The 2025 LVMH Prize: Francesco Murano

To distill a highly technical and deeply instinctive craft into its broadest terms, Francesco Murano’s approach to fashion design is centered around taking opposites and finding balance. There’s a quiet rebellion in that, given that we live in a time when ideas—within and outside of fashion—are often presented in their logical extremes to create clarity, avoid ambiguity, but seldom move beyond novelty. Murano’s designs, as minimal as they can appear, stir curiosity and possess an innate confidence that’s magnetic; his opposites are ever-present and beautiful. This pursuit of balance is his design language; he repeatedly explores the contrasts within materiality, form, and color, refining until the only thing that remains is visual harmony.

Murano’s approach is rooted in the culture of Buccino, Italy, a small town outside of Naples. Despite his interest in clothing and fabric, there were few opportunities to study fashion as a youth. Instead, Murano took up ceramic sculpture, a more natural pursuit in a town influenced by the classical æsthetics of ancient Greek art and culture. Though he would go on to the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan to study fashion design after high school, sculpture was an important introduction to form and would largely inform how he approached his process in designing clothing. During his final year at university, he was trying to find the right theme for his thesis but was struggling to express what he wanted to say about opposites coming together. He was once again drawn to ancient Greece. “The ancient philosophy of the Greeks was to understand the simple things of the world,” he says, and looked to the overarching concepts of the rational and the irrational, permeating much of Greek philosophical thought, to frame his ideas.

“It was beautiful to find the link between classical æsthetics and Greek philosophy,” Murano recalls. This would define the brand and continues to be the theme that Murano iterates. “The concept of the brand is the process: how to find a way to make clothes through these two concepts, the rationality and the irrationality. The æsthetics are a consequence of this.” He begins designing on paper, drawing tailored shapes and creating the patterns, but then he uses the moulage technique, which involves working directly on the mannequin, allowing him to find the right drape and proportion. “For the draping, I reflect the irrational side, because the moulage technique is instinctive. For the other part, there is the tailoring, the structure—that is reflecting the rational side. I start the tailoring on the paper, but I continue to work on the mannequin also for the tailoring, to feel the right point, to find the right balance of the silhouettes. So the human body is the central part.”

This is immediately apparent in his collections, which strongly emphasize figure, texture, and movement in a way that projects a striking silhouette. For Fall 2025, delicate fabrics in jersey or chiffon loosely conform to the body, creating layers without sacrificing contour. Strong tailoring in structured, minimal pants and jackets is paired with soft, flowing tops. Leather, a key fabric for Murano (“I like touching the leathers—it reminds me of ceramic paste”), takes form in wide pants, a jacket with a corseted waist, or a slim, supple long coat, but in each instance, it is paired with something sheer. “I like the way the leather talks with the jersey. That is another main fabric of the collection that had two very opposite materials, but I love the way they play together.” Most looks are entirely in black or a creamy white, but a touch of color comes through, though muted, in a deep purple and a grayish-blue. The limited choice in palette allows the garment to be the focal point, akin to the codes of many avant garde designers who emerged in the eighties and nineties, but Murano’s color choices are more reflective of his inspirations from early-twentieth-century designers like Madame Grés and Madeleine Vionnet, as well as the black-and-white photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and Horst P. Horst, whose imagery beautifully captured fashion in grayscale. “I love to capture the right shade of gray, which is not always gray-gray, but pale blue, or dusty pink, or sage green, because I think the natural color enhances the shape of the dress or the texture of the fabric. I like to put a touch of strong color—but maybe in the next ten years I’ll be very colorful, I don’t know.”

If the inspiration sounds heady, the result is far more immediate; Murano has a profound skill for capturing a heightened femininity through his designs. The looks radiate with confidence, which is why they tend to attract the bold: Bad Gyal looks just as natural performing in a custom jersey bra and miniskirt as Florence Pugh does on a press tour in an all-leather look. “I think that in the past year, we have had a lot of this kind of feminine [æsthetic], but in the same way, I love the warrior women,” he says, clear about the idealized figure he’s capturing with each collection. “You see a very conscious woman, very strong. It’s masculine, but it’s also erotic—not [sexual] but erotic. And it’s like a bitch, but at the same time it’s like an angel from heaven. It’s all about the attitude, regardless of the size or the age. It’s like a goddess.”

The culmination of these choices has made Murano one of the most exciting figures in a wave of fashion where technique-driven designers are breaking the codes that so many traditional houses are attached to. Murano may take inspiration from the distant past—as far back as we can go philosophically—but is designing in a way that feels refreshing for this moment in time. His fashion is instinctually sensual and soft, and sculptural and powerful, all at once. The balance Murano so desires is finally found—that is, until next season, of course, when his process begins again.

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