How Marni, Erykah Badu, and Dev Hynes Assembled a Freaky Fashion Marching Band

Left: Krista Schlueter; Right: Bowen Fernie.

On Wednesday morning, the day before GQ’s second annual Global Creativity Awards, the Italian designer Francesco Risso wields a plastic shoe horn as he paces, rather energetically, through racks of hand-painted clothing inside the Condé Nast fashion closet. Risso is reciting the remarks he’ll deliver during the ceremony. As he practices, he punctuates his syllables by rapping the shoe horn against any available surface: a tabletop, his palm, the hard back of a chair. He taps out the words about the nature of creativity, making a rhythmic mnemonic device to nail the English-language cadence: “We are but conduits for this discreet power…”

As Marni’s creative director, Risso and his team are preparing a grand musical centerpiece for this year’s event—a boisterous spectacle featuring an entire marching band and a cadre of dancers, all costumed in custom Marni, who will be performing a composition by the musician Dev Hynes. On the racks around us are a sampling of the Milanese label’s archival designs re-rendered in white muslin, leather, latex, and cowhide, all swept broad brushstrokes of primary-colored acrylic paint. Risso’s animated movement mirrors the frenetic creative spirit here, as the staffers put on the finishing touches.

For the live fashion component of the GCAs ceremony (last year’s inaugural event included a presentation from the British designer Grace Wales Bonner), Risso considered a more straightforward retrospective of memorable past pieces—but when they got them all into a room, it didn’t feel quite right. “So we thought, ‘No. Let’s start from zero again, and let’s make something that is really and only for this moment,” he says. They saw the opportunity for another “Marni Jam,” a collaborative musical concept they’d executed in the past, and painted the pieces with bold stripes and checks “to accentuate that loudness of a marching band, that mechanical behavior between instruments and the person and the walk.”

The Marni team have turned the closet into a temporary design studio—part fitting room, part craft room, part playground. They must account for the musicians’ necessary movements: What is the right hoodie-jacket combination to grant a trombonist his full range of motion? Which dress can best accommodate a sousaphone? Midway through the day, the team decides something is missing: There should be crowns. Before long, Marni designer Ileana Giannakoura is hand-molding each one out of a roll of Reynolds Wrap, ripping off long sheets of silver aluminum foil and scrunching them into a dozen-plus idiosyncratic coronets dotted with dried Craspedia flowers—pert yellow orbs suggesting the presence of precious jewels. The team works into the wee hours, snipping and readjusting and giving the tinfoil crowns their own coats of paint, to match the clothes.

This is how things work at Risso’s Marni. Which other major contemporary fashion house would consider acrylic paint and aluminum foil as plausible mediums? It is, one imagines, precisely what fashion-making should be: joyous, strange, and wholly free to bend to the whims of possibility. (“The brand,” as Risso said in GQ’s April issue, “is a living organism.”)

On Thursday evening, the Marni Jam band is dressed and ready to take their magical mystery tour to the Global Creativity Awards. The activation is two-fold—the main performance will occur during dinner, but first the crew will take over the purple carpet in a burst of noisy exuberance, playing a quick tune in front of the step-and-repeat. Decked out in their ample Marni costumes and wielding capacious percussion and wind instruments, the group waits in the lobby of the WSA building (a new multipurpose creative space operated by the founders of the voguish Cayman Islands resort Palm Heights) while the final celebrities make their way upstairs.

Suddenly, a familiar sight makes its way up the opposite escalator: a Seussian, hand-striped, toddler-sized Marni top hat worn by musician Erykah Badu, who is ascending from the carpet to the party. (Badu, a frequent Marni collaborator, will be introducing the band and Risso ahead of his planned remarks.) The room cheers when they spot her—the Marni band meets their Marni bandleader, like fellow creatures of the same species encountering each other in the wild, or the meme of multiple Spider-Men all pointing at one another. Badu salutes everyone with a blow into a metal whistle—more on that later—and heads up the elevator. The crew files out into the cold rain of the sidewalk before bounding onto the carpet, where the dancers leap to the band’s brassy tune.

Midway into the night, it’s finally showtime. Dancers are staying limber; trumpeters and saxophonists are warming up. Inside, Badu takes to the GCAs podium to deliver the preamble: “Without further ado, I need to call my crew,” she tells the room, blowing into her whistle to call the band into action. The Marni Jammers spill into the room, filling the space with Hynes-composed music—it’s simultaneously dreamy and disruptive—as dancers hop between dinner tables.

“I’d never written for a marching band before,” says Hynes, though he managed to whip up this piece in just the last two and a half weeks. He looked to the work of the composer Julius Eastman as well as the advice of his friend, the musician Adam Tendler, who says composing for this sort of ensemble is like “pushing a boulder down a hill because like, once [the music starts], you actually just have to keep going and then hit the end.”

Hynes, too, wanted to channel Risso and Marni’s kinetic energy: “Francesco…it always feels like he’s using all of his body, and like his team’s using all their body,” he says. For the brass, the idea was “to keep them moving the entire time.”

When the music ends, the ensemble encircles Risso on stage as he delivers his speech. —a fashion visionary surrounded by fellow creatives wearing his designs. “Creativity is a gift from the gods,” he says, but it is also a demon, a shrink, “a life-saving drug, a fire angel, a tempting shadow.” Afterwards, the Marni Jam band filters back out into the foyer, playing a burst of celebratory music into the empty hallway.

Samuel Hine contributed reporting.

Originally Appeared on GQ