Milan Fashion Week: Marni’s Preservation Hall

There is no more fertile fashion imagination in Milanese fashion than Francesco Risso, whose latest collection for Marni was the fruit of an intense artistic collaboration with Olaolu Slawn and Soldier Boyfriend.

A collaboration that began with all three of them “locked together in a studio in London for a month,” in Risso’s words, and ended with their paintings displayed on the show-space walls and printed onto many outfits. Large images of wolves, fox tails, dark birds, flying pigs; the fruit of a residency he dubbed “The Pink Sun”.
 
All presented inside a surreal mock jazz club, where every item of furniture was draped into hand-painted black and white tablecloths or chair covers.  Though this fall 2025 collection, on the other hand, was an explosion of color. 

“For me, this collection is the Marni Preservation Hall,” added Risso. Pre-show, waiters served Martini vermouth spritzes, as guests admired the art.
 

Showing composite cool fashion: Crombie coats that become cocoons, tube skirts that had plenty of kick, and shirt dresses morphed into gowns. “Deconstructed or reconstructed, where I wanted to show my love of Marni. And where every piece was ‘a seed vault’,” explained the ever-philosophical Francesco.
 
Pragmatism mixed with practicality, he claimed where embroidered flowers bloomed from satin dresses, and gowns had fantastical biomorphic shapes.
 
Risso even indulged in several cool inside witticisms, like using his close friend and fellow designer Laurence Steele as a model, in an Edwardian top coat trimmed with fox tails. Or attiring his pal Aymeline Valade in a Victorian falling-off-the-shoulders red satin gown, finished with black wool shoulders, from which drooped fabric flowers. Its back finished with the same print of a pumpkin head seen as the show backdrop. 
 
Slawn and Soldier are Nigerian artists living in London, whom Francesco met in a random encounter. “Slawn an instinctive artist. Soldier is a Renaissance style creator. I sculpt with color,” expounded the very thrilled Risso, who later Wednesday night hosted an opening in his Milan home of their art.