Marras’ Music and Melodrama
Review of Antonio Marras Fall 2025 Fashion Show
By Mark Wittmer
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Revitalized history. Music. Melodrama.
Every season for Antonio Marras is an opportunity to tell a story, often drawing on his Sardinian heritage. But Fall 2025 sees the designer explore the act of storytelling itself and how interventions in history and geography shape the way we construct our world in art – be it drama, music, or fashion.
The initial inspiration of the collection is La Bella d’Alghero, a melodrama written by Antonio Boschini and set to music by Giovanni Fara-Musio in 1892, which was staged only once, at the Teatro Rossini in Pesaro. While the the libretto with dialogue and some explanatory notes was stored in a Pesaro archive, the original score was lost. But thanks to the work of authors and musicologists Massimiliano Fois and Raffaele Sari Bozzolo, the original score has been painstakingly reconstructed. This score provides the musical backdrop for the show, while the opera’s story of romance, betrayal, and intrigue inspires the collection itself.
But Marras complicates the transhistorical narrative one step further, imagining that a troupe of Catalan actors have crossed over from Barcelona to Sardinia to revive La bella d’Alghero in 2025. The collection is thus a richly layered and carefully detailed intersection of historical drama, references to late 19th-century Catalan and Sardinian dress codes, and contemporary sophistication.
As always, Marras’ sense for fabric combinations and structural techniques is rich and varied, but here it takes on a deeper quality as a symbolic treatise on the way stories transform and reappear across time. Garments are hand-painted with portraits, flowers, and musical notes that form interactions with their pleating techniques or sheer layering; patchwork tailoring and pieced-together knitwear suggest interventions and slippages over time.
THE DIRECTION
THE QUOTE
I am passionate about giving a voice to seemingly
mute things so that they become garments that speak.” – Antonio Marras
THE WRAP UP
Marras isn’t just stopping at sending an ode to the freshly rediscovered historical work; he’s teaming with a Catalan theater company and the Municipality of Alghero to bring the play back to life. We’re looking forward to the premier, but until then, the collection offers a rich musical world of its own.
