Belgian designer Meryll Rogge’s anticipated debut show as creative director of Marni, which took place during Milan Fashion Week A/W 2026 yesterday (26 February), was first teased across social media with a series of short videos directed by Davide Rapp, captioned ‘echoes of the familiar’ and showing just that: a key sliding into a lock, coffee being poured into a glazed mug, a bakelite telephone. Even the show invitation mimicked, luxuriously, that most ubiquitous of office stationery – the post-it note. ‘I have a very personal connection to Marni,’ Rogge tells Wallpaper*. ‘It’s a brand that shaped my design sensibility during my formative years, and through the show I wanted to acknowledge that sense of familiarity.’
This familiarity – with a few surprises, of course – was a throughline for both collection and scenography, the latter of which was a close collaboration between Rogge and research-based design agency Formafantasma (Wallpaper* Designers of the Year in 2021, and the brains behind our 2026 Design Awards trophy). In the space, founders Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin transformed Marni’s headquarters with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches, while a play on perception came in mirrored panels which were partially painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’, from car headlights to office chairs. The effect was a space which felt familiar – banal office space; the entranceway to an apartment block – though hard to place.
‘The structure of the set suggests a bourgeois interior wooden frame, hints of domestic architecture – but fragmented, slightly taken apart. It feels familiar yet unsettled, as if a room has been carefully disassembled and reassembled in another order,’ Trimarchi and Farresin tell Wallpaper*. These recognisable elements, resonant yet subverted through scale and deconstruction – for example a monumental doormat covering the floor in lieu of a carpet – were part of ‘a very clear atmosphere’, that Rogge already had in mind for the space when Formafantasma was brought in: ‘something real, unpretentious, open – but without suggesting a specific place’.
‘Our conversations with Meryll Rogge started from an open discussion about what “reality” means in fashion,’ say Trimarchi and Farresin. ‘We found that interesting, especially because a runway show is, by nature, constructed. It is a staged moment, carefully framed and controlled. Instead of trying to disguise that, we chose to acknowledge it. The set became a way to think about how fashion exists somewhere between lived experience and representation, never entirely one or the other.
‘We also spoke about how fashion moves through domestic and social environments,’ they continue. ‘Clothing is worn in kitchens, offices, streets – not only on runways.’ Indeed, in its vivid assemblage of elements – which shuffled between pragmatism and glamour – Rogge’s debut collection captured a human way of dressing, where a parka might be worn over a suit, or a sweater over a cocktail dress.
A penchant for elevating the everyday has long been a speciality for the Belgian designer, whose much-loved eponymous own brand, founded in 2020, is known for its imaginative take on practical dressing. Although the move to Marni marks her first role at the head of a major house, Rogge is a seasoned veteran of the industry, with stints at Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten, and is obviously staying true to the aesthetic values she has honed along the way. In 2022, she told Wallpaper* about her desire to create ‘pieces which evoke a sense of nostalgia, in a familiar and reassuring way’, a foreshadowing of the intentions she set for Marni with this energetic debut.
Follow our live coverage of Milan Fashion Week A/W 2026.