When Francesco Risso was in the early stages of designing his latest collection for Marni, the Italian fashion house where he serves as creative director, he entered a sort of primal state. It began when he covered every surface of his Milan design studio in paper, from the floor to walls to the tables and chairs. He wanted to "cancel all information around us," so that he and his dozen or so design colleagues could "make things instinctively." He had essentially turned part of the studio into a cave.
Guests were bemused by the whole thing. "I don't know how to explain it," says frequent Marni collaborator Babak Radboy, an artistic director known for his work with Telfar Clemens. "It looked like a weird kind of cocoon." To more fully insulate the design grotto, Risso banished images from the premises.
To say that's an unusual arrangement is an understatement. Mood boards and reference images are the building blocks of contemporary fashion design. But there's a method to Risso's madness. "Fashion today feels like an overload of information," he says. He had been inspired, he tells me, by an invitation Virginia Woolf once sent to a friend, beckoning her to visit the author's country house. The letter included the scintillating sign-off: "Bring no clothes." "Obviously, she wasn't meaning to come naked," Risso says. She was instead, he says, inviting her guests to shed the "constrictive structures of society" that dictated what they ought to wear. Risso found this interpretation deeply inspiring. "I thought, Wow, what does it mean for these structures that we have created in the way we design, in the way we sell things?" In the cave, his team would bring no clothes. There, they could make things "without expectations, without needs, without all these parameters that are imposed by numbers, by social media."
"It's been," Risso tells me, "extremely interesting."
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April - May 2024-Ausgabe von GQ US.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April - May 2024-Ausgabe von GQ US.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
MARNI'S FRANCESCO RISSO WILL NEVER GROWUP
The eccentric Italian designer is proving that the very serious business of fashion doesn't have to be very serious at all.
WELCOME TO LAUREN HALSEY'S NEIGHBORHOOD
The red-hot 36-year-old artist has achieved global success with a very local approach: applying imaginative, laserlike focus to a few square blocks of her hometown. In doing so, she renders and reflects what it's actually like to live and work in-and never, ever leave-South Central Los Angeles.
DARK KINGDOM
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross-best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates-found unlikely creative fulfillment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they're thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making.
INSIDE BANNY MCBRIDE'S LOWCOUNTRY COMEDY COMMUNE
After taking big screens and HBO by storm with his macho-lampooning humor, comedy hero Danny McBride uprooted his life in Hollywood to build his dream production studio in Charleston, South Carolina-away from the stifling industry, and alongside his closest friends and collaborators. That's where he's been unlocking a blistering new creative gear-and plotting his best work yet.
LEWIS HAMILTON IS CHANGING LANES
The seven-time F1 champ says he still has a world title in him-maybe this year, his final one at Mercedes; maybe next year when he joins Ferrari, a shocking move he tells us he manifested. But it's his passionate work outside of racing-in fashion, in film, in music-that's setting him up to keep making moves after the checkered flag drops on his racing career.
The New Gold Standard in Tasteful Watches
Piaget's Polo 79 once again marks the end of the steel sports watch's reign-and the start of something much more fun.
Captain Mbappé
We met him as a teenage prodigy. Now, with his PSG teammates Messi and Neymar gone, and a new job as French national team captain, Kylian Mbappé is reckoning with the responsibilities and privileges that come with being the man.
The full Ricky
Twenty-five years after becoming one of the most staggeringly famous men on the planet, a wiser, more assured Ricky Martin is taking another run at being a star. While also being himself, this time.
How Cillian Murphy Cracked the Code
For nearly 30 years, Cillian Murphy has built an unimpeachable body of work as one of our most versatile actors-while somehow also staying cleverly out of sight. Now, as an Oscar frontrunner, the Oppenheimer star pulls back the curtain (just a bit).
Finally, Women Are Breaking Up One of Luxury's Stuffiest Boys' Clubs
Dimepiece founder Brynn Wallner hosts a roundtable of leaders in the watch world to unpack the ascendant power of the female collector.