Introduction
Francesco Risso is an Italian designer born in Sardinia in 1982 who has led Marni since 2016. He arrived at the house after work in Milan fashion and has since become closely associated with a more expressive and artistically charged phase of the brand, one defined by strong atmosphere and unconventional beauty.
His place in recent fashion rests on what he did with Marni’s identity. Rather than preserving it in strict form, he pushed it towards a looser, stranger and more emotionally textured language built through colour, surface and atmosphere.
Design ethos
At Marni, Risso treats colour and texture as unstable, expressive materials rather than as fixed signatures. Exaggerated shape, hand-touched surface and unexpected combinations of print or fabric give the clothes a deliberately off-centre quality, and polished finish is often interrupted by something raw or odd. That friction is part of the appeal.
The work often feels assembled, reworked or reimagined rather than cleanly resolved. That keeps craft visible and allows emotion, irregularity and artistic collaboration to become part of the design language instead of something added afterwards. His collections favour tension over neat balance.
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Career history
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