Marni’s has always been a particular kind of history — artfully offbeat, idiosyncratic but disciplined, steeped in a Milanese modernism that has magnetised a very specific kind of intelligent, creatively minded woman since Consuelo Castiglioni founded it. After Francesco Risso’s expressive tenure, the house now passes to Belgian designer Meryll Rogge — and as the review in Vogue noted, karmically speaking, it feels like the universe tidying up. A woman’s house, back in a woman’s hands.

Rogge’s connection to Marni is not a professional calculation. She has been a fan since her teenage years, she said — the brand shaped her vision of fashion before she had a vision of fashion to speak of. That personal bond gives her approach a quality that’s harder to manufacture than research: native fluency rather than studied homework. There’s also a genuine kinship between her own namesake line and Marni’s DNA — a shared appetite for artistic wit, expressive off-beat sensibility, and an honest respect for wearability.

Her archival excavation took her back to the very beginning — the first Marni collections from 1993, buried on a long-forgotten hard drive. What she found there was almost shockingly restrained: white, black, brown and grey, no colour, no prints, no embellishments for the first three seasons. Pure material and shape. That foundational austerity resurfaced in her debut, where muted tones offset by abundant black were punctuated only occasionally by pastel or colour — used sparingly enough to feel like a decision rather than a habit.

She also revisited the mid-to-late nineties collections she’d loved as a young woman, pulling archive pieces to try on and asking what still resonated. The answer was proportion. Those small nineties coats — fitted shoulder, gently nipped waist, proper knee-length skirt — felt immediately modern. A skirt sitting slightly low on the hips locked the silhouette into place, and from there the collection built itself through confident variation. Multiple iterations of that slender, tidy shape moved down the runway with the conviction of a designer who has found solid ground.

Rogge’s version of Marni veered slightly punk — true to the founder’s allergy to anything too pretty or merely cute. “We toughened everything up a bit,” she said. Hardware appeared throughout, turning fastenings and studs into design gestures rather than just functional details. Shearling and goat short coats reimagined Marni’s long relationship with furry textures. Foundational prints returned — stripes pushed forward, dots reappearing as large loose discs attached to tops and skirts, jingling with movement. Graphic florals stayed sharp and modernist, with no sugar and no softness. Decoration remained artistic, maintaining what the house has always done best: that particular hallucinatory streak that makes Marni so hard to imitate and so easy to recognise.

The Marni woman Rogge described is strong and self-directed — someone with a career, a family, a genuine engagement with art and culture. Not defined by fashion, but living in it. The same goes for the Marni man. These are people wearing their clothes, not the other way around.

She was clear-eyed about what she was and wasn’t attempting. “I always say the best person to do Consuelo’s Marni is Consuelo,” she said. “This was always going to be something else — not just because I’m a different person, but because, well, it’s 2026.” It’s a disarmingly honest framing for a debut — and the collection that followed it made a persuasive case that something else can still be very much Marni.