Moschino Creative Director Davide Renne Has Died at 46

Davide Renne, the recently appointed creative director of Moschino, died on Friday of a “sudden illness.” He was 46 years old.

“There are no words to describe the pain we are experiencing at this dramatic time,” said Massimo Ferretti, chairman of Moschino’s parent company, Aeffe S.p.A, in a statement. “Davide joined us only a few days ago, when a sudden illness took him from us too soon. We still can’t believe what happened.”

Just last month, the Tuscan-born designer was named as Jeremy Scott’s successor at Moschino. He officially started working with the brand on November 1, and he was set to make his debut in February during the fall/winter 2024 season at Milan Fashion Week. It seems that the team will carry on his work.

“With Davide, we were working on an ambitious project, in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and optimism for the future,” Feretti said. “Even though he was only with us for a very short time, Davide was able to immediately make himself loved and respected. Today we are left with the responsibility of carrying on what his imagination and creativity had only envisioned.”

Prior to joining the Moschino team, Renne worked at Gucci, where he spent two decades under both Frida Giannini and Alessandro Michele, eventually making his way to become the head designer of womenswear.

After his appointment, in October, Renne authored a letter, which began by offering some insight into his upbringing. “I was born in 1977 in Follonica, Tuscany, on the Tyrrhenian Sea, a magical body of water—according to Greek mythology, the cliffs above the Tyrrhenian housed the four winds kept by Aeolus,” he wrote. Despite his interest in “drawing women’s clothes” from a young age, Renne decided to go off and study architecture. “Enrolling at Polimoda, in Florence, endowed me with a sense of absolute freedom, paving the way for a journey of creativity that, I soon discovered, became my life.” He then went on to Gucci, and worked closely with Michele, calling the brand’s former creative director his “first teacher and mentor in fashion” who taught him to dream big.

Renne wrote of his excitement in joining the Moschino team, specifically relating to Franco Moschino’s tendency to call his design studio la sala giochi, or “the playroom.” “That resonates deeply with me: What fashion—Italian fashion especially, and the House of Moschino most of all, can achieve with its enormous power, should be accomplished with a sense of play, of joy,” Renne said. “A sense of discovery, and experimentation.”