Babak Radboy (from TELFAR) has collaborated on a very special fashion film for Marni, highlighting a new way of experiencing high fashion, in connection to the human body, its emotions and environment. The house has also issued a manifesto to accompany the short film. First a presentation broadcasted live on September 25th for Marni’s Spring/Summer 2021 collection, « Marnifesto » is now a symbol of a new era.

Marni’s Marnifesto:

« Spring/Summer 2021 will be remembered as a turning point in fashion history — if people still keep track of such things.

We can forgive them if they do not — because while like the rest of the world the business of fashion faces profound uncertainty — the culture of fashion faces a more existential threat: irrelevance.

What people chose to do this season means something.

As a brand and as individuals we had to ask ourselves the same question the public would ask: why do a fashion show at all?

If 2020 has been catastrophic it has been so only in how it has exposed the vulnerability, inequity, and dysfunction which preceded this year. If we are to move forward from here — it will not be to go back to normal.

If there is a reason to do a fashion show now — it is to use this moment of discontinuity to fundamentally refashion the core of what we do — and undress the ‘model’, the ‘walk’, the ’show’ and the ‘venue’:

We started with our models — engaging them as human beings and collaborators — instead of blank canvases.

In over 48 hours of phone calls we collaborated with each person ‘walking’ in our collection — giving them complete autonomy over what they wanted to ‘show’.

Their ‘venue’ was wherever they were — from Detroit to Dakar, London to Tokyo, Milan to Nebraska; in their bedrooms, their homes, their neighborhoods, corner-stores and the places in between.

It was captured on camera phones — by their family, their lovers or friends.

On September 25th at 4pm Milan time we began our live broadcast watched by thousands of people around the world.

We saw people wake up, go to the deli, walk their dogs, take the bus, donate to a community fridge, dance, paint, draw, eat, drive, picnic. We saw the cast of the award winning film Atlantics, going about their daily lives in Senegal. We saw luminaries such as Sasha Lane, Paloma Elsesser and Yves Tumor; performances by Deem Spencer, Tom Rasmussen, Mykki Blanco and Moses Sumney, and a finale where they all came together walking backwards and forwards all over the world.

Some of our collaborators had chosen to prerecord their segments, others chose to go live.

In either case — in commissioning nearly 50 autonomously produced videos one week before our show, not one of us knew what was going to happen — and that was precisely the point.

Nothing could be truer to this moment of uncertainty. Where nothing worth doing can be done without risk. Nothing worth risking can be made without trust, and nothing in our lives can be taken for-granted — as anything short of a miracle.

We think MARNIFESTO is a good fashion movie — but as the name suggests it is also something more: It is a way of doing things — both greater and smaller than the sum of its parts.

The people who made it, and how it was made — are inseparable from how it looks.

When you do things this way — looking good can mean something. That’s what fashion can say in 2020. »