In style, designers virtually by no means get to script their very own farewells. The trade is a fan of the pomp of a company beheading, delivered with a press launch dipped in rose water by the executioner. You’re ‘parting methods amicably,’ although your head’s already neatly within the basket. What follows is the same old mess of bruised egos, crocodile sobs, and managers pretending the guillotine is only a heat handshake.
However Sunnei’s Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo, who acquired a majority stake funding from Nanushka and Aeron proprietor Vanguards Group in 2020, weren’t having any of that company theater. They staged their very own demise as an alternative—campy, snarky, and gloriously unhinged. A parody funeral, full with humor sharp sufficient to slit by the trade’s polyester veils of respect. These two wrote the obituary themselves and carried out it stay, a closing genius center finger.
True to their sharp critique masquerading as good showmanship, the Sunneis, in cahoots with Christie’s, staged an public sale the place nothing was truly on the market however everybody pretended it was—a case of peak style logic. Friends had been handed scratch-off lottery playing cards preloaded with ‘style {dollars}.’ My private jackpot was a measly F$30,000, whereas my seatmate casually revealed F$200 million. Even within the realm of faux cash I’m nonetheless within the fallacious tax bracket, I believed.
The primary lot got here as an enormous Sunnei brand, as a result of let’s face it, branding is the one actual foreign money left. It was offered for a staggering F$111 million. Second lot: the founders themselves, who had been encased in a picket field and wheeled in like uncommon collectibles, and auctioned off at a F$95 million. The spring assortment shuffled across the room on Sunnei crew members who had been cosplaying as phone operators. There have been the same old laughs and cheers, and everybody floated out carrying the Sunnei afterglow—pensive but weirdly sunny. By no means thoughts it was pouring exterior.
However all this performative tour de drive was truly a background act to the actual efficiency: model implosion. Moments later, the designers stunned everybody by saying on-line that they had been stepping down, reworking your complete spectacle right into a going-out-of-business skit. It was a real shock-and-awe second that has left their style watchers nonetheless scrambling to know what occurred.
Sunnei has at all times been a beam of incisive intelligence reducing by the haze of trend-chasing and musical chairs video games on the large conglomerates. Fiercely impartial, it has operated extra as a nerdy, artsy platform than a bona-fide model, skirting the same old style affiliations, refusing to play by the trade’s typically merciless, self-consuming guidelines.
Messina and Rizzo vanished after the public sale, declining to elaborate on their departure—a gesture of discretion, leaving the room charged with unanswered questions. Within the press notes they circulated, they wrote: “Style is finance; creativity is on the market. Greater than ever, right this moment’s trade is ruled by hidden but highly effective dynamics. This efficiency isn’t a direct critique, however a hyperbolic, theatrical metaphor of that mechanism. The Sunnei public sale is a stage the place the contradictions of the system are enacted, the place what’s symbolic challenges what’s actual, and need itself is questioned.”
Arrivederci, Sunnei. Thanks for the exhilarating journey—and for reminding us that, typically, genius leaves as mysteriously and out of the blue because it arrives.
