Takeaways from a Marni experience that brought new life to Fashion Week. …
MILAN — Finally, a kind of catharsis. An event that — like the 150th-ranked Emma Raducanu winning the U.S. Open or Chloé Zhao getting to direct a Marvel movie — kicked open the door after months of mostly isolation to shake us out of complacency.
From the start, it was clear that this Marni show was not going to be like the other ones. Every guest was asked to wear a sort of Marni uniform — an upcycled garment from a former collection that the designer Francesco Risso and his team had hand-painted with sweeping washes of stripes — and to stop by the Marni headquarters first for a fitting. Whether they were the sort of person who generally felt drawn to the magpie, haute art-school aesthetic that Mr. Risso has brought to the house — or not.
I was given a navy dress with a big portrait neckline made of some taffeta/nylon material that swished when I moved, and splotched with chartreuse stripes. The paint and the fabric made it a little stiff, so it had a tendency to move on its own. When I tried it on in the studio, I felt relatively ambivalent: As a critic, I thought it was pretty and interesting; as a wearer, I felt like I was faking it and thus kind of resentful about putting it on in the first place.
But when I arrived at the show on Saturday night, staged like a theater in the round, and there were stripes, stripes, everywhere you turned — in oversize shirts and trousers and jackets and skirts, each one with a white canvas patch framed in red reading “Marniphernalia: Miscellaneous Handpainted Treasures” and numbered (mine was 300/800)—
