If fashion is fate, Meryll Rogge has long been destined to land at Marni.
With her first paycheck as an assistant at Marc Jacobs circa 2008, the young Belgian designer bought a pair of wooden platform Marni sandals from Saks Fifth Avenue. “I wore them until they broke,” she admits. But even before that, as a teen discovering her own colorful, eclectic style, she chose a green Marni skirt for her older brother’s wedding.
Thinking back to her youth, Rogge remembers: “It allowed me to represent myself in an expressive way without looking not like me. The people that were wearing Marni at that time, they weren’t loud, but they had personality—that’s what I liked.”
Rogge accepted the creative director job at Marni last July, a month after picking up ANDAM’s Grand Prize, where Renzo Rosso, Only the Brave founder and Marni owner since 2012, is a member of the jury. Her appointment came amidst a rush of new hires that saw many established designers swap one European luxury brand for another, but if she was among the lesser known names—not to mention one of the few women in a pool of mostly men—she isn’t short on credentials.
Rogge was still a student at the Royal Academy of Antwerp when she landed an internship at Marc Jacobs in New York. That internship turned into a seven-year gig. “It just just clicked for me, all the books that were there, all the artworks, the references—I just felt super at home,” she says. Eventually, though, Belgium called her back, via Dries Van Noten. “I wasn’t looking for it, but I got to be head of women’s there, taking on more responsibility, and I worked really closely with Dries—it was an opportunity to step up.”
Round about 2019, she felt ready to go solo, a plan of hers since adolescence. “At first it was 25 then it became 30 and then it became 35—that’s when I just couldn’t resist anymore,” she says of launching her eponymous brand. But the timing was tricky: It was March 2020 when she introduced her collection at a showroom in the Paris Marais. Ten days before the world shut down, she’d secured orders from 35 stores; ultimately all except one stuck with her, even though Covid restrictions forced her to deliver that debut offering late. Her Meryll Rogge collections are full of color, wit, and sophistication, but always with a dash of the unexpected.
Blame it on that Marni skirt she wore as a teenager—Rogge has a flair for off-kilter elegance and bricolage not unlike the kind once practiced by Marni founder Consuelo Castiglioni.
Launched in 1994 as a spin-off of her husband’s family business Ciwifurs, Marni’s early days were minimal by 2026 standards: no bags, no jewelry, just lots of knee-length coats and knee-high boots, though it soon became known for a quirky kind of individuality. Castiglioni’s approach, as she told Vogue in 2007, was to treat fur “like a fabric, maybe dyeing it, doing it without a lining, with just a little bit of string to close it, so the pieces looked modern and wearable.” Once the furs took off, clothes followed, in unlikely prints and vintage shapes that could only have been put together with a woman’s eye and a woman’s touch.
Rogge’s new job required a change of address. She and her husband Clement Van Vyve moved with their young children, five and three, to Milan from Antwerp. They spend their weekends getting to know their adopted home town. But the assignment didn’t necessitate a change of aesthetic. “I really grew up with Marni,” she says. “So I have a memory of what it means in an abstract way, and what it meant at different stages.”