At this Antonio Marras show finale a group of characterful male models in the designer’s characterful menswear climbed the book-scattered piles of salt that had been placed in the middle of the runway and began to wildly emote. Around them paced more models wearing the nearly 100 looks built by Marras around an elaborate and free-flowing imaginative fantasy.
That fantasy collided Marras’s real-world Sardinian home with a group of visiting travelers; Katherine Mansfield; D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda; and Virginia Woolf were amongst the writers of fiction placed fictionally within the designer’s geographical backstory. This self-penned license allowed Marras to roam freely between genres of clothing and explore similarly invented dialogues between his home aesthetic and influences drawn from afar. Robes, pajama suits, tulle ballgowns, swing dresses, sharply tailored suiting, dégradé knits, workwear, and denim were some of the textile forms he pulled from the library in order to rewrite.
As often, Marras asserted his voice by layering color and detail. The colors ranged from lilac and cream through bronze, plum and copper, while the detail included checks, stripes, jacquards, lace, and embroidery. Marras piled pattern on pattern and texture on texture to create the sense of a wardrobe stuffed with details acquired over years. As always, he included reworked military surplus. The models sometimes carried boxes or boards layered with Marras’s distinct and beautiful drawings.
Marras also incorporated original pieces from traditional Sardinian costume, saying in his release that they were “too beautiful to rework, too important not to share.” Rather than treating them as folkloric decoration, he placed them alongside his contemporary designs. Similarly his fantasy characters shared the runway with a real-world protagonist, the heroic shepherd Giuseppe Ignazio Loi whose refusal to sell his land became the subject of Riccardo Milani’s film La Vita Va Così.
