Just a Really Fantastic Fashion Show

It’s not often you see a designer crying backstage after a fashion show. But there was Francesco Risso, the creative director of Marni, on the opening day of Milan Fashion Week, having to take a minute to collect himself.

The surprising thing was, you could understand the feeling. After all, it’s also not often that fashion shows, which have become a form of serial and often cynical content creation focused on which celebrity can be contracted to sit in the audience and what moment can be engineered to be the most viral, can instead become a reminder about what unites us, rather than what drives us apart. Or at least what segments us into market groups.

But that’s exactly what Mr. Risso created. It was like a treatise on the humanities, performed at the commedia dell’arte and writ in cloth. One you actually wanted to wear.

He had filled the cavernous space of the Marni headquarters with a seemingly random array of old wooden chairs — a little story about a white rabbit running through a “deep green” forest under “fractal moons” had been tucked in origami folds and dropped on each seat — all of them scattered like a random collection of molecules around a trio of baby grand pianos. The composer Dev Hynes, a longtime Risso collaborator, and two accompanists sat down to play. And out came models who wove their own ways through the labyrinth of seating, only to come together at the end. Kind of like the clothes themselves, which wove through history and memory, beginning with skinny cotton leggings that looked sort of like a cross between long johns and workout pants. Well, we all have to start somewhere.

He added shrunken jackets or boxy little capes created by knotting the sleeves together at the neck, 1950s prom dresses in bright rose prints and 1980s power shoulders and blouson tops tied into turtlenecks over trumpet skirts. A big rose print and the occasional photo of a Renaissance-esque painting or a page ripped from a book — things that, Mr. Risso said backstage after the show, had meaning to him. Everything was left relatively unadorned, so each piece resembled a sketch, dashed off; an aesthetic echo, open to personal interpretation, rather than a literal reference.