Photo: Courtesy of Marni
The crowd-pleasingest event of Milan fashion week? Easy: the Marni flower market. To celebrate the brand’s 20th anniversary, Consuelo Castiglioni and daughter Carolina, Marni’s director of special projects, organized a one-day pop-up flower market at Milan’s Rotonda Della Besana. The 18th-century building complex was completely transformed with PVC and metal garden structures for sale planted in the grass outside, and inside the colonnaded space a souk-like atmosphere with stands selling live flowers, planters-slash-purses in archival Marni prints, and mini totes stuffed with gardening tools. Homemade cakes and fresh-squeezed juices were on offer, along with brown paper bags holding some particularly tasty spiced nuts. The market opened for a press preview shortly after Castiglioni’s runway show, which deserves its own fair share of superlatives for the way it progressed from Zen-like combinations of black and white to a riotous effusion of color and print. Let’s just hope team Marni was able to restock before the public was invited from 3 to 8. Fashion show folk left the opening with plastic market bags stuffed full of fresh bouquets (see Tommy Ton), and a necklace-making station originally conceived for kids with wooden beads, fabric strips, and plastic bottle tops cut into flowers was especially popular. Overheard at another brand’s runway show later in the afternoon: “I had to tear myself away from the Marni flower market.” And again, waiting for yet another show to start: “I wish I could just go back to the Marni flower market.”
Tamu McPherson, Princess Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz, Micol Sabbadini, and Anna Dello Russo; Consuelo and Carolina Castiglioni
Courtesy of Marni
A portion of the proceeds from the event will go to The Vimala Association, which benefits Tibetan children living in India. The market was the first in a yearlong schedule of events that will mark Marni’s anniversary.
