As Paloma Elsesser made her way up the Metropolitan Museum’s monumental staircase, a guest at tonight’s Met Gala celebrating “Costume Art,” she faced the usual question from journalists behind the velvet ropes: What are you wearing? Her answer, however, was not so usual. “I’m wearing my dear friend Francesco Risso’s new project, Bureau of Imagination,” she told the reporters with an air of mystery, a sweeping train following in her wake.

Bureau of what?

On the phone last week, Risso elaborated: “It’s a manufacturing house for objects.” As the creative director of Marni for a decade before he exited the label last year, Risso had a long track record of collaborating with designers and artists of many stripes. When he left the brand he reminded my colleague Mark Holgate that he had vowed a long time ago not to work under his own name. But he did have a caveat: “I am really craving to work, and I am going to fight for my own studio, which I’d like to build soon to be a real community, not the ones which are claimed [as communities] by fashion.”

The shape that community takes will become clear soon. In the meantime, Risso confirmed that Elsesser’s one-of-a-kind gown was patchworked from no fewer than 30 vintage dresses sourced from eBay, and was subsequently hand-painted and embellished with metal embroideries in Milan, where he’s based, by “a squadron of people.” It’s part of a series that we’re experimenting with in the Bureau that we call ‘Vestige,’” he explained. “Let’s say it’s the very high-end part of the Bureau of Imagination, where it’s really about collaging different times together. This is something that I’ve always been quite drawn to: the idea that we can experience things through different places, different eras, and in a way, almost like tear them apart, and then find a different, new beauty out of it.”

Paloma Elsesser is more than just Risso’s model; she’s a collaborator: deeply involved in the selection of the original dresses and sharing artist references back and forth—Ana Mendieta, Cy Twombly, and Joan Miro are a few that they mentioned. Then, of course, the disassembled vintage dresses were put together on a mannequin with her measurements. In fact, Elsesser has played muse to Risso for many years, walking in every one of his Marni shows after appearing in a pandemic-time lookbook the designer produced for spring 2021. “There’s a lot of trust there,” she said. “Any dress I ever wore for Marni, I always was able to have a voice in it. This was just the biggest expression of that, and it’s not something I take for granted. We were talking about the gesture of the paint, normally at these kinds of things you spend time talking about, ‘is it snatched enough?’”

Risso, for his part, calls their collaboration, “sort of like tandem designing.” When pressed for more details, he said, “it’s one of the peaks of what we will make the Bureau. But it’s not only going to be this level of high handmade, custom-made couture. At the Bureau, there’ll be different series of objects made in different ways of thinking.” Watch this space for more information.