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Italian fashion label Marni has a notable history of artistic collaborations, including projects with photographer Richard Prince and musician Kim Gordon. For the brand’s Fall 2016 collection, creative director Consuelo Castiglioni experimented with unusual proportions and bold color combinations on her own, possibly pulling inspiration from a few of my own favorite artists, including the iconoclastic (and super awesome!) French artist/designer Sonia Delaunay.
When I first saw this Marni ensemble [ Fig. 1 ], I was immediately reminded of Delaunay’s “Robe Simultanée” or “Simultaneous Dress” (1913), a patchwork creation that blurs the line between fine and applied art. [ Fig. 3 ] The dress serves as one of the best examples of Delaunay’s work with “simultism”, a term that she and her artist husband coined to describe the dynamic that is created when different colors are put together in ways that generate wholly different meanings.
The combination of shapes and bold colors in this Marni dress also bear a close resemblance to Italian futurist paintings, especially “The Airplane” by Mario Sironi. (1915). [ Fig. 5 ] Although Sironi is not one of the best known futurist painters, he did adopt the style for a short time while working alongside Giacomo Balla, one of the movement’s key figures. Like “The Airplane”, many futurist artworks focused on themes such as speed, technology, and violence, using fragmented shapes that are strongly infl