One of the great mysteries of Milan, the city of Prada, Gucci, Armani and so many fashion Goliaths, is the scarcity of young brands. Sunnei, a self-declared outsider, is a star exception that has shown the Goliaths how to have fun in fashion with inventiveness and irony.
Surrounded by the midday senior crowd on the sunny patio of a tennis club in Milan, the label’s founders, Simone Rizzo, 36, and Loris Messina, 35, stood out with their fresh faces, in sneakers and the same oversize Sunnei T-shirts (one in white, the other in screaming acid green).
They hate to be called young or to hear Sunnei, marking its 10th anniversary this year, called a young brand. Yet in the fashion landscape of the city, they are still, comparatively, the kids in the room — albeit kids with a sharper grasp of what’s going on than many of the adults.
For years Sunnei was deemed an upstart, putting on concept shows for its committed fan base. Now, at 10, it is considered one of the hottest shows of Milan Fashion Week. With momentum, an important investment and some hard-won prudence, its founders are at a point where — as has historically been the case with many labels — they move to the next level or fizzle.
Sunnei liked to use their runway shows to disrupt social conventions. They often rope the audience into complicity at events. Last season, models walked down the catwalk while voice-overs of their supposed inner thoughts played for all to hear. At a different show, the audience was armed with scoring paddles, judging each look in real time.
Another collection presentation featured Sunnei staff members modeling and then crowd-surfing off the catwalk (unknowingly mirroring Telfar). The runway events are executed with a fraction of the funds that big brands invest, but are still reliably playful, sardonic and unforgettable.
Despite their upcoming runway show on Friday and the elevated expectations of a fan base that counts on being wowed by Sunnei’s left-field concepts, Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Messina remained serene.
“Our shows are a moment of catharsis,” Mr. Rizzo said.
They preferred to stay mum about the details of this one, though — “a more grown-up show for us,” Mr. Rizzo said, feigning a serious face.
Yet Sunnei makes clothes for young people — or at least, people with a sense of levity. Rendered in the bright palette of a dreamland future, Sunnei’s fabrics can be stiff as if to mimic a line-drawing, or explode with fluffy surfaces resembling the pelt of a muppet. There are puffer coats, pants and sweaters that sometimes run to caricature-like proportions.
Born as a men’s wear brand, Sunnei introduced women’s wear in 2019, with unisex styles as well as dresses and skirts possessing all the anti-prettiness of 1990s rave gear. They are clothes that require of wearers a certain predilection for the unconventional — a quality that’s endeared Sunnei to like-minded creative spirits.
“The real secret of our success is that we’re the only brand in Milan that speaks to a community, that helped create a community,” Mr. Rizzo said, pausing over his plate of ravioli. “In other cities, we saw things happening that responded to how the world was changing, but Milan was missing new brands, new bars, new everything. There was nothing that reflected the international culture we saw ourselves as being a part of, so we created it.”
‘Social media is dead’
We walked the few blocks from the tennis club to Palazzina Sunnei, the company’s three-story headquarters since 2020. Inside, Sunnei staff milled about near an extruded sculpture by Anton Alvarez, one of the many contemporary works commissioned for the offices. Angelo, the French bulldog — Messrs. Rizzo and Messina have joint custody — jumped up for affection as his owners arrived.
The Palazzina, a former recording studio at the end of a cul-de-sac in the residential Città Studi neighborhood, is about to become a magnet for Sunnei’s community, with a flagship store opening on the ground floor later this fall. The pocket-size boutique near Bar Basso, where Sunnei initially maintained a rather cramped office, will shut down.
More than just a store, the new flagship will house Sunnei’s collections alongside installations by artists and designers, as well as a cafe in the courtyard. “This is the future of retail — a space for experience,” Mr. Messina said. “At the Palazzina, you have our whole world inside. The design team can tell you about a bag, Angelo is trotting around, and just by sitting down for a coffee, you can be a part of Sunnei.”
The brand might never have survived its nascent years if not for Sunnei staff’s sarcasm and wit on social media and the brand’s website. (The Sunnei web shop features half-nude models with their private bits blurred out.)
“We were early advocates of digitalization, but social media is dead,” Mr. Rizzo said. “Today, the physical trumps digital.” Big brands are aping Sunnei’s online style from five years ago, he said, while Sunnei has moved on to real-life pop-ups in Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Barcelona, and to the hangout philosophy of its flagship.
Sunnei, pronounced like “sunny” with a heavy Italian accent, began like so many design brands in the history of fashion: with a romantic partnership and a shared dream. Mr. Rizzo, originally from Calabria in southern Italy, focused on marketing and business, and Mr. Messina, whose excellent Italian belies his French origins in Grenoble, on design development. In truth, they tell me, they each do everything from designing to styling to settling payments.
“Simone and Loris are like two kids who escaped from kindergarten,” said Angelo Flaccavento, a correspondent for Business of Fashion and Il Sole 24 Ore, the leading financial daily in Italy. He meant it as a compliment.
Though they are no longer a couple, the two remain “without any doubt, completely united to preserve what we created with Sunnei,” Mr. Rizzo said, both of them seated now in a recording booth-turned-office where a quote by the former New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn was pinned to the wall: “Sunnei is the most original fashion brand in Milan after Prada …”
‘Fashion has a lot to learn from them.’
Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Messina introduced Sunnei in 2014 with 20,000 euros they’d scraped together. In 2020, they received an investment windfall of six million euros from the fledgling Vanguards group. The money helped spur the brand’s expansion — it was also the biggest challenge to preserving what they had created.
From just 10 employees, they leapfrogged to 45, and test-ran a chief executive officer. “We were convinced that with an investment firm, we had to restructure the brand in the predetermined way that they wanted,” Mr. Rizzo said. “But it didn’t work.”
They have since shrunk Sunnei to 30 employees and sworn off C.E.O.s in favor of their personal leadership. “When money becomes the driver of what you’re doing, it’s ruined,” Mr. Messina said. “Even the big brands ought to realize that.”
At Vanguards, Peter Baldaszti, the co-founder and chief executive, led the investment revenues. “Sunnei has gone from creativity without limits to creativity within a framework, focusing their effort on a few key ideas — a fundamental step for a creative company to succeed,” he said.
The brand was losing money before Vanguards invested, but its earnings have since multiplied exponentially, with half of sales coming from Sunnei’s own e-commerce, dominated by its hit accessories: Labauletto bags in cuboid shapes, hoop earrings hand-dipped with rubber blots of color and 1000Chiodi sneakers stippled with rubber nodes like freckles.
Mr. Baldaszti expects Sunnei to break even only this year — an eye-opening reality, considering Sunnei’s relative success among Milan’s new generation. “Financially, fashion is a very challenging business and very capital intensive,” he said. “The only way to turn a profit is to scale everything up.”
Where does that leave a willfully lean and self-governed label like Sunnei? For Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Messina, it means defining victory by the survival of their project.
Mr. Flaccavento enumerated Sunnei’s virtues: “spontaneity, free thinking, humor and no bull.” Italy, with its skilled artisans, high-end manufacturing and powerhouse brands, is vitally important in fashion, yet lacks the gusto to cultivate new talent, he observed. “What saved Simone and Loris was keeping their brand small and independent of Milan’s fashion system, while maintaining control over what they do,” he said. “Fashion has a lot to learn from them.”
At the Palazzina, Mr. Messina made a declaration: “Sunnei will never be a mass brand.”
“We were driven by a desire to create our own system,” Mr. Rizzo added. “We’re artists,” he said with air-quotes, then turned solemn. “And for artists, leaving a mark in history is everything.”
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