The restless mind of Antonio Marras this season alighted on the sad story of Princess Romanework, the eldest daughter of Haile Selassie. After her husband was killed fighting the Italians during their occupation of Abyssinia, in 1937, the Princess and her four children were captured and exiled to Asinara, a small island off of Sardinia whose name literally translates to “inhabited by donkeys.” As a counterpoint to the story of the princess, Marras also considered the 1880 self-exile of Arthur Rimbaud to Harar in Ethiopia as a refuge from his tempestuous relationship with Paul Verlaine and the strictures of conservative France. This led Marras to also consider Bruce Chatwin—the title of his final book, What Am I Doing Here, was taken from a Rimbaud line, and he wrote a libretto about Rimbaud’s time in Harar.
Phew, huh? Yet, to appreciate the full fabric of the Marras experience, you must also consider whatever cultural flotsam has washed into his consciousness for the season. His feathered and embellished deconstructed military parkas; his riotous mélange of lace, python print, ostrich feather, and brocade layered in languorously long plissé dresses; and his oversize jersey sportswear pieces decorated with botanical reliefs in pins were all drawn from his mental voyages between Asinara and Harar. Some of those spectacular headpieces, decorated as busily as you imagine Marras’s internal dialogue to sound, were literal hat tips to Chatwin. The cacophonous pentimento of patched apparent offcuts on ruffle-armed shirts was a wearable scrapbook of sometimes counterintuitive decorative twists. The sheer busyness of Marras can sometimes overwhelm: Keep looking, and you see a method in the apparent madness.
