The first thing to know about the Bureau of Imagination is that it’s a real, physical place. Despite the ethereal name, Francesco Risso and his partner Alex Sossah are the current inspired worldbuilders of the Bureau, an atelier-meets-shop-meets-home on a semi-industrial street on the south side of Milan. Risso purchased the old dairy factory just before his departure as creative director of Marni in 2025, after a colorful, highly lauded decade with the Milanese house.

Inside the Bureau – across the street from a municipal bus depot, and beyond a nondescript concrete entranceway – is an emergent world of craftsmanship that is as much about collective learning as it is about brand-building. “To be honest, the Bureau was kind of born out of a joke,” says Risso. “I bought this place thinking that Alex and I were going to come and live here.” But then the Marni departure hit. After a few days, the unrenovated building became an ad hoc creative studio – a free space and collecting point for the network of people who had been working with and inspiring Risso across his tenure at Marni. “The chosen family knocked at the door and got reunited very quickly,” he says.

When we speak during peak summer, the former cheese factory is humming. The arrangement of the building – last used as a photo studio – is unique, with big industrial salons on the lower floors and more private, smaller environments as you ascend. After on-and-off reconstruction, the five-floor creative hub will pack in diverse functions, from a ceramic studio in the basement to BOI-appointed artistic residency spaces and a special archival library with rotating exhibitions. “It was always a dream of mine to own a place where I can follow the process of the making of a thing from the start to the very end,” says Risso with a Willy Wonka-esque flair. With BOI, this dream becomes concrete – literally. The oddball edifice will encompass many forms of aesthetic experimentation. In other words: a bureau of imagination.

Yet, the nascent project’s tagline, “a manufacturing house for objects”, brings the dazzling concept back to earth. This is a makerspace. “We share a deep passion of being very hands-on,” continues Risso. “What we’re doing is becoming scientists around every category.” From silverware, to glass, to ceramics, to shirting, the couple are both students and obsessives. Unlike fashion design or marketing – where both led decades-long, esteemed careers – the development process at BOI has put the duo through many twists and turns, as they throw themselves into learning new crafts. “We’re used to producing clothes at such a fast pace. It’s easy for us,” says Sossah. Developing a forthcoming collection of Murano glass objects, however, required patience. “It took me at least six months to be accepted by this company in Murano after multiple trips – talking, mingling, seducing,” jokes Risso. But the payoff is worth it: learning directly from an incredible, 79-year-old master of the art who has worked with glass since the late 1950s. “The bureau has been an incredible journey, both in terms of learning new skills, but also in accepting the things that you don’t know,” reflects Risso. “In a way, it’s rewiring our own sense of dynamism around what we do. That’s the gift.”

Another gift of the Bureau of Imagination is more personal – the deepening of Sossah and Risso’s own relationship. The electric feeling between them is palpable. Excitement builds as they build upon each other’s ideas. They were first introduced in London through their mutual friend Carlos Nazario. Many common friends soon got involved. “Now, a lot of people claim that they were the matchmaker!” says Sossah. Despite Alex’s background in streetwear and sportswear – a space with its own, different codes – it is also immediately clear that beyond romance, they share converging taste and ways of seeing. When they first got together, Sossah encouraged Risso to pick back up creative practices like painting and sculpting that he had sidelined since his 20s. “In a way, I was forgetting about all these talents that I actually had, and Alex is the one who pushed them all out again,” he explains. And now, at last, their creative exchange is crystallising in a more holistic expression with the launch of BOI. “Alex has an incredibly logical brain that compensates for my completely schizophrenic, roller-coaster brain,” confesses Risso. When asked whether they divide and conquer, specializing their talents within the Bureau, Sossah jokes: “He does the furs and I do the hats!”

The day we meet, hats indeed are on the menu. Donning a floppy red cap – a new prototype – Sossah emphasizes that a slower creative pace is, in fact, the intention. BOI has “its own timing and flow, independently from seasons, independently from collections.” They anticipate, at full steam, eventually producing around 100 unique objects a year – an output more akin to a specialized designer than a brand producing garments at scale.

At the core of BOI is the somewhat counterintuitive-sounding ethos of “complicating the transaction”. One of the first items produced by the Bureau this year is an appealing, cloth-bound manifesto entitled GENESIS: A Book About Becoming. Inside, Risso trots out the concept, writing “I am interested in complicating the transaction, subverting the ritual of buying and selling, not out of shame but to remind that selling can become something of a civic art.” As a punk philosophy in test-mode at BOI, the mantra rejects the pull of smooth consumerism that drives many business, marketing and design decisions across the fashion industry. Instead, the stickiness of a unique interaction between consumer and object leads to a more profound reflection on value, as well as beauty. In a few years, when the former factory will be chock-full of unique objets d’art, Risso imagines and hopes for this moment of reckoning: “you should find yourself in front of a product and be like, ‘Can I use it? Is it a vase? Is it a container for wine? What is it!?’”

The un-pin-downable spirit of BOI’s designs holds true to Risso’s colorful sensibilities while at Marni. There, Risso rejected a sterile modernity, developing a visual language rich in eclecticism: prints on prints, quirky tailoring and creative direction that valued collisions between art forms. Dancers moved as models, or a dinner party became the runway.

A small selection of tableware items in development for release this autumn attests to BOI’s free spirit. Cutlery has been stretched into elaborate, biological structures, with the handles swelling and contracting in sequences of beads, ridges, and twisting filaments. Ceramic dinner plates are ringed with flower-like scallops, and botanical-feeling Murano vessels feature coils of colored glass. The collection seems more like ceremonial artefacts than something intended for a kitchen cupboard. There’s an unruly, hallucinogenic verve to the objects making them feel as if they are about to come alive like in Alice in Wonderland.

The marquee category of BOI, and the only one yet seen by the public, is Vestige. According to Sossah, Vestige emerges from deep research into niche eddies of fashion history and materiality, colliding personal experiences, time, and references from their travels together within unique garments. The line debuted at the 2026 Met Gala on none other than Paloma Elsesser. Her shimmering gown was constructed from more than 30 vintage dresses, many dating from the 1920s through the 1940s. The team in Milan took apart the dresses, then re-stitched elements of them together with expert threadwork. Later, the dress was hand-painted and worked over with metallic embroidery. Sossah describes the process “as if one dress melted into the other, becoming a tapestry”. The stunning result was like an impressionist painting, with Elsesser’s body enveloped in pastel hues and rich textures.

Yet, when I let the word “couture” slip out, the duo immediately shakes their heads. Upcycled? Not that buzzword either. Instead, the cut-and-paste approach of Vestige is partly rooted in Risso’s childhood penchant for destruction and recreation. “I started making clothes when I was nine years old, with the clothes of my grandmother’s sisters. In a way, for me, the process was like a drug,” recounts Risso. “I found beauty in destroying, remaking, and collaging. I was a very silent kid. That was my language.” Vestige embraces these traces of memories – the residues of previous use and time that linger within a garment.

Glancing at each other, Risso and Sossah begin new thoughts with the line “one of our dreams is…”, before delving into a description of some future endeavor at the Bureau of Imagination. The refrain speaks to the couple’s seemingly boundless hunger for experimentation – one that the more niche format of the Bureau allows. They aim to cultivate personal encounters with friends and collectors, rather than running up order numbers from around the globe. Risso explains their perspective on this industry this way: “If we don’t try to experiment with new formats again, then we’ll never have the answer to the unease I’m hearing” about the political state of the world, the logics of consumer culture, or the churn of fast fashion. “It’s not the huge corporations that will come up with solutions,” he continues, “they’re just going to continue pumping the industry with products since this is what they need to do to sustain and answer to their shareholders.”

Yet, beyond demonstrating an alternative approach to luxury, Sossah is keen to point out how “everything goes back to the building” at the Bureau of Imagination. In his manifesto, Risso sums it up like this: “The method is simple. We build a room and let it breathe.” When I liken the BOI to the top-to-bottom artistic universe that is Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s magical temple of living and creation in Mexico City, the answer was not “no”, but rather “yes, thank you”. Coming upon the building was the accidental beginning to this new chapter. Once complete, the factory of wonders will stand as a Gesamtkunstwerk where architecture, furniture, garments and everyday objects share a unified vision, down to the very last spoon.