A trip to Alghero brings the full story of Italian designer and artist Antonio Marras to vivid life.
Situated on the western coast of Sardinia, the seaside town reveals centuries of cultural influences from the ruling class through its history, from the Phoenicians and Romans to Turkish, Catalans and French.
“It was fundamental to dominate the Mediterranean,” says Marras as a way of explanation for the turnover of cultural change resulting in a unique blend of influences that shaped the designer, who has chosen to live in his hometown Alghero and maintain his atelier there.
Following the investment in 2022 by Oniverse, formerly Calzedonia Group, as a majority shareholder, the atelier has expanded and given a more structured organization, but Marras has made sure that the level of craftsmanship remained the same.
Here, crisp white blouses are transformed by the young artisans who apply sequins, lacy details or tiny pearls, all stitched by hand, under the careful watch of the more experienced seamstresses — and of Marras himself.
Nothing escapes his attention. A martingale on a jacket’s sleeve needs to be redone because the checks do not perfectly align with the pattern on the garment. The patchwork elements on a shirt must be repositioned because the effect is jarring in the eyes of the designer.
A rendition of a fox needs to be carefully and perfectly cut with scissors from a roll of fabric depicting a bucolic scene and then applied on a parka — one of the brand’s bestselling items. Next to this on the large white table sits an exquisitely hand-embroidered fauna and floral motif that will become the back of a jacket. The details are so precise that they are couture-like.
In fact, Marras debuted with a couture collection in Rome in 1996 taking apart his uncle’s wardrobe, re-creating striking gowns from men’s suits, cutting and stitching together scraps from different looks.
Previously, Marras had launched a line in 1987 under the Piano Piano Dolce Carlotta label, a translation of the title of the 1964 Bette Davis film “Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte.”
Marras’ father, Efisio, had hoped his son would go into accounting, but that plan changed when the designer took over the family’s textile shop in Alghero, after Efisio died in the ‘70s. (Antonio’s eldest son is also called Efisio).
It’s easy to understand how Marras’ artistic senses are stimulated by the town and its landscape. Alghero is also known as the Sardinian Barceloneta, or “small Barcelona” as it has maintained the use of the Catalan language. From the town, its antique part nestled within the medieval fortified walls, and across the sea rich in red coral colonies stands the protected marine reserve and dramatic limestone promontory of Capo Caccia.
Because of the cliff’s westernmost position in relation to mainland Italy “it is the last place in the country to experience sunset,” says Marras. “I lose myself in these sunsets; each day is different and I try to capture the colors and lights.”
Taking a tour of the town with his wife Patrizia and their son Leo, Marras stops here and there to capture the clouds in the sky with his iPhone marveling at their shapes and beauty above the sea, choppy after a storm. “I like contrasts and anything that is diametrically opposite, the layering of different elements, so pervasive in the territory’s history and culture. I have grown up with this, it’s in my blood.”
Alghero has also served as the backdrop for the brand’s fall 2025 campaign fronted by Sharon Stone and lensed by photographer Branislav Simoncik. With Stone, Marras shares a love for the arts and the movies. While he has designed costumes for theater works such as the Athenian tragedy by Sophocles “Oedipus Rex,” he admits he would be thrilled to direct a movie or a theater production.
Back in the atelier, he points to another of the brand’s bestsellers, the kimono, which is “quintessentially essential, fabric shaped as a rectangle with two squares for the sleeves,” although his are anything but, embellished with embroideries and different motifs and details.
Marras’ attraction to Japan and his sense of color aligned with his tenure as creative director of Kenzo for eight years until 2011. Despite his fondness for Alghero, his trips to Paris and Japan are just two of the many the designer has taken around the world, returning only recently from Kyrgyzstan, describing himself as a contemporary Ulysses. “If you are born in Alghero, the sea beckons you to travel, but at the same time the urge to come back home is strong.”
New York, where Marras opened a flagship in July, his first outside Italy, is also a city dear to the designer. “It’s the city that resembles me the most because, like me, it never sleeps, and because it’s a place of encounters, exchanges and cross-pollination,” he says.
Milan is home to the brand’s fashion shows and to his long-standing Nonostante Marras concept store that also serves as an exhibition hub.
His trips are also key in his research into fabrics and as sources of inspiration — although Sardinia has also been a key starting point for his seasonal collections over the years. “I don’t have a method,” he shrugs when asked about his design process. “My fashion is made of combinations of parts in a planetary alignment,” he says chuckling.
Energetic and ebullient, Marras’ rapid-fire speech reflects his quick wit, and his literary and artistic culture has been the foundation for his storytelling and his theatrical fashion shows staged in Milan. His aesthetic cross-pollination has drawn from the Bloomsbury Group, the lives of Virginia Wolf, medieval Sardinian Princess Eleonora d’Arborea, Nobel prize winner for literature Grazia Deledda or Eva Mameli Calvino, mother of renowned writer Italo Calvino and the first Italian woman to get a degree in botany and dedicate her life to plants. Marras’ first namesake ready-to-wear collection in 1999 was dedicated to Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who recorded her drive to India through Iran and Afghanistan at the onset of World War II.
Strong women who have left a mark in history have always stimulated the designer’s creativity.
His conversations with his wife Patrizia, who is equally determined and, according to Marras, diplomatic and “farsighted,” are also key in the development of the collections. “She has a talent in suggesting ideas, and the encounter of different propositions is always essential.”
The atelier includes the design, pattern and prototype making, and the tailoring offices, as well as the production of special garments, made-to-measure and unique items over three floors spanning 10,800 square feet. It has expanded the number of its artisans to 24 from 15.
“I am obsessed by fashion but I never had the ambition to be a designer,” he acknowledges. “Clothes are like an armor, they protect you and are a means to communicate. It takes courage to dress with colors and prints,” he said. Although he never went to fashion school or art school, Marras in 2013 received an honorary degree in visual arts from Milan’s prestigious Brera Art Academy.
“I like to revisit and reinterpret classic tropes, like checkered shirts bought at vintage shops. Fashion is experimenting, trial and errors, finding new solutions, recovering, and cross-pollination. I don’t plan on paper. There is intervention on the details, I am interested in the process from the imagined design to paper and then 3D.”
