While COVID has impacted fashion as a whole, Marni’s Fall/Winter 2021 collection is a contemplation on the new normal with a romantic take on a world beyond the lonely confines of pandemic. Like many brands that have sought to create tactile collections, with billowing, voluminous silhouettes and lush fabrics that invite touch, Marni’s Fall/Winter 2021 line urges us to “feel, touch, and feel some more,” according to the brand’s accompanying artistic statement. It calls upon the antecedents of the Romantic era, itself a response to the Enlightenment’s technocratic coolness that privileged science and rationalism over emotion and longing.

Marni’s creative director Francesco Risso offers a presentation in film format, drawing a star-studded fashion cast, including Mykki Blanco, Zsela, and Paloma Elsesser (among others). In this surrealist film we are invited into a romantic day of breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the creative director and his cast, clad in an exciting new line full of vibrant colors, complex patterns, and chunky knits. We experience fashion at its ineffable best; this collection is “a romantic ode to dressmaking at its most tactile and intimate. A love letter, actually: blatant, at times even proudly banal,” the brand writes. Thus, it does not matter what you think of the collection. What matters is what you feel.