Meryll Rogge presented her debut Fall/Winter 2026-2027 collection for Marni in Milan on February 26, 2026, per WWD's review: the show opened with a fuzzy knee-length coat and reprised the house's signature kitten-heel silhouettes while filtering everything through Rogge's own off-kilter sensibility.
The appointment was one of the more closely watched creative-director moves of the season. Rogge — a Belgian designer who launched her own label after years behind the scenes at major houses — took over an Italian brand whose entire equity rests on a defiantly odd visual language, quirky prints and color-blocked knits that its founder Consuelo Castiglioni built and that later designers alternately amplified or tamed.
What actually walked the runway
Per Vogue's collection review, Rogge dug into Marni's own territory rather than replacing it: embellished skirts worn low with belts, graphic t-shirts, and heavy textured coats in that opening fuzzy register. The set, designed by the Dutch-Italian studio Formafantasma, framed the clothes in a reflection on fashion's relationship with materials — a cue that craft, not spectacle, was the message. The Impression called it a confident first showing that blended her aesthetic with the house DNA.
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Why this debut is a template worth reading
Rogge's approach — re-enter the archive, keep the awkwardness, sharpen the pricing and the wardrobe logic — mirrors the broader 2026 reset across Italian and French houses, where new directors are judged on how few signatures they break. For Marni specifically, owned since 2015 by the group that also controls brands including Triumph-adjacent portfolio plays, the test is commercial: can oddity scale? The early read is that Rogge kept enough of it to matter.
The commercial backdrop sharpened the stakes. Marni's ownership has spent recent seasons positioning the brand for growth, and the creative choice signaled the direction: rather than hiring a safe minimalist, the house chose a designer whose own label trades on exactly the oddity Marni owns. Early retail signal to watch — the coat textures and the kitten-heel proportions — will show up in pre-fall deliveries; if sell-through holds, the appointment becomes the season's template for heritage-oddity brands choosing reinvention over normalization.
The takeaway
Track one thing in stores: the fuzzy coat. Debut openers tend to become a new director's shorthand, and if that texture graduates into the pre-fall buy, Rogge's Marni is working; if it stays a runway curiosity, the house is still searching.