Francesco Risso began developing his design skills as a child, cutting up his sister’s and parents’ clothes and sewing them back together in new configurations. His paternal grandmother was eclectic and made her own clothes, while his maternal grandmother worked as a tailor in Genoa, and both figures shaped his early exposure to garment construction.

At seventeen, he left home for Florence to enroll at Polimoda. He transferred to Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, where two older tailors taught him couture construction. He then crossed the Atlantic for the MA Fashion course at Central Saint Martins under the late Professor Louise Wilson.

He worked for Anna Molinari, Alessandro Dell’Acqua, and Malo before joining Prada in 2008. There he worked alongside Miuccia Prada for eight years on women’s show collections and special brand endorsement projects, a stretch that shaped his approach to oversized proportions, quirky fabrications, and print applied as narrative surface.

Marni announced his appointment as creative director in October 2016, effective immediately. His first collection was scheduled for fall-winter 2017. The house was then wholly owned by Renzo Rosso’s OTB group, following its 2015 buyout.

For his debut, Risso designed downy angora knitwear in multicolored stripes, oversized tailoring, and outerwear in fantastical animal prints. The menswear debut included mattress-stripe suits made from quilted eiderdown-like fabrics and ribbon-tied bed jackets. This maximalism placed him at a distance from the Phoebe Philo and Lemaire school of pared-back Parisian minimalism.

Instead, he moved closer to the artist-collaboration lineage Consuelo Castiglioni had cultivated. He extended it through commissions to Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Frank Navin, and Florian Hetz on tees, totes, and coated PVC accessories. Later collections pursued concepts including fall-winter 2024’s interior zoo and spring-summer 2024’s 2D flower dresses. His tenure closed with an American show staged under the Brooklyn Bridge, accompanied by an orchestra, with Risso himself playing cello.

In June 2025, after nearly ten years, Risso and Marni parted ways. This ended the chapter he had opened in 2016 as successor to founder Consuelo Castiglioni.

In early 2026, Fast Retailing, the parent company of Uniqlo, appointed Risso creative director of GU. He launched his debut fall-winter 2026 collection for the label, alongside the UNIQLO F. RISSO capsule collection, following the Uniqlo and Marni collaboration he helmed in 2022.

The GU appointment shifts the argument of his career. It moves from artist-collaboration maximalism at an OTB house to volume design for a Japanese mass-market label. The move tests whether the vocabulary of stripe, print, and oversized proportion translates outside the runway economy that shaped it.