MARNI: A PERFECT BALANCE BETWEEN CLASSICS AND ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTS
Consuelo Castiglioni founded Marni in 1994, focusing on the synthesis of fashion and art, classics and experimentation.
In just 26 years, the once little-known family business has become a successful global brand. Based in the Italian capital, Marni is completely different from other luxurious, maximalist brands such as Gucci and Versace. The company gained popularity at a time when women began to move away from hyper-sexual clothing in favour of designs centred on colour, print and texture. This is exactly what Marni has been able to offer its customers. The brand is known for its unique and distinctive graphic prints and the abundance of textures in the designs offered in the global market.
Today, the luxury brand, loved by women and men alike, cultivates the aesthetic of "intellectual chic", and develops garments that do not necessarily follow trends and transitory movements.
Founder Consuelo Castiglioni
Italian fashion house Marni was founded by Consuelo Castiglioni in 1994. Although she had no specialised education, Castiglioni had previously worked on her own clothes.
She was born in 1959 in one of Switzerland's most welcoming cities into a family of Chilean-Italian immigrants. When she turned 25 in 1984, Consuelo decided to return to her historical homeland in Italy, where she met her future husband, Gianni Castiglioni.
Consuelo quickly became involved in her husband's business, and by the early 1990s she had already been assigned the position of the company's fashion expert. Working at CiwiFurs, a woman notices the various subtleties of production as she explores customer preferences. At the time, fur was not a popular material and was generally used to make old-fashioned clothes. Castiglioni, on the other hand, used it like any other fabric to make everyday products, thanks to which the line was able to attract the attention of the public.
The fashion label, named after Consuelo's sister Marina, grew as her customers needed new clothes that could be worn with fur. About five years after starting production, Marni moved away from its original concept, but this became a prerequisite for developing a brand that emphasised tactile materials.
In 2006, a new overseas boutique of the brand was opened in Beijing. In addition, the official website and an online shop were launched.
In 2016 it became known that Consuelo had resigned as creative director. She left the company as she wanted to spend more time with her family. Her place was taken by the talented Italian designer Francesco Risso.
The success of Francesco Risso In Marni
