Marni Is the Most Fun Brand in Fashion

When Marni creative director Francesco Risso was growing up, he would raid his parents' and siblings' closets like a mad scientist in search of parts. His sister would go out and return home to find jackets with sleeves lopped off or a skirt sprouting pant legs. His habit “tragically created dramas,” he laments over the phone from Milan, and earned him the nickname the Virus of the Wardrobe. Risso just wanted to express himself. His childhood home, he recalls, was like a “commune” that bustled with extended-family members and the random architect, artist, or agriculturist whom his dad would bring around. Risso says he wasn't shy but he wasn't chatty, either. He preferred to express himself through clothing—slicing up whatever he could find to make it just right. “It was like a drug,” he says.

Not much has changed since Risso's days as the Virus. If he was hooked on cutting up clothes and mashing them together, it's safe to say he is still awaiting an intervention: The creations that shuffle down the Marni runway are compellingly bizarre, peculiar, magical, funny, joyous, playful, and as vibrant as acid-powered visions. In Risso's hands, shoes erupt with fur, stately brown jackets are Frankensteined together with hippie-dippie floral prints, and googly-eyed gloves channel elementary-school arts and crafts.

At 16, Risso exchanged his self-taught curriculum for proper training. He left home for fashion school in Florence before transferring to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, then London's prestigious factory of successful designers, Central Saint Martins. By 24, he was working for Prada. At 33, in 2016, the designer took over Marni upon the exit of Consuelo Castiglioni, who'd founded the label in 1994. Now Risso is ready to infect closets en masse. No one is immune to the Marni epidemic. The world of fashion is too often self-serious and painted in black and white, but discovering Marni is like gaining access to the jumbo-size crayon box with the sharpener on the side.

Risso stepped into Marni at the perfect time, just at the dawn of menswear's wild-style era. But his brand of maximalism pushes something that is totally fresh in our irony-addled time: earnestness. His clothes don't ask you to be in on some joke or to get some obscure reference. Instead, they are generous in proportion, print, and color. “I would like people to feel at home when they go in the shop and try something on,” Risso says.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that Risso is inspired by cartoons. He loves Disney movies like Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland, but rather than referencing them directly, he strives to convey the feeling of wonder they evoke. “It's like a primordial way of speaking,” he says of his designs. “It's like you're laughing and everyone in the world understands why.”

For Risso, though, making playful clothes is serious business. He doesn't want to be pigeonholed as the designer who trades only in the childlike. Risso often finds inspiration by constructing worlds or envisioning movie sets where his designs might be worn. For the spring collection that's in stores now, he imagined what Olympians in the '20s and '30s wore. Even while mining the highest levels of competition for ideas, Risso burrows for the fun. “I was trying to make a sport collection for Marni that wasn't grounded in the hyper-human [but] in the joy of the sport,” he says. Fittingly, the men in the show looked less like gym rats than guys who just moments before had vowed to kick-start a diet.

When asked if flamboyant colors and prints will continue to be the touchstones of his collections moving forward, Risso replies after an extended pause, “I don't know.” He imagines a future where the Virus of the Wardrobe mutates Marni's colorful universe so extensively that it pops out an all-black collection, then quickly clarifies that what makes Marni irresistible won't go anywhere: “But black can be fun, too.”