Marni CEO Stefano Rosso installed Meryll Rogge as creative director in the midst of an industry-wide creative reset. It was easy for designers making their debuts to get lost in the noise. That did not happen to Rogge. Her first runway collection for the 32-year-old OTB-owned label was critically lauded, including by Vogue Runway, for being true to founder Consuelo Castiglioni’s aesthetic, while marking the start of a fresh chapter for 2026 and beyond.
At the Vogue Business Global Summit in Chantilly, France, earlier this month, Meryll Rogge and Stefano Rosso discussed Marni’s next era.
Vogue: Let’s start with my colleague Tiziana Cardini’s review of your debut. She wrote that, “with Marni back in a woman’s hands, it karmically feels like the universe is tidying itself up.” Meryll, what are the pluses and minuses of being a woman designer as you see them?
Meryll: Starting with not an easy question [laughs]. I think what’s important in our case is that the founder of the brand was a woman, and, from what I understood, the brand really originated from a sense of wanting to design for herself.
Stefano: For us, talent has no gender. A talent is a talent, and we were looking for the best talent to take Marni to its next creative chapter, and we believe that Meryll has all it takes to do it. The fact that she’s a woman, it’s probably added value, because we really wanted to focus this new period of bringing back the attention and the focus on women’s ready-to-wear, which had been struggling a little for the company in the last few years. So it was a natural choice, but mainly because we recognized in Meryll an amazing creative talent.
Vogue: Meryll, I want the audience to hear about your first paycheck from your first big job in fashion. You bought something that maybe shows how this new job was kismet. Will you tell us what it was?
Meryll: It’s true. I started my career in 2008 at Marc Jacobs in New York, and with my very first paycheck, instead of paying the rent that was due, I went straight to a store uptown and bought a pair of Marni shoes that I’d been eyeing for a few months. So that was my very first purchase ever with the very first paycheck.
Vogue: So, it seems like this job was meant to be, and I had that feeling too when I was in the Marni showroom with you a couple of days before your show. You had chosen key moments in Consuelo Castiglioni’s early collections and people noted the connections you were making between Marni then and Marni now. Talking about the road forward, do you see the archives playing an important role permanently? How do you plan to use them?
Meryll: What we’re interested in doing is working from the spirit of Marni: what the brand means, what the values of the brand are, and how we can bring the brand forward in a new context, a new world, let’s say. I think really what we will be focusing on is the value system, even more than the actual archive, even though the archive will always play a role.
Vogue: Stefano, can you talk about the Marni values?
Stefano: Two words: modern elegance. We believe a lot in having a point of view that stands a bit outside the lines. As a matter of fact, in our brand book, we have an essence phrase that is, “color outside the lines,” and I truly believe it represents perfectly what Marni is.
