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.

- SAMUEL HINE

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."