How Marni Designer Francesco Risso Built the Ultimate Fashion Playground

In a way, the cave also served as a metaphor for Risso’s own eight-year journey to becoming one of the most captivating and irreverent creative voices in fashion. Italian menswear is heavy with tradition, but since Risso joined Marni in 2016 he has built his own distinct—and highly unpredictable—universe. He has defied the commercial imperative of the modern luxury business, which increasingly dictates that the fantasy of fashion should take a backseat to the business of it. And by working with a sense of total freedom and unbridled imagination, he has turned a label that once lacked a strong identity into a thriving clubhouse for the fashion world’s eccentrics, rebels, and misfits.

On a recent winter day, Risso, 41, called me on video from his book-filled office in Milan. He was wearing a hunting cap over his shaved head, and as he gestured with his hands I saw flashes of large tattoos on both of his palms. I didn’t have time to ask—it was a little over a week before Risso was scheduled to show his collection in Milan. Behind him, in the cave, his team was doing final prep. “Everybody’s sewing and painting and making pieces,” he told me. Hang on—painting? Risso laughed. “The team is full-on painting. It is one of the main ways in which we make textures, prints, and sometimes garments themselves here at Marni.”

Most fashion businesses, to state the obvious, do not have paint-splattered caves in their design studios. But Risso thinks of Marni completely differently. “The brand,” Risso says, “is a living organism.”

For Risso, it all starts with a uniquely organic process. “The way he runs the studio, it feels like a workshop at a radical art school or something,” says Radboy. “There’s a real social element to it.” Like his creative-director peers, Risso is the figurehead of a brand, but Marni feels styled more like a collective, or maybe an extended friend group, one that DIYs clothes that eventually come out as collections four times a year.

At their best these clothes achieve Risso’s ultimate ideal, which is that they express something as human, intimate, and emotional as the people behind them. Like Marni’s now-ubiquitous Muppet-hued mohair sweaters, developed to convey “tenderness and love,” these garments are often bright enough to stop traffic, and awash in clown-y stripes, acid plaids, and a botanical garden’s worth of florals. (Risso adores stripes so much that he and Marni chief marketing officer Chungaiz Khan Mumtaz have had “trademark discussions” about them.)

The collective extends well beyond the tight-knit design studio; in fact, the house that started as a family business now includes Risso’s chosen family like Radboy; the musician Dev Hynes, who composes the brand’s sonic identity; the stylist Carlos Nazario; and the creative strategist Alex Sossah, his boyfriend and close adviser. When Risso first took the brand on the road for a series of three runway shows, new members of the community boarded Marni’s Ken Kesey bus as it rolled through Brooklyn, Tokyo, and Paris, from skaters and artists who now model in every show—Marni’s runway cast is as freakish and wonderful as the clothing—to Erykah Badu, who designed a capsule collection with Marni and went to the Met Gala with Risso in 2022.