Marni

MARNI is a luxury fashion brand founded in Milan in 1994. Innovative and multifaceted, Marni celebrates individuality through an unpredictable visual language. Marni’s is an artistic, life-embracing, colour-savvy, off-beat world of luxury that expresses a unique flair for mixing prints and shapes.

Founded in Milan in 1994, Marni is renowned for experimental craftsmanship techniques and the creative misuse of color, material, and silhouette. At Marni elegance is not perceived as something to be achieved, but the wild fauve that lives in the space between a gown and a canvas.

Creative director since 2016, Francesco Risso, invokes a new, 21st-century Renaissance through phantasmagorical mythos and sartorial storytelling. Bridging the gap between the conceptual and the wearable, Risso approaches design as a “gesamtkunstwerk”— a total work of art. By shaping through intuition and emphasizing hand-made processes, every Marni garment is imbued with its own unique sentience and personae.

Marni’s first boutique opened in London in 1999, followed by New York, Paris and Tokyo. Today its 96 stores across the world challenge the banality of the typical retail experience— simultaneously acting as galleries, artist residencies and havens for the eccentrics who comprise the Marni family. The flagship store in Via Montenapoleone in Milan exemplifies this innovative approach, acting as a multifunctional, free-standing installation space that hosts revolving artists. Marni conceptualizes “the shop” as a doorless, roomless vehicle for artistic communion, manifesting in special collaborations and capsule collections.

After embarking on a world voyage—starting under the Dumbo Bridge in Brooklyn, then Yoyogi gymnasium in Tokyo, followed by Karl Lagerfeld’s private home in Paris—Marni returned to Milan in 2024 to show for the brand’s 30th anniversary. Hosted in a hand-made paper cave in the tunnels of the Milano Centrale Railway Station, the show was both a celebration of the brand’s rich history and an inauguration of the next chapter in Marni’s design lexicon.

At the helm of Marni since 2016, Francesco Risso invokes a new, 21st-century Renaissance through the creative misuse of sartorial storytelling. Risso stands out for his preternatural attention to detail, heritage, pattern making and materiality that perfectly bridge the gap between the conceptual and the wearable. The DNA of Italian craftsmanship is evident in every thread (with a heavy dose of Risso’s imagined dreamscape). A designer with a fantastical childhood at sea and an adolescence steeped in the ’90s subculture of Italy, Risso has reinvented Marni as a brand with an ardent fan base.

Risso grew up as the wallflower of a noisy family, and quickly discovered fashion design as a means of communicating with the world; a lexicon composed of anything he could scavenge from the wardrobes of his grandparents, guests, or sisters. This rebellious streak would prove itself a permanent fixture in his disposition as a designer. At sixteen Francesco ran away to Florence to study fashion at Polimoda. From there, he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City before receiving an M.A. from the renowned Central Saint Martins in London. After university, Risso worked for several designers, including Anna Molinari at Blumarine, Alessandro Dell’Acqua, and Malo, before joining Prada in 2006 to work on womenswear. Ten years later, he was appointed creative director of Marni.

While still paying homage to the eccentric roots from which Marni had garnered a cult following, Risso has reinvented experimental fashion by approaching design as a “gesamtkunstwerk”— a total work of art—merging theory, exquisite mastery of technique and naturalistic inclinations. By collaborating with a global community of like-minded peers across mediums, Risso fosters a dialogue between fashion and the arts, celebrating the moment the gown becomes a canvas and the canvas a gown.