MARNI FALL 2022

Risso himself appeared in the show, his now dirty platinum hair surmounted by a fine pair of tiny horns, as if Diaghilev had joined a ’70s East Village punk band. That he walked speaks volumes; a denial of the idea that designers have some divinely ordained remove from the same shit and the same joy that the rest of us are going through. His Marni has increasingly shifted—and now, with this show and the last, decisively so—into a world less of fanciful fashion remove, but instead reflective of all the ecstasy and confusion and disillusionment and love and kinship that we can all recognize and empathize with.

It’s a pretty brave step, to not want to just keep offering up a familiar and reassuring idea of what a high-end brand can do, retreading the same ground, especially at a time when the fashion industry, despite proclaiming the need for change, has snapped back to business as usual pretty darn quick. In some respects, Risso might share more these days with someone like Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymor, an independent NYC designer who’s brilliantly mining some of this same territory. In fact, Risso made a cameo in Taymor’s hilarious video for her fall 2022 collection, “The Collinas,” a deliciously tongue-in-cheek ode to iconic ’00s reality show The Hills.

Tantalizingly, those wandering around in the dark eventually found the light (as did the rest of us.) They came out blinking into the bright and glorious Milanese sunlight to an Alice in Wonderland Mad Hatter’s tea party, long tables set up in the rough hewn industrial courtyard, their tops groaning with fruit tarts and elaborate cakes and jello in hallucinogenic shades. Risso’s cast milled around, ate, laughed, chatted, hung out, their fall collection finery looking a little loveworn in the sunlight, but no less loved. They looked like they didn’t, at that very minute, have a single care in the world.

Images courtesy of Acielle StyleDuMonde.