When Francesco Risso (Creative Director, 2016 until June 2025) arrived, that philosophy expanded horizontally rather than vertically — into art, craft, emotion, collectivity. It became a cultural system rather than just a silhouette. And crucially, it was never framed as activism. It was simply how the brand thought about people.

Consumers are more visually fluent, harder to impress, and uninterested in volume. Scarcity doesn’t create desire — conviction does. You see this in the resurgence of pieces meant to endure: vintage Armani, Miyake, Versace. The question becomes: What’s worth keeping?

At a time when history itself feels endangered — erased or rewritten by politics and AI, which obscures sources and floods the record with deepfakes — the question grows only more complex. Is an artistic director there to design clothes, or to curate a house’s legacy? Is their role to rewrite history — artificially reviving memories and parodying... See more