“Let’s dance/ Let’s dance ’til the end of love. / Let’s dance our best days away. / Let’s dance to keep the abyss at bay./ Let’s dance until everything changes,” so read the opening lines of a poem in the show notes for Marni’s AW20 menswear show over the weekend. Titled A call from Prince Prospero, the poem references the protagonist of Edgar Allen Poe’s 1842 short story, The Masque of the Red Death about a nobleman who throws a lavish and hedonistic masquerade ball in order to avoid some mysterious and deadly plague. But, of course, his efforts are fruitless and the plague somehow finds its way into the party, resulting in the deaths of Prospero and his guests.
Prospero’s party served as the inspiration behind creative director Francesco Risso’s menswear show. Out of the dark, dancers emerged and moved in slow sways and hypnotic stretches as models strode down the runway. Choreographed by Michele Rizzo, the dance called to mind the work of artists Anne Imhof or Giselle Vienne, whose choreography similarly embodies trance-like states—a merging of nightlife ritual and religious ceremony. The clothes, meanwhile, were mismatched and deliciously eclectic: billowing trousers and eye-watering, hot pinks, jackets patchworked together from two different textures, frayed hemlines and dangling sleeves, ‘70s style trouser suits and long lengths, the gleaming green of fresh plucked olives.
Although Poe’s gothic tale is commonly considered as a comment on the inevitability of death, Risso did not subscribe completely to this reading, instead saying after the show, “It’s a dance which takes us to the end of love. The end and the beginning of love.”
See more from the performance below:
