MARNI

Founded in Milan in 1994, Marni is renowned for experimental craftsmanship techniques and the creative misuse of color, material, and silhouette. We understand elegance not as something to be achieved, but the wild fauve that lives in the space between a gown and a canvas. We are not rationalists. 

Creative director since 2016, Francesco Risso, invokes a new, 21st-century Renaissance through phantasmagorical mythos and sartorial storytelling. Bridging the gap between the conceptual and the wearable, Risso approaches design as a “gesamtkunstwerk”— a total work of art. By shaping through intuition and emphasizing hand-made processes, every Marni garment is imbued with its own unique sentience and personae.  

Our first boutique opened in London in 1999, followed by New York, Paris and Tokyo. Today our 96 stores across the world challenge the banality of the typical retail experience— simultaneously acting as galleries, artist residencies and havens for the eccentrics who comprise the Marni family. The flagship store in Via Montenapoleone in Milan exemplifies this innovative approach, acting as a multifunctional, free-standing installation space that hosts revolving artists. We conceptualize “the shop” as a doorless, roomless vehicle for artistic communion, manifesting in special collaborations and capsule collections. 

After embarking on a world voyage—starting under the Dumbo Bridge in Brooklyn, then Yoyogi gymnasium in Tokyo, followed by Karl Lagerfeld’s private home in Paris—we returned to Milan in 2024 to show for our 30th anniversary. Hosted in a hand-made paper cave in the tunnels of the Milano Centrale Railway Station, the show was both a celebration of our rich history and an inauguration of the next chapter in our design lexicon. 

Welcome to the enchanted forest of the fashion world.