Following its 10th anniversary celebrations last September, Sunnei entered its second decade with a new attitude and a little shopping spree.
After having spoiled the audience to expect the unexpected with their inventive, buzzy show concepts, founders Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina invited guests not to overcomplicate things – in (too) wordy press notes, though – as “maybe the moment calls for something else—a bit of fashion realism.”
“It’s been a year of change—some doors are closing, and new ones are opening,” read their statement.
These include the white one of their new store, a 1,614-square-foot space installed in their Palazzina Sunnei headquarters, designed by the 2050+ architecture studio and replete with a cafè.
It was unveiled to guests at the end of the show, minutes after the models emerged from it to walk down the runway staged in the street, holding multiple shopping bags in both hands to accessorize their fall 2025 looks.
“Fashion is about buying and selling, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that matters to us,” continued the press notes, underscoring this season was about “stripping away expectations, shedding interpretations.”
All that guests were left with was the Sunnei product then. The collection was refreshingly comprised of new silhouettes, the most appealing of which were a series of high-waist pleated pants, cool in their structured yet comfy ample volume, and sleeveless felted tops sculpted on the torso with snap buttons, which often came with matching long skirts or pants.
These pieces added to dresses with feather-embellished straps and pencil skirts with side slits that seemed to riff on bourgeois codes and fit with the more mature direction of the lineup. Even the brand’s signature retro-athletic vibe was more subdued and elevated in the zippered tops, arm warmers and padded vests that flanked fuzzy knits and beanies rendered in multiple colors.
It was good for the duo to fully focus back on clothes, but the show lacked that special ingredient of catching people off-guard that has contributed to increasingly build excitement around Sunnei. It proved that if you take the concept out of the brand, chances are energy falls flat. Hopefully its sales won’t.
