“I was trying to strike a balance between Jane Eyre’s iron-willed restraint and Catherine Earnshaw’s untamed, wind-swept ferocity—to find a woman who exists somewhere between these two emotional extremes.” That was Ian Griffiths’s pre-show thesis for a Max Mara collection that sought to bottle the stormy, windswept romance of the Brontëan heroines—high drama, but make it wearable.
What trick will Francesco Risso pull from his magician’s sleeve this time? That’s the anticipation a Marni show generates—every season, an unpredictable sleight of hand, a door swung open to a world that didn’t exist five minutes ago. Risso is one of those increasingly rare creatures in fashion: a true visionary, someone who doesn’t just make clothes but conjures entire universes, where quirk and craft meet in poetic, almost mystical collisions. His work is ineffable and deeply felt, lyrical yet potent—an antidote to an industry currently flailing somewhere between panic and paralysis, either chasing every trend at once or no direction at all.
No grand unveiling. No messiah in monogrammed loafers descending from the heavens to rescue Gucci from its latest existential wobble. Just another show, another placeholder, another polite nod to the fact that yes, fashion marches on, even when it’s leaderless. It’s been exactly a decade since Alessandro Michele was plucked from relative obscurity, tasked with salvaging a collection in five days flat, and in the process, rewrote the house’s entire trajectory. Sabato De Sarno? He barely had time to unpack before being unceremoniously escorted out. And for a fleeting moment, the industry held its breath—would we see another eleventh-hour savior? A seismic shift? A moment?
