lewis chong

 If you boil down a Marni menswear collection, reducing it to its base ingredients, you will always arrive at colour, cloth and cut. Which seems obvious enough when you’re dealing with clothes, but here, these fundamentals have been canonised, becoming the elemental particles of everything produced. The cloth is obsessively developed—shaved nutria, spongy technical jerseys, flannels glazed—the colours entirely singular and the cuts more narrative than tailoring.

Though three words does not a fashion house make, especially one with such an extraordinary men’s and women’s following as this. Her cult line debuted in 2000, his seven years later. But the pair are in safe hands. Fastidious craftsmanship aside, it is the role of founder and creative director Consuelo Castiglioni to supply the substance, the off-hand spirit, and this she delivers on each season as the maison’s guiding light.

“I imagine the Marni man and woman coming from the same free-spirited, elegant, playful world,” Castiglioni told us exclusively, “and humorous. They are people who understand our uncommon sense of luxury.” Without any formal fashion training Castiglioni has turned the brand into one of the most creatively stirring in the world. Perhaps it is her gallerists eye or a heightened sensitivity to nice stuff, the things the Marni-attuned individual will appreciate. Whatever it is, she has loads of it.

Autumn/Winter 2016 saw the debut of Marni’s first ever womenswear ad campaign. It was styled by British Vogue’s fashion director Lucinda Chambers, a long-standing Marni consultant, and photographed by Jackie Nickerson. Fun fact: Mr. West also enlisted the Anglo-American lensman to capture his Yeezy look books. Jackie Nickerson is respected for her beautiful photojournalistic studies of identity, its constructs, and the environments where it develops; the affects of place on persona. She finds powerful pith in the everyday faces of the unseen and overlooked, like the inhabitants of Catholic institutes in Ireland or Africa’s agricultural workers.

The Italian brand too is all about the exploration of personality. The clothing equivalent of a therapy session. Collaborating with Nickerson was a stroke of genius, a proper meeting of minds. The sprawling, stretching, slightly subversive stills lay it out plainly for all to see. It is one of the best campaigns produced in a long while. And let’s not forget that the Marni man is a strong outsider himself, a resident of the fringes, however fanciful those fringes might be.

Beneath all the layers he squirrels away under a fantastic coat, he is reliably idiosyncratic. “He has a strong personality and sensitivity. He experiments, is attentive to detail. Think eccentricity, but a ‘normal’, grounded eccentricity,” explains Castiglioni. “He is someone who has a taste for the formal and traditional codes of the male wardrobe, but interprets them with fun, twisting them according to his own personality.” For summer you can see this in utilitarian tailored coats worn with athletic shorts and Fusbettsandals, or how collars are elongated in an almost ironic way. He’s also curious. A culture hoarder. If he wasn’t fictional and could actually own a coffee table, it would be piled high with reference books on Robert Rauschenberg, Isa Genzken, Richard Prince and all his other favourite artists. Many of whom have, and continue to, collaborate on the prints for the collections.

This season that spotlight falls on Jack Davidson, the Scottish artist who creates his works out of his studio in Barcelona. His central figure is colour. Tonal memos scribbled down in response to the mad world around him. Forms are abstract, lines clean, colours jarring. Shocks of absinthe green on fleshy pink; rust against gingery yellow; powdered blue and clementine. “Working with my team, we go through a lot of different ideas. In this process Jack Davidson’s works came up and I was immediately fascinated by his bold use of colours and his abstract subjects, geometric yet naïve.” Davidson’s work cameos on compact jersey T-shirts and shirts, sometimes alone, sometimes combining two paintings altogether. His undefined shapes also seem to have influenced the iconic Marni floral, as this season the ever-present blooms appear amorphous, almost bacterial, its boundaries less defined when printed on the classic cotton button-up.

Like Davidson, Castiglioni too is impelled by colour. Marni is an exercise in the possibilities of it, after all. “To me the use of colour is crucial. I have never liked a total black look, instead I find inspiration in the way colour combinations can create something wonderful, strong and unseen,” she assures. “Defining them is a natural process to me.”

That process is, as Sly and the Family Stone put it, a family affair. Carolina Castiglioni, director of special projects, is integral to the process. She is the lens to Consuelo’s eye. “My daughter Carolina helps me in deciding on all artists, we work together a lot. I always keep an eye on what is happening in the art world, especially when I’m travelling. Sometimes the mood of the collection reminds me about something that I have seen before, and that could fit perfectly. Otherwise, sometimes it is art that inspires me in creating the collection.”

Castiglioni is both artist and patron, instead of commissioning artwork to hang on the walls of an exhibition space, they are designed into a collection that she conducts like one. It is the pursuit of it all, the creative chase, that inspires and influences constantly. “I am always looking for the next artist to collaborate with, either well-established or new on the scene,” Castiglioni concludes. “I hope all my clothes can be described as wearable art. I like experimenting and mixing different worlds, but my goal is to always create something that can be worn in everyday life. That, is the biggest luxury”