The Marni Evolution: Francesco Risso's Story

• Risso’s early years were spent not talking in a hectic and blended family home in Genoa, where he communicated by making things with his hands.
• At 8 or 9 years old, he began making clothes, scavenging clothes from his grandmother’s closet to cut and sew.
• Studying the classics and art, Risso “escaped” from his loud family by moving to Florence, knowing he would make clothes.
• He found in the dance, clubbing, and rave scenes a way to escape from the constrictive traditional forces in Italy at the time when he considered himself goth and an outsider.
• “Provocative, and visceral, and obsessive.”: Risso talks about how he accepts a darker side of his outlook as a complement to his lighter and romantic side.
• He notes one of his mentors, Louise Wilson at Central Saint Martins, taught him to base a world around a garment without using typical fashion references.
• Risso read a Virginia Woolf piece in which she invites her friends to the countryside and tells them not to bring clothes, as to leave behind a kind of social structure, and this inspired him to lose reference points.
• On the secret of merging creative freedom with commercial success, Risso champions trust, pleasure, and courage,and living in the moment rather than for the final product.
• Marni Jam is one example of interdisciplinary creativity that Risso works into the brand, expanding music into fashion.
• To Risso, what’s contemporary now is “sex and food”—two exchanges he finds beautiful in that they build community.

‍Notable Quotes:

• “So I literally started kind of living on my own; adventure towards making with my hands was in a way, my way of talking and my way of expressing myself. That was better than words. That was my own tool to kind of say that I was happy or mad or just exploring, you know?” —Francesco Risso
• “I was literally almost like one of these dogs you have to pet and take care of because they’re ruining all your furniture with their teeth. My sister still calls me the virus of their closet. But for me, it was like a drug, like literallyI was obsessed about it, like I couldn’t wait for the moment somebody was going out [so I could] scavenge again.” —Francesco Risso
• On Italian fashion in the ’90s: “There’s nothing that I think can be defined as subcultural about Italy in those years. I think Italy in those years was very, very traditional.” —Francesco Risso
• “We end up many times here in Milan talking about how much we miss like that period where dance was very much combined with fashion, and going in these places and really put up yourself for the maximum with outrageous looks and full on—like it was a ritual and now it’s completely changed. There was a great deal more to push up against in terms of how personal style could be an active rebellion.” —Francesco Risso
• “Those dark stories somehow, they always contain extreme romanticism, in my point of view.” —Francesco Risso
• “Every day, I ask myself, am I, are we building a world? What are we doing? What I’ve learned from the experiences that I have gone through is that first of all, I’m not interested to do fashion in a way, or whatever job in a way, in which it will become a sort of domination of life.” —Francesco Risso
• “I’ve learned I was always grasping as much as possible in terms of agility on how you can always be at ease with reinventing yourself, with criticizing yourself, with challenging yourself. Be OK with the fact that sometimes you might be blocked, and then you have to find creativity again.” —Francesco Risso
• “Let’s just make clothes; we know what we stand for. We know, for instance, what Marni is about. So let’s just make this as an act of instinct with no para-essential needs, you know, because also we have to consider that we are driven by so many needs. And many of them sometimes are very oppressive. I’m not going to lie. I live well with it, but maybe we just need to make beautiful clothes.” —Francesco Risso
• “It feels almost more contemporary to have a beautiful dinner all together than just any other type of exchange. I love that. Maybe sex also. Actually, I would say sex and food.” —Francesco Risso