A Fashion Designer Who ‘Chose Crazy’
It was during Paris’s first pandemic lockdown that the fashion designer Marco Ribeiro felt he’d reached a creative inflection point. “I was like, ‘I can go one of two ways,’” he recalls. “ ‘Either very commercial’ — but nobody was buying anything at the time, and nobody knew how long that would last — ‘or very crazy.’ I chose crazy.”
In 2019, the now-35-year-old Brazilian, who’d moved to Paris after 11 years in Buenos Aires, where he sold hand-painted bags and clothing, mostly to friends, had launched his first women’s wear line, a collection of tailored, minimalist pieces. But he never really felt like the work reflected him — where he came from, or what he wanted to convey. His post-pandemic collections, which he showed for the first time last year, are just as rigorously structured, but they’re also exuberant, with outsize ornamentation and dramatic silhouettes: skirts with exaggerated pleats,