Formafantasma created Meryll Rogge’s Marni debut present set

Belgian designer Meryll Rogge’s anticipated debut present as inventive director of Marni, which passed off throughout Milan Style Week A/W 2026 yesterday (26 February), was first teased throughout social media with a collection of brief movies directed by Davide Rapp, captioned ‘echoes of the acquainted’ and exhibiting simply that: a key sliding right into a lock, espresso being poured right into a glazed mug, a bakelite phone. Even the present invitation mimicked, luxuriously, that the majority ubiquitous of workplace stationery – the post-it be aware. ‘I’ve a really private connection to Marni,’ Rogge tells Wallpaper*. ‘It’s a model that formed my design sensibility throughout my youth, and thru the present I needed to acknowledge that sense of familiarity.’

This familiarity – with a couple of surprises, in fact – was a throughline for each assortment and scenography, the latter of which was a detailed collaboration between Rogge and research-based design company Formafantasma (Wallpaper* Designers of the 12 months in 2021, and the brains behind our 2026 Design Awards trophy). Within the house, founders Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin remodeled Marni’s headquarters with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches, whereas a play on notion got here in mirrored panels which had been partially painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’, from automotive headlights to workplace chairs. The impact was an area which felt acquainted – banal workplace house; the entranceway to an residence block – although onerous to put.

‘The construction of the set suggests a bourgeois inside picket body, hints of home structure – however fragmented, barely taken aside. It feels acquainted but unsettled, as if a room has been fastidiously disassembled and reassembled in one other order,’ Trimarchi and Farresin inform Wallpaper*. These recognisable components, resonant but subverted via scale and deconstruction – for instance a monumental doormat overlaying the ground in lieu of a carpet – had been a part of ‘a really clear environment’, that Rogge already had in thoughts for the house when Formafantasma was introduced in: ‘one thing actual, unpretentious, open – however with out suggesting a selected place’.

‘Our conversations with Meryll Rogge began from an open dialogue about what “actuality” means in style,’ say Trimarchi and Farresin. ‘We discovered that attention-grabbing, particularly as a result of a runway present is, by nature, constructed. It’s a staged second, fastidiously framed and managed. As a substitute of making an attempt to disguise that, we selected to acknowledge it. The set grew to become a method to consider how style exists someplace between lived expertise and illustration, by no means fully one or the opposite.

‘We additionally spoke about how style strikes via home and social environments,’ they proceed. ‘Clothes is worn in kitchens, workplaces, streets – not solely on runways.’ Certainly, in its vivid assemblage of components – which shuffled between pragmatism and glamour – Rogge’s debut assortment captured a human method of dressing, the place a parka may be worn over a swimsuit, or a sweater over a cocktail gown.