On a day in which people the world over took to the streets as climate activists, it was a relief and a pleasure to sit on recompressed-cardboard benches under a recycled plastic jungle (reused from a repurposed prior set built of reclaimed waste) to watch Francesco Risso’s Spring-Summer 2020 show for Marni. Bravo to a major Italian house for putting sustainability front and center! And kudos to Risso for showing a collection that had charm and beauty by the bucketload and upcycled textiles, organic cottons, and “recuperated” leathers. He wanted to create a “joyous protest”—“an homage to nature and our sense of humanity”—and he succeeded.
Risso loves metaphors, and he often starts his collection from a rather abstract narrative place. This collection began with him imagining a tropical disease—ergo the jungle setting—that leaves its victims hallucinatory, dizzy, trepidatious, or succumbing to a “beautiful vertigo” (“the WTF of this particular and hard moment”). He wanted to create looks that cause “ecstatic sensations” and “nice shivers.” He wanted, essentially, to make fashion that gets under your skin.
The results are deeply romantic: balloon-smock tops paired with fit-and-flare skirts from which ruffled petticoats spill. Some are in lustrous satins, raw edged and weighty in the best way. Others are in prints of deliberately naive, semi-fauvist paintings done by Risso and his team in the studio. The colors are bold—green ivy and wicked magenta, say. The silhouettes are conservative (long of line, neo-Edwardian, or ’50s couture) but slashed and exploded. Many of the pieces are aprons (masquerading as dresses) paired with full skirts. Sweaters hang asymmetrically. It is territory shared in the fashion landscape by Junya Watanabe, Raf Simons, and Molly Goddard, but it’s totally Risso and so right for Marni. His clothes are shrewd but romantic, conscious but dreamy. His protestors walked only in flip-flops (recycled rubber?), but there is nothing casual in the thinking behind Marni.
