In a year when we’ve all felt at the mercy of natural phenomena, a thunderstorm might register as a mere nuisance. But last Wednesday, after several months spent planning their alfresco spring 2021 runway show, the team behind Sunnei — one of Milan’s most exciting emerging fashion brands — was consumed by the ominous weather forecast for the following day, ordering scores of umbrellas for an audience they fretted would face raging winds and biblical downpours.

“Look, it was supposed to rain already today, but it didn’t,” said Simone Rizzo, who founded Sunnei with his partner, Loris Messina, five years ago, when the pair was not long out of school. They were eating lunch in the courtyard garden of the Palazzina Sunnei — their newly renovated headquarters in a three-story ’80s-era former recording studio in the same eastern corner of Milan as the brand’s flagship store — and sunlight streamed down from a then cloudless September sky. “It wasn’t supposed to rain yet,” Messina countered (his mother had just called in distress about Thursday’s forecast). Rizzo’s optimism withered: “Are you saying it’s going to storm tomorrow? Are our guests going to be miserable?”

“It could be beautiful with the rain,” Messina offered.

The show, held in the vast, emptied pool of the 1930s-era Lido di Milano, would be one of just a handful of live events during a mostly digitized fashion week. Conceived by the designers as a rousing love letter to their city, still scarred by the pandemic, the occasion would also mark an epochal transition for the label: Just hours before start time, it was announced that the Budapest-based Vanguards fashion group had made a $7 million investment in Sunnei, which had previously been independent, in order to gain majority control. “Maybe it’s time to finally move into a bigger place,” said Rizzo, of the 400-square-foot apartment he and Messina have shared since before they launched their brand.

Source: New York Times

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