All The Looks From Marni Spring/Summer 2023
Here, crafty clothes that show the hand are a uniform of strength.
At Marni, run by the 39-year-old Francesco Risso, crafty clothes that show the hand are a uniform of strength. The front row was stacked with menswear fashion fanatics like rapper Kodak Black (sitting in front of me, smoking a beautifully rolled blunt) and basketball player James Harden.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of this collection, which felt too much like a thunderingly serious art project centred on one idea about round yarn patterns. (The too-thin knitted separates several of the female models were dressed in felt a little menial, as well.) But I hadn’t witnessed a Marni show in person before, and seeing everyone huddled together in a Dumbo underpass, with figures like photographer Tyler Mitchell and elite model Lara Stone walking the show, clarified why a certain kind of star has a cult attachment to the brand. The art world and brainy fit gods see these clothes as demonstratively sensitive, cerebral objects. It’s like Prada for people who cry at arthouse movies.
(Interestingly, just as this conflation of crafty clothes and power seems to codify, Jonathan Anderson, who originated this idea from another direction, did an about-face and is now making the most out-there, deliciously difficult-to-digest clothes in the world. Will be interesting to see what he gets up to at his brand at London Fashion Week and Loewe in Paris, later in the month.)
Maybe my Marni skepticism is fuelled by a feeling that female designers are the stars of this week, driving all the ideas forward. Even when female craft doesn’t have a political undercurrent, it is still something deeper to behold. That’s why I adored Maryam Nassir Zadeh’s so-strange-it-shouldn’t-work collection of old fabric scraps and treasured passemanterie sculpted and patched together into half-skirts, little strappy tops, kinda-dresses, and see-through skirts. I could just see and know and love this woman, stalking through the Lower East Side on the way home from a big night out, her posterior basically visible to the whole world, and feeling just great.
This article originally appeared on Harper’s BAZAAR US.