The Marni Evolution: Francesco Risso's Story

What's Contemporary Now?

Italian fashion designer Francesco Risso is renowned for his offbeat, innovative approach to contemporary clothing. He learned how to cut and sew from the age of eight with any fabric he could find, going on to study fashion at Florence’s Polimoda, New York’s FIT, and London’s Central Saint Martins. As creative director at Marni since 2016, Risso gained prominence by infusing the brand with vibrant colors, eclectic patterns, and playful aesthetics. His charming exuberance and unique ability to blend craft with modernity sets him apart and captivates audiences worldwide. What he sees as contemporary now is simple and uncontrolled by trends and a fast-paced industry: food and sex.

Episode Highlights:

• Risso’s early years were spent not talking in a hectic and blended family home in Genoa, where he communicated by making things with his hands.
• At 8 or 9 years old, he began making clothes, scavenging clothes from his grandmother’s closet to cut and sew.
• Studying the classics and art, Risso “escaped” from his loud family by moving to Florence, knowing he would make clothes.
• He found in the dance, clubbing, and rave scenes a way to escape from the constrictive traditional forces in Italy at the time when he considered himself goth and an outsider.
• “Provocative, and visceral, and obsessive.”: Risso talks about how he accepts a darker side of his outlook as a complement to his lighter and romantic side.
• He notes one of his mentors, Louise Wilson at Central Saint Martins, taught him to base a world around a garment without using typical fashion references.
• Risso read a Virginia Woolf piece in which she invites her friends to the countryside and tells them not to bring clothes, as to leave behind a kind of social structure, and this inspired him to lose reference points.
• On the secret of merging creative freedom with commercial success, Risso champions trust, pleasure, and courage,and living in the moment rather than for the final product.
• Marni Jam is one example of interdisciplinary creativity that Risso works into the brand, expanding music into fashion.
• To Risso, what’s contemporary now is “sex and food”—two exchanges he finds beautiful in that they build community.

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