Francesca Murri Aims to Reawaken Fiorucci With Debut Show
MILAN — It’s Fiorucci o’clock.
The label founded by the late visionary designer Elio Fiorucci is ringing the alarm and reclaiming a spot in the fashion landscape by staging its first runway show under the its new ownership and the creative direction of Francesca Murri at 1 p.m. CET on Tuesday.
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The event, which is to open Milan Fashion Week but is off the official schedule, will be held at the Triennale Milano museum, a landmark location for arts and design that recently hosted the Gucci men’s show. For Murri and Fiorucci’s chief executive officer Alessandro Pisani, the choice was a no-brainer not only for the venue’s reputation but also because the museum is slated to honor the brand’s founder — who died in 2015 at age 80 — with an exhibition curated by Judith Clark opening in November.
The duo hopes that both the runway show and exhibit will reignite interest in the Italian brand, which has been on a relaunch trajectory for the past year, when it relocated from London to Milan, unveiled a new creative vision, moved its first steps into physical distribution, revamped its online presence and opened new headquarters here.
Meeting with WWD at the Casa Fiorucci hub last week, Murri and Pisani offered a preview of the collection and teased the show format, both inspired by the dream world.
“Looking to Elio’s archive, we started to explore the idea of utopia and irony,” Murri said. “In this case, I linked utopia to a dreamlike dimension, since dreams offer the most utopic moment of our lives, in which everything can happen.”
The connection had the designer exploring the theme across various media, as many references crowded her mood board, ranging from surreal artworks by Timo Helgert, Daniela Balsamo and Maurizio Cattelan and paintings by Salvador Dalí and Henri Rousseau to words by William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Pablo Neruda and Walt Disney.
These were reinterpreted in the show format, where guests will embark on a sensorial journey, first stepping into a smoky and scented light blue space with soft pillows and then accessing an essential location, considered more apt to spotlight the spring 2025 collection. The change of scenery was symbolically intended as an awakening experience to the brand’s new reality.
The concept is in sync with Murri’s approach to the collection, too. The designer focused on representing different characters as they abruptly wake up in the morning — from the hungover to those who got their beauty sleep — and dress in a rush, picking and layering clothes without giving too much thought.
Braiding such a narrative with Fiorucci’s signature ironic spirit and the sugar-coated attitude she brought to the label, Murri conjured a lineup heavy on white, light blue and indigo hues that will offer a new take on some of the brand’s codes and more insight on her personal output.
“This collection is more mature, and maybe more modern compared to my previous ones….I want to take the brand toward a new language because for me that’s essential for ensuring Fiorucci its relevancy today,” Murri said. “I don’t believe in nostalgia. It would be disappointing to turn to it also because Elio did so many wonderful things that were so modern or ahead of his time, so he wouldn’t do what he did in the past if he were here today. But of course, I will need time to digest certain processes. Everything is still new for us.”
For one, Murri reprised the Tyvek fabric from the Fiorucci archives, but elevated its performance aspect and papery feel with lace and macramé inserts and ajour intarsia. These will include motifs such as angels, only not the iconic ones designed by Italo Lupi in the ‘80s in order to avoid a literal approach.
“The angels are intrinsic to the brand’s iconography but I explored different ones,” Murri said while showing the embroidery of two cherubs kissing, the outline of their image reprised as a furry pattern on a fluffy knit. The theme also informed a padded bedcover playfully doubling as an outerwear piece, while other dainty items included retro-inspired lingerie pieces peeking from under men’s tailoring and sporty accessories reworked in macramé.
Another Fiorucci staple, denim was revisited with organza inserts or via patchwork techniques. Murri additionally played by mixing two different shirts in a single piece or opening the back of roomy trenchcoats and nylon vichy coats with the goal to challenge consumers to see things from a different perspective.
In the same spirit, she cut new, elongated silhouettes, oversize proportions and loose fits that could express the gender-bending approach she’s been embracing and that honors Fiorucci’s inclusive ethos. Finishing off the range, colorful elements nodding to the brand’s archives appeared as prints in the garments or defined chunky accessories, bringing a pop touch to the lineup.
“It’s all about the fun and not taking ourselves too seriously,” said Murri, who indulged in designing mouth-watering lollipop-like necklaces and earrings; pastel-hued eyewear with cloud-shaped lenses, jelly shoes, and puffy Neoprene flip-flops covered in crystals. She also expanded the assortment for Fiorucci’s current hero bag, the Mella, which is shaped as a marshmallow.
Accessories are a key category for the brand and are developed by the company, although Pisani has received requests for licenses from eyewear to home lines and beauty. “The show will be a platform to fuel further conversations but the truth is that we did a giant effort in stretching the assortment and I don’t want the loss of control to turn into a risk of losing quality,” the CEO said. “Everything in the show has been produced in partnership with Italian suppliers because our return in Italy was meant to be not only in spirit but product-wise, too.”
The show is seen as pivotal to further build credibility around the new strategy and Fiorucci’s repositioning in the accessible luxury segment, even if Pisani acknowledged the overall uncertainty the market is experiencing and the complexity “in convincing retailers to introduce a new brand, because they are in a ‘clean up’ phase.”
But the CEO believes the brand “offers an alternative to what’s on the market” in terms of aesthetic and that the Fiorucci name “is still top-of-mind for consumers.”
“Everybody remembers Fiorucci’s heyday but the brand has been quite silent from the ‘90s onward. Yet this isn’t hampering its potential relaunch today. On the contrary, it is helping it because there’s much curiosity around the project,” Pisani said. He stressed that it’s the company’s duty now to bank on the show’s momentum and the Triennale exhibition’s organic buzz to scale up the brand awareness.
Getting consumers accustomed to the new price point might be trickier, considering it increased 35 percent on average compared to where it was under the previous ownership of veteran British clothing retailers Stephen and Janie Schaffer.
While Pisani shut down the Fiorucci store in London’s Soho, he acknowledged that the brand still resonates strongly with U.K. consumers, as well as those in European fashion capitals and in the U.S. These markets will remain the priority for further expansion distribution-wise, before the company embarks into targeting Asia, the executive said.
Meanwhile, Fiorucci’s revamped online store is helping driving sales and garnering new consumers, as 80 percent of purchases of the new collection were made by new users, including shoppers from Australia and Philippines.
Bags and jewelry are the most popular categories as they offer an easier way to access the brand as well as gifting opportunities. Yet Murri was surprised by the positive reaction to the Mella bag, which retails between 550 euros and 750 euros.
“I come from the world of leather goods and I know what bags represent and that their purchase goes beyond the design or functional aspect but is linked to status and affinity to a brand,” said the designer, who counts previous stints at established houses like Ferragamo, Gucci and Givenchy.
That’s why Pisani wants to further push on the accessory segment and aims to generate 50 percent of Fiorucci’s total sales out of it by 2029.
The CEO is also committed to build Fiorucci’s physical presence by enhancing the pop-up strategy the company launched earlier this year with outposts at Rinascente and Galeries Lafayette Champs-Élysées, which acted as a test.
Learnings from the experience will be applied in temporary formats controlled directly from the brand. The company is also eyeing the opening of a first flagship — a move that would come with big expectations considering the founder created the mother of all retail concepts with its store in the Milan’s central San Babila in 1967 as well as the 1976 flagship in Manhattan that was commonly described as a “daytime Studio 54.”
Pisani, who placed the flagship store opening in the first half of 2026, envisions a space that “goes beyond the canonical business hours” and reprises the original concept’s spirit of community building and of aggregation point for artists.
To this end, the company will start testing its skills by engaging with activists and artists and inviting them at Casa Fiorucci, which in November will open an area aiming to become a meeting point for talents and external collaborators. The implementation is in tune with the founder’s legendary inclination for capturing and amplifying the zeitgeist and the collaborative approach he embraced throughout his career.
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