like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. “This was just a dance!” he exclaimed, slightly annoyed. “It’s a dance which takes us to the end of love. The end and the beginning of love.” OK, please do expand. “I was thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of The Read Death and about Prince Prospero,” said Risso. For those with limited knowledge of the American master’s macabre oeuvre, the story goes that Prince Prospero locks himself in an abbey with a crowd of friends for a masquerade ball, attempting to escape the plague. The Red Death infiltrates the abbey with exterminating results. “Today it was our court of Prince Prospero’s noble friends dancing to the end of love and locked in our castle,” said Risso. “They are a collective in a never ending party, wearing multiform uniforms… objects with a life of their own, heirlooms, something we have to protect.”
The clothes were made from assemblages of old scraps of fabrics, leftovers of ’50s deadstock, hand painted floral velvets, hybrids made out of satin and leather. They looked beautiful in their flow of haphazard improbability. There was method to the madness: Risso’s poetic way of addressing new methods of creating and producing clothes (recycling, upcycling, assembling, reusing) is a serious, consistent approach—it just seems a bit more bonkers than average.
