After nine years at the helm of luxury fashion house Marni, creative director Francesco Risso is stepping down. Initially brought on in 2016 by OTB Group founder Renzo Rosso, the announcement was made by the group on Wednesday morning (June 18). In a statement, the outgoing creative director told Vogue Business, “Marni has been a studio, a stage, a dream. It carried colour, instinct, care, and gave space for people to be themselves. It taught me how to build with feeling and how powerful true collaboration can be.”

Rosso also added that, “Francesco has embraced the spirit and the values of the house, and together with the team brought them to new grounds, building the foundations for a new and exciting chapter of Marni.” The OTB chair also went on to say that, “Francesco is a unique designer and an artist at heart, and I wish him only the best for the future.”

Elsewhere in the statement, Risso thanked both his former boss for “believing in me, for giving me the front seat on a journey that became more than I could have imagined”, and the entire team at Marni. “Here’s to more extraordinary journeys ahead!” he concluded.

Debuting at Marni for the AW17 season, Risso’s appointment was not met without controversy. After Rosso’s OTB bought Marni in 2015, founder Consuelo Castiglioni – one of the few female creative directors at the helm of a luxury house – stepped down as creative director, and an unknown Risso was drafted in to replace her. Despite that initial wave of criticism, Risso managed to prove himself by ushering the house into a new creative era, with maximalist collections inspired by fresh concepts, like AW24’s “interior zoo” and SS24’s 2D flower dresses.

Before his time at Marni, Risso worked in relative obscurity at Prada for eight years, and before that with Italian fashion designer Alessandro Dell’Acqua. The grandson of a well-known tailor in Genoa, Risso developed his design skills by shadowing his grandmother in her profession, before enrolling at Florence’s Polimoda fashion school, and then later Central Saint Martins in London.

Revisit our profile of Risso here, taken from the spring 2022 issue of Dazed