“I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I don’t go around having sex—so let me make clothes.” So said Antonio Marras, via not Zoom (for a change) but the translation of his elder son, Efisio. As with the season’s womenswear collection, this menswear offering was conceived and crafted in Sardinia with 100% Sardinian-sourced materials—a physical articulation of the designer’s always Sardinian-sourced inspiration.
There was the sense of an artist working variations of the same canvas over and over again—seeking some unobtainable standard of perfection—in Marras’s mighty offering of patchwork flannel jackets, hunting jackets, lining jackets, combat pants, and military shirting and jackets. Each piece in the showroom was unique and hand-fashioned, featuring attractive ornamental idiosyncrasies that cried out to be assessed, then possessed, before becoming a pleasurable highlight in the act of getting dressed. Archival fabrics we saw in past collections were layered between deadstock surplus and hand-stitched tapestry.
To say Marras’s only compulsion is clothes making, however, isn’t quite the full story. Later in the appointment Efisio mentioned that his father's “Instagram addiction” led them to make contact with a photojournalist in Palermo, Sicily, who has inspired an interesting—and unusually un-Sardinian—Marras project to come. For now though there was content and contentment to be found in rifling through these spring rails, checking out the endless variations of patchwork, fabrication, and embroidery. Efisio observed: “It’s kind of compulsive—Antonio Marras therapy.”
