How Marni, Erykah Badu, and Dev Hynes Assembled a Freaky Fashion Marching Band

On Wednesday morning, the day before GQ’s second annual Global Creativity Awards, the Italian designer Francesco Risso wields a plastic shoe horn as he paces, rather energetically, through racks of hand-painted clothing inside the Condé Nast fashion closet. Risso is reciting the remarks he’ll deliver during the ceremony. As he practices, he punctuates his syllables by rapping the shoe horn against any available surface: a tabletop, his palm, the hard back of a chair. He taps out the words about the nature of creativity, making a rhythmic mnemonic device to nail the English-language cadence: “We are but conduits for this discreet power…”

As Marni’s creative director, Risso and his team are preparing a grand musical centerpiece for this year’s event—a boisterous spectacle featuring an entire marching band and a cadre of dancers, all costumed in custom Marni, who will be performing a composition by the musician Dev Hynes. On the racks around us are a sampling of the Milanese label’s archival designs re-rendered in white muslin, leather, latex, and cowhide, all swept broad brushstrokes of primary-colored acrylic paint. Risso’s animated movement mirrors the frenetic creative spirit here, as the staffers put on the finishing touches.

For the live fashion component of the GCAs ceremony (last year’s inaugural event included a presentation from the British designer Grace Wales Bonner), Risso considered a more straightforward retrospective of memorable past pieces—but when they got them all into a room, it didn’t feel quite right. “So we thought, ‘No. Let’s start from zero again, and let’s make something that is really and only for this moment,” he says. They saw the opportunity for another “Marni Jam,” a collaborative musical concept they’d executed in the past, and painted the pieces with bold stripes and checks “to accentuate that loudness of a marching band, that mechanical behavior between instruments and the person and the walk.”

The Marni team have turned the closet into a temporary design studio—part fitting room, part craft room, part playground. They must account for the musicians’ necessary movements: What is the right hoodie-jacket combination to grant a trombonist his full range of motion? Which dress can best accommodate a sousaphone? Midway through the day, the team decides something is missing: There should be crowns. Before long, Marni designer Ileana Giannakoura is hand-molding each one out of a roll of Reynolds Wrap, ripping off long sheets of silver aluminum foil and scrunching them into a dozen-plus idiosyncratic coronets dotted with dried Craspedia flowers—pert yellow orbs suggesting the presence of precious jewels. The team works into the wee hours, snipping and readjusting and giving the tinfoil crowns their own coats of paint, to match the clothes.