MILAN — There are questions one simply doesn’t dare ask.
When stepping into Palazzina Sunnei here to meet with Sunnei’s founders Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina ahead of their show Friday, it’s natural to be tempted to fish for hints about the format the duo will come up with this time, before realizing there’s no point.
Their inventive concepts and the surprise effect of their shows has contributed to make Sunnei one of the unmissable tickets at Milan Fashion Week, even if the brand stands on the outskirts of the fashion system and is much smaller in size and budgets compared to many of the more established names on the schedule.
And many Italians still see Rizzo and Messina as the new kids on the block, the duo has gradually gained international recognition and cult status and the brand is quietly gearing up to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
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The spring 2025 show will mark the milestone but no nostalgia is contemplated, the designers said in a preview. The collection will continue to push forward the Sunnei lexicon rich in colors, stripes and ‘90s references, integrating a personal element and its second collaboration with Camper.
“We didn’t focus on the anniversary but simply worked on the Sunnei person we have in mind, who’s colorful, explosive, maybe even a snob as detached from trends. Let’s define it ‘macro,’ but in a way it doesn’t scream logos or fashion,” Rizzo said. He underscored that as the brand looks ahead, the duo will continue to build and perfect its codes rather than pivot in other directions.
Novelties this time will include a print developed from drawings by Messina’s mother from the ‘80s, which he recently unearthed. Portraying different women, these have been manipulated digitally by the Sunnei team by clashing them with dystopian scenarios. As a result, the images were splashed on second-skin tops, skirts and gloves, as well as a limited-edition series of silk scarves that will drop at the same time as the show.
Elsewhere, the Sunnei codes will be magnified with smock techniques, oversize proportions, elongated silhouettes and bright hues, which will also inform the sneaker style developed with Camper. These come with bold colorblocking in both their mesh upper and a chunky rubber sole with a double-like effect. The design marks the second collaboration with the footwear company, after the two brands launched the Forone style in June, a single-laced shoe with no left or right, purchasable individually and available in five colorways to form a matching or mismatched pair.
As for the show venue, the brand kept details under wraps at press time, with Rizzo only teasing that it will act as a statement “not much of our stylistic maturity but of our awareness.”
“But we don’t love to tell much because we work hard on making it a surprise and special moment for those who come. I think it’s the best part for guests, to leave a show with the memory of an experience…and have felt part of something special and unconventional. That’s what we’re after and find most interesting,” Rizzo said about Sunnei’s approach to show formats. “This is a job that risks becoming repetitive: we’ve been to some shows and there’s always the same people and maybe at the fourth or fifth show of the day you don’t even know where you are anymore and lose focus. We understand that. That’s why we try to offer a spectacle aiming to stay in people’s mind. That’s the goal: do something compelling, that makes sense and has an impact on those in attendance.”
The occasional viral effect on social media is just a consequence of such an attitude and never the goal, said Rizzo, stressing that Sunnei seeks quality rather than buzz. “We don’t [plan] anything, we just want to express the craziness we have in our head and live here at Palazzina,” he said with a smile. “Those 15 minutes have become a slot to make our creativity explode. We spend too much time and so little resources [on it] that we’re focused just on trying to do what we have in mind rather than chasing virality. And you see it also from our guests: They are all so quiet, everything is kind of elitist because we’re so protective of our choices and we just want our friends and those we believe are professionals at our shows.”
Asked which usually comes first, the collection or its show format, Messina said it depends. “There’s no formula: there have been cases in which we came up with the idea way ahead of the time, and others just three days before the show,” he said.
Case in point, the crowd-surfing concept that made the Sunnei fall 2023 show last year one of its most memorable didn’t exist until 48 hours before the event. “We were here one night, clueless. Then I got this idea and we didn’t have the time to think it through, we were so late that we said it’s going to be this one,” recalled Messina. “The only rule we have is not to force anything; if an idea doesn’t arrive, it doesn’t, and that’s fine. It has to be a creative urgency.”
All involving an undercurrent of social commentary, concepts through the years encompassed the musical chairs format of Sunnei’s first runway show for men’s spring 2017; models sprinting on Milan’s streets for fall 2022; the doppelgängers parade of spring 2023, and the audience participation call to instant judgment — score paddles included — for spring 2024, to name a few.
Yet the founders’ favorite one remains the spring 2020 show, linked to the Bianco Sunnei urban requalification project. “It was our last naïf show,” said Rizzo, while Messina added that it marked a pivotal moment as “we understood what we were really doing and everyone started to see value in it.”
It was also the last runway show of Sunnei as indie brand, before Vanguards Group took a majority stake, investing 6 million euros in the company in September 2020.
Even with the financial backing, the duo have remained highly involved in both the creative and decision-making processes, both on their own terms as they continue to experiment with collections and distribution strategies alike.
On the production front, Rizzo and Messina have whittled down the collections, focusing on a less-but-better approach. “We revisited the strategy based on our needs. We were stuck in a dynamic in which we had to please both wholesalers and us, until we decided to satisfy more our demands and follow our own pace,” Messina said.
“The online market is saturated, buyers are full of stock, it would be pointless to do attempts of overproduction. For us it’s essential to innovate in a pragmatic way, that makes sense with the moment we’re living….Doing less means to create less, and to create less means to create better,” he continued.
The flexibility in stretching strategies has always proved to be an asset for the brand. For one, the cofounders launched the pioneering Canvas project in 2020 amid the pandemic, enabling wholesale partners to build their own Sunnei selections according to their demands through a customization service available at a dedicated VR-enhanced platform.
The initiative was replaced by the “master collection” concept introduced last year, a combination of main and pre-collections unveiled as a whole to buyers on pre-collections timing and meant to offer them an overview of what to expect, as well as ease pressure on the supply chain. As a result, the two big shows the brand stages annually mainly include clothes already presented to buyers, leaving out just around 20 percent of looks that are special pieces for the runway.
“We experimented with Canvas and bigger collections but now we feel the need to be practical, very directional and more and more unisex in the lineup, without offering too much because it would go against other implementations we’re doing and that enable us to work with materials in a more efficient way. We look to reduce production and increase creativity,” Rizzo said.
Looking forward, the biggest challenge is to keep preserving the authenticity and integrity of Sunnei and the work done so far. “It’s the most difficult task, because there are so many things changing around us, so many temptations, distractions and too many voices. Of course we see everything, know everything but we don’t care,” Messina said.
“We’ve always done things our way. Also [Vanguards Group] follows us in our madness because it understood that’s where our value lies,” concluded Rizzo.
