Marni AW26
Gallery / 35 images
Meryll Rogge is done with manifesting. She manifested so hard in 2025 that she got everything she wanted, and now, her life has been turned upside down in the best possible way. In the space of three months, the Belgian creative director tripled her workload, taking on two new brands, as well as continuing to design for her own namesake label. One of them is the craft-focused knitwear brand B.B. Wallace, which she co-founded last September. The other has been expanding its pool of devoted followers for more than three decades, and today, exists as one of Milan’s most treasured fashion houses: Marni.
Rogge herself was a Marni girl long before she grew into a Marni woman. The brand’s playful confidence first caught her attention as a teenager, growing up in Ghent and getting lost in the pages of fashion magazines. She remembers picking out a green Marni skirt to wear to her older brother’s wedding, and later, after landing a job in New York working as an assistant at Marc Jacobs, she used her first paycheck to buy herself a pair of platform Marni sandals.
It’s a brand that has punctuated some of the most important chapters of her life, and last July, it was announced that Rogge would be taking over from Francesco Risso as the brand’s new creative director. The designer, her husband and their two young children swiftly moved from Antwerp to Milan, where she presented her debut runway show on Thursday evening. Less than 24 hours later, I was granted a strict 15-minute window to fire off questions about the biggest show of Rogge’s life so far. We meet over Zoom, and after several silent minutes of staring at myself, eventually her camera flashes on… the clock starts ticking.
“You always wish you had done things differently,” she says, reflecting on the events of the day before. “But overall, I really wanted two things out of this first show: for people from [Marni’s] first and second chapters to find themselves in the conversation. But at the same time, a desire for it to be surprising. There is a new vision happening, and it’s not going to be the same. It’s going to take us somewhere else.”
Rogge’s appointment marks the third chapter in Marni’s design story. Founded in 1994 by Swiss designer Consuelo Castiglioni, it originally opened as a luxury fur brand before evolving into ready-to-wear by the late 1990s. By 2012, 60 per cent of the company had been acquired by Renzo Rosso’s OTB Group (which owns Diesel, Margiela and Jil Sander), and in 2016, Castiglioni left the brand. She was replaced by the Prada-trained Italian designer, Francesco Risso, who remained creative director for nine years, until announcing his departure last summer. Rogge was confirmed the following month.
Like any designer headed to a new house, her first point of call was the archive. Sadly for us, Marni’s early years aren’t well documented – they don’t exist online, but luckily for Rogge, the brand has access to a hard drive that stores its first-ever collections. “I was surprised to see them,” she says, but she was also surprised by what they looked like. “In the very first three [collections] the colour palette was brown, black, white and grey. You didn’t have colour, you didn’t have prints, none of the things that you associate with Marni now.”
“Marni shaped my idea of fashion. This collection was made from my own personal memory”
Though the brand today is known for its unapologetic colours and chunky patterns, its beginnings were entirely the opposite. According to Rogge, the first sign of any colour or pattern showed up at the same time, in 1995, with one very small, red floral print. “That became the building block of our first look – we wanted to honour it, but also move it along,” she says. The opening look of Rogge’s debut show featured a beige top, black skirt and white coat – the principal colours of Marni’s earliest designs – styled with a cherry red belt, in homage to that first red print from 1995.
For any designer to come in and take the reins at a pre-existing fashion house is to tread the line between the old and the new. It’s a balancing act of honouring the past and modernising it for the future. Rogge is well aware of this: “I wanted to keep the essence and the spirit of Marni, but not be too literal,” she explains. “There are some archival things that we took, certain prints that are a wink to the old guard Marni fans who will recognise them.” More important to her, however, was paying tribute to her own personal relationship with the brand. “I discovered Marni when I was a teenager, and I really followed it – it shaped my idea of fashion. This collection was made from my own personal memory of Marni.”
After the show, the online reaction was mostly very positive. Some people drew comparisons to Dario Vitale’s one and only collection for Versace, others saw similarities to Prada. Regardless, Rogge does not care for comparisons or for online chatter. What she does care about is doing her job to the best of her ability, for the sake of all women in fashion.
As one of so few female creative directors currently working in fashion, when she landed the job last year, women throughout the industry let out a collective cheer. “There is pressure of course, but I’m not going to let myself be bothered by pressure,” she says, “and I’m not going to let myself be pressured by all the debuts – like, who’s better than the other. I’m really not interested in that or whatever plays out online.”
“But, clearly, there are very, very few women who have a leading role at a house, so one thing I want to say is that I’m so incredibly grateful to Mr Renzo and Stefano Rosso for having made that choice, because there are many people who don’t do this [hire women]. What I do think is that I better be doing a good job at this, because I need to make sure I don’t fuck it up for everyone else, you know?”
The list of women designers that Rogge looks up to today includes Martine Rose, Simone Rocha, Phoebe Philo, Rei Kawakubo, Elsa Schiaparelli and Madame Grès – “there’s not enough space in this article to list all the women who have done fantastic things,” she says. As for the Marni woman that we have grown very fond of under both Castiglioni and Risso, she’s still there, “but she’s evolved – maybe she’s the next generation,” explains Rogge. “She’s interested in more than just fashion. She’s strong and put together and she doesn’t care so much about what people think.”
As the interview edges closer to that 15-minute cut-off, I’m told I can ask one last question. Does she think she manifested this job? “Yes, I did,” she responds without hesitation. I laugh, but she’s deadly serious: “I did, one hundred per cent. We have proof.” But before she can reveal it, that’s time.
