Marianna Rosati was born in 1980 in Tuscany, where at the age of twenty her first experience in fashion was researching leather materials and treatments for the collections Santacroce and Neil Barrett. Starting from 2011 sh attended Polimoda in Florence, where she graduated with a Master in Concept Brand Image.
She soon became the Assistant Designer for Ugo Cacciatori at Santacroce, eventually moving up to the role of Head Designer.
The following season the Santacroce partners left their old brand behind and embarked on a new adventure, creating a new uniquely leather based collection with a radically different concept, free of the past influences, where Marianna was positioned as the Creative Director of DROMe.
The key idea of DROMe is the deconstruction of the traditional notion of “leather” by experimenting new shapes and volumes, different treatments and weights, as if it was silk. Marianna has achieved phenomenal success since the launch of her first collection, attracting enthusiastic reviews from the international press and an impressive list of world-wide buyers.
She has lived in Paris, London, Tuscany and Milan and she continues to travel the world as a source of inspiration and research.
Her main ispirational icons are David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, David Lynch, Nan Goldin, Nick Cave, Madonna and Tarantino.
(©)DROMe FW23-24
Let’s discover more about Marianna:
– What are the biggest challenges you have met in your career?
The biggest challenge has always been finding the meeting point between the message I want to send, my values and identity and the market needs. Nowadays we live in a world ruled more by marketing than actual intellectual creativity. Finding the right balance between these two aspects is one of the biggest challenges I’m facing.
– Outside of fashion, what are you currently interested in and how is it influencing your work?
I have always had many interests outside of fashion. I strongly believe that as a creative person, I can’t stick just to what I create for a living but my world is influenced by what I live, what I see, and what I breathe every day, it is influenced by how I feed my mind and my soul. I love music, buying records and digging deep into knowing where the sound comes from. This drives my creative process in every collection. I’m also a physical theatre performer and dancer, loving Pina Bausch’s universe and beyond, so I often spend my spare time doing workshops or participating in shows. Last but not least, I love photography, I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t going around with my little analogue camera, stealing everyday life moments, faces, and fragments. I like collecting moments, frames, fragments or even just the essence of a brief encounter. All of this enters the way I create, it completes my world which I feel is quite eclectic.
– What is the message you want to send, and what kind of people are you referring to?
The main message to me is delivering a story that talks about a fearless attitude to face ourselves and welcome every part of us, especially the most intimate and vulnerable. To welcome and embrace our various personalities and to not put ourselves in a predefined box where everything seems already set and decided. We can be free to change and evolve, and this is daring even if it can feel uncomfortable at times. Clothes reflect a part of us, strongly. I like to create clothes that can empower those who wear them but also can feel protected.
– What is your main source of inspiration?
As I said I often start with something that attracts me in music and sound. I always listen to a lot of music while creating and brainstorming, I like taking my team to concerts and sharing experiences that create our vision. DROMe always has a playlist that accompanies every collection or project. Then is about the subcultures that music and society have developed or still keep developing. I think I put in the mix the essence of what I live in the moment I create. This FW season for example was about Gisele Vienne’s piece Showroomdummies, a performative act about reality and its representations.
– What about your next project?
My next project is to give DROMe a new, fresher, lighter structure, focusing on projects and a communication strategy based on local communities, human values, and connections. Something that gets easily lost in the hurricane wind of social media and the overwhelming amount of images that hit us every day, diminishing the value of what we see. I think we kind of need to re-learn to observe instead of just swiping an image. For me, this is very important.
Marianna Rosati portrait (©) DROMe