Brands have auras. You can pretend they don’t. You can say it’s just product and strategy and quarterly reports. But no. They have karma. Past lives. Energy that lingers long after the founder steps away and the next designer arrives with a new deck and a fresh moodboard.

Marni has always had an aura. Slightly sideways. Artfully offbeat. Disciplined but weird. Milanese modernism with a pulse. Founded by Consuelo Castiglioni, later stretched and shaken up by Francesco Risso, and now—karmically, poetically—back in a woman’s hands. There’s something satisfying about that. Like the universe quietly rearranging the furniture.

Enter Meryll Rogge.

“I’ve been a Marni fan since I was a teenager,” she said. Which is either terrifying or perfect, depending on how you look at it. Because being a fan is different from being a strategist. It’s emotional. It’s formative. It shapes you before you even know you’re being shaped. And Marni, let’s be honest, has always magnetized a very specific kind of woman. Intelligent. Creative. Slightly allergic to obviousness. Rogge clearly grew up inside that orbit.

Her connection doesn’t feel academic. It feels instinctive. Less studied homage, more native fluency. She’s also still designing her own namesake label, and the symmetry is almost too neat: both brands share that appetite for wit, for artistic detours, for wearability (yes, that deeply unsexy word that actually matters). You can sense she understands that Marni isn’t about costume—it’s about character.

Like every designer before her, she did the archival deep dive. Somewhere on an old hard drive—tragically absent from Vogue Runway—she found the very first Marni collections. And here’s the part that surprises you: they were almost colorless. White. Black. Brown. Gray. No prints. No embellishment. No drama. Just materials and shape. It was 1993, and restraint was the whole point.

That restraint came back in her debut. Muted tones. Lots of black. The occasional jolt of pastel—strategic, not sugary. It wasn’t loud Marni. It was foundational Marni.

She also revisited the mid-to-late ’90s and early 2000s collections—pieces that, she said, still look shockingly fresh. They tried them on. Asked what still resonates. And the answer, for her, was proportion. Those small ’90s coats—fitted shoulder, slightly nipped waist, knee-length skirt—suddenly felt very now. A skirt sitting just slightly low on the hips became a kind of anchor. Once that silhouette locked in, the rest followed. Iteration. Variation. Confidence. Not scrambling for novelty—just building.

Her Marni skewed slightly punk. Because Castiglioni famously hated anything too pretty, too girly, too cute. Rogge toughened things up. Hardware appeared everywhere—functional but decorative, fastenings turned into statements. Furry textures—always a Marni signature—returned as shearling and goat short coats that felt instinctive, tactile. Stripes were sharpened. Dots came back as oversized discs loosely attached to garments, jingling faintly as models walked. (Subtle chaos. I loved that.) Florals stayed graphic, modernist. No sugar. No flirtation.

And then there were the codes. The quiet signals only long-time Marni devotees would catch. Younger audiences might not clock the reference—but the expression still reads fresh. That’s the trick. You don’t need to know the origin story to feel the energy.

Rogge described the Marni woman as strong, self-directed. Someone with a career, a family, friends, a real relationship with art and culture. Not posing. Living. Same goes for the Marni man—interested in fashion, but not consumed by it. Wearing Marni as part of a life, not as a costume for one.

“I always say the best person to do Consuelo’s Marni is Consuelo,” Rogge admitted. Which feels honest. Grounded. This was never going to be a replica. Not just because she’s a different designer—but because it’s 2026. The world is different. The woman is different.

But the aura?

Still there.