Mood board: Creative Director Francesco Risso encourages poetic rebellion with his unflinching collections; his S/S 20 offering examines how disillusionment can become positive energy: ‘It’s not political to me, it’s more humanistic,’ he said. ‘It’s up to us to make a stand and that’s why I like this sort of initiation ritual.’ Guests stood under a blanket of single use plastic; the spliced soundtrack gave off the improv feeling of a world being reordered. Risso’s dress code was camouflage verses carnival. The clothes were clashed and jumbled. Military shapes smacked into tropicana, camo slashed into field jackets. Trousers were patchworked and buttoned, sleeves bunched up. Slippers were made from off-cuts left over from production. Painterly plastic bottles were rendered across the collection. ‘Even the prints reflect a nature, the nature that we live in today, a corrupted nature. I was thinking about the Fauvists and how they would paint incredible beauties but in a savage way.’
Team work: Georgian artist Shalva Nikvashvili – known for re-appropriating found objects and waste materials into masks – made a series of ‘wedding hats,’ stapling and gluing together pieces of cardboard, feathers and fur. Silver brooches were by Kazuma Nagai, whom Risso met on a trip to Japan. Originally from Kanagawa-ken, a coastal Prefecture just south of Tokyo, Nagai studied graphic design and taught himself metalwork. His pieces have a mystical style which manifests in cosmic fairy-like creatures. For Marni he has worked on a series of metamorphic animal pins; a monkey becomes a fish, or a daisy chain merges with a crocodile. ‘It’s about transforming what we have,’ Risso said. They’re clinging onto his clothes for dear life, whether by claw, paw or fin.
Scene setting: The guests all stood on red spots as the models walked though a channel of yellow ones, the portentous cloud of plastic hovering above: ‘I didn’t want to produce a set, this is us together, standing up shoulder to shoulder,’ Risso said. ‘This is the result of months of collecting plastic from many sources including waste and the ocean and the studio. Now this is going to be a process where this nightmare becomes an order in the second act.’ The bottles are going to be made into new objects, transformed by the German artist Judith Hopf. ‘I’m making the nightmare and she’s making the order.’
