Antonio Marras does not define himself as a fashion designer. “I don’t walk around with that concept of myself because it is a restrictive and reductive definition. I cannot stand it,” he says from his home in Alghero, Sardinia, facing the blue Mediterranean Sea.  The very sui generis designer, 62, is more like an artist-experimenter.

Besides creating dramatic, darkly romantic clothes, he paints and makes installation art. He is also a ceramist and a song lyricist. He wants art without borders that satisfies the inescapable human hunger for imagined experience in all its variations.