Marco Zanini

Marco Zanini is an Italian-Swedish designer born in Milan in 1971. After studying at Milan’s Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and working with Lawrence Steele, he spent nine years at Versace across ready-to-wear and couture. A brief appointment at Halston in 2007 was followed by his 2008–13 tenure at Rochas, where he developed an understated but eccentric wardrobe shaped by fabric, colour and the atmosphere of the house.

Zanini was appointed creative director of Schiaparelli in September 2013, becoming the first permanent designer of the Della Valle revival. He built two haute couture collections with the Place Vendôme atelier, Maison Lesage, Lemarié, Taroni and milliner Stephen Jones. His January 2014 debut resisted literal reconstruction of the archive; the July collection pushed into darker urban imagery, elaborate animal motifs and what he called controlled excess.

The appointment ended on 7 November 2014 after thirteen months. No commercial ready-to-wear collection materialised during his tenure, despite the announced prêt-à-couture mandate. Zanini subsequently moved towards smaller and more autonomous projects, including work with Santoni, before establishing his own label.

Zanini works through atmosphere, proportion and material judgement. Historical reference is rarely quoted intact; it is absorbed into silhouette, colour and fabric so that a house’s memory remains perceptible without becoming costume. His clothes often combine composure with one destabilising decision—a cropped proportion, an unexpected flat shoe, an emphatic sleeve or an animal motif rendered with couture precision.

At Schiaparelli he rejected a karaoke version of the archive. Masculine tailoring, cloud-like silk gazar, dense embroidery and Stephen Jones’s millinery carried the first collection, while the second used pigeons, rats, squirrels, bleeding hearts and sombre cinematic references. The couture workmanship was exact even when the visual field became deliberately unruly.

That approach also exposed the tension in the revival: Zanini treated couture as an autonomous creative proposition, while ownership expected a system capable of commercial expansion. His short tenure is best understood as an uncompromised atelier experiment, not as the launch of the ready-to-wear business that followed under later directors.