Simone Rizzo

Simone Rizzo is an Italian fashion designer and creative director born in Catanzaro in 1982. He studied business management and later digital media management, then worked in buying and digital roles before co-founding SUNNEI with Loris Messina in Milan in 2014. Their lack of formal design education became part of the label’s operating logic: they built its first menswear pieces through experimentation and used direct sales, social media and a close creative community to establish an audience.

SUNNEI expanded from menswear into womenswear, co-ed collections, accessories, objects and physical and digital spaces under their joint direction. After Vanguards Group acquired a majority stake in 2020, Rizzo and Messina helped scale the company, reduce the number of seasonal collections and develop the Palazzina SUNNEI headquarters as a store, café, workplace and cultural venue. They left in September 2025 after staging the Spring/Summer 2026 collection as a mock auction of the brand and its founders.

Rizzo and Messina were appointed joint creative directors of Moschino on 21 June 2026, overseeing women’s, men’s and accessories. Their appointment followed Adrian Appiolaza’s departure and marked their return to creative leadership as a pair; no completed Moschino collection could yet be assessed at the research cutoff.

Rizzo’s practice connects product design to the systems through which product is encountered. At SUNNEI, relaxed shapes, strong stripes, synthetic colour and deliberately rounded footwear or bags were developed alongside photography, social platforms, casting and retail. His background in buying and digital management helped make communication and commercial timing part of the collection rather than an afterthought.

He and Messina worked as an undivided partnership, resisting a stable split between design and brand direction. Their runway formats made fashion’s habitual behaviours visible: twins complicated the perception of changing looks, models were passed over the audience, guests scored collections in real time, and an auction staged questions of ownership and succession. Humour functioned as analysis, not decoration.

The same approach shaped SUNNEI’s business architecture. Community grew from collaborators and friends into a deliberate physical and digital network, while the collection calendar and Palazzina SUNNEI were reorganised around fewer releases and longer forms of engagement. Rizzo’s contribution lies in this alignment of clothing, audience and organisation.