Marni

Consuelo Castiglioni was born in 1959, part Chilean, raised in Lugano on the Italian-Swiss border, and she studied languages rather than fashion — a biographical detail that explains more about Marni than any design education could. She entered the industry through marriage to Gianni Castiglioni, whose family operated CiwiFurs, an established Milanese fur house that produced for Fendi, Prada, Dior, and Louis Vuitton, and in 1994, she launched Marni as a fur line within the family business — shaved, dyed, and patchworked pelts that treated the material not as luxury signifier but as texture to be manipulated. By 1999, Marni had separated from CiwiFurs entirely, and Castiglioni was designing full ready-to-wear collections that bore no resemblance to either the fur trade she had emerged from or the polished sensuality that defined Milan in the late 1990s.

What Castiglioni proposed instead was a vision of fashion that felt simultaneously intellectual and effortless, eccentric and livable — clothes for women who mixed prints without anxiety, who treated a clashing color combination not as a mistake but as a decision, who dressed as though they had wandered through several interesting rooms and emerged wearing something from each. The aesthetic was built on offbeat color blocking, unexpected material pairings, oversized silhouettes that followed the body’s movement without revealing it, and chunky geometric jewelry assembled from gemstones, rhinestones, pearls, and glass beads. The prints were eccentric and layered, the textures deliberately varied within a single garment, and the overall effect was of clothing that had been curated rather than designed — each piece the product of an eye that valued the unusual over the correct. Castiglioni herself said her work began with fabric: “I am most attracted to textures, patterns, colours and the effect you can achieve with different materials when working on a silhouette.”

The Marni woman — the archetype that fashion criticism uses when a brand creates a recognizable world rather than merely a product line — was the writer, the gallerist, the architect, the person whose intelligence was expressed through the deliberateness of her visual choices. Meryl Streep wore Marni. Sofia Coppola wore Marni. The brand attracted women who understood that fashion could be generous rather than prescriptive, that an oversized coat in an unexpected print was not a rejection of glamour but a redefinition of it. Within the Milan system — dominated by the commercial confidence of Prada, the polished sex appeal of Versace, the corporate luxury of Armani — Marni operated as a permanent anomaly, founded by a Swiss-born linguist, driven by an anti-fashion sensibility, and successful enough to prove that the anomaly was what a significant number of women had been waiting for.

In December 2012, Renzo Rosso’s OTB Group — the parent company of Diesel — acquired a controlling stake in Marni, eventually reaching full ownership by 2015. Rosso called the brand “an icon, representing the world of modern luxury alternative to the establishment — gentle luxury,” and the description was precise enough to function as both compliment and market positioning. Castiglioni continued as creative director until October 2016, when she departed after twenty-two years, citing a desire to focus on her private life — though the dynamic between a founder’s intuitive vision and a corporate parent’s commercial imperatives was visible to anyone who had watched similar departures at other houses.

Francesco Risso, a Central Saint Martins graduate who had worked for Anna Molinari, Alessandro Dell’Acqua, and Miuccia Prada, was appointed as Castiglioni’s successor, and his tenure transformed Marni from a quietly beloved label into something more volatile, more experimental, and more aligned with the art world than the fashion calendar. Risso approached design as gesamtkunstwerk — total work of art — subverting traditional runway formats by seating audiences on exercise balls and mismatched furniture, dressing four hundred guests in upcycled hand-painted Marni ensembles for his Spring/Summer 2022 show, and staging presentations that unfolded like performance art rather than commercial showcases. The collaboration with Nigerian artists Slawn and Soldier, the hand-illustrated garments, the psychedelic palettes, the neon furry mules that went viral on social media — Risso took Castiglioni’s craft-heavy eccentricity and exploded it into a sensibility that appealed to a generation that encountered fashion through Instagram rather than through department stores. In September 2023, Marni showed at Paris Fashion Week for the first time, at Karl Lagerfeld’s former residence, signaling ambitions that Milan alone could not contain.

Risso departed in July 2025 after nearly a decade, and Belgian designer Meryll Rogge — a Royal Academy of Antwerp graduate who had worked at Marc Jacobs and spent four years as head of women’s design at Dries Van Noten — was appointed as his successor. The choice was telling: a designer from the Antwerp tradition, trained in the school that produced fashion’s most cerebral voices, selected to lead an Italian house that had always operated as though it belonged somewhere else entirely. What Castiglioni built, and what Risso amplified, was the proof that Italian fashion did not have to mean polish, sex appeal, or corporate luxury — that it could mean texture over surface, curiosity over confidence, and that a woman who dressed with intelligence deserved a label that matched it.