Mario Arena doesn't believe in quiet ideas. Colour, texture and a healthy dose of nostalgia run through everything he touches, and after two years and seven seasons – if you count the label's smaller capsule drops – as the creative director of Joseph, he's only just getting started.
HELLO! meets him for morning tea at Nobu Portman Square, a stone's throw from his home in Marylebone, the neighbourhood he loves for its vibrance. "There's always a new restaurant, a new pop-up… you never know what's around the corner," he says.
Joseph's autumn/winter 2026/7 collection takes its cue from the studio of the sculptor and painter Richard Stone, whose work Mario has followed since 2017. "He captures the ability to turn something like marble into looking like flowing chiffon," he says.
The two spoke at length about finding form where form doesn't exist – a philosophy, he says, that runs through everything from architecture to fashion. It shows up in a rich, resin-inspired palette of mahogany tones, oversized late-Eighties and early-Nineties silhouettes, and a standout dolman-sleeved coat that has already become a studio favourite.
Elsewhere, an old leather-weaving technique has been revived using a factory press left unused for thirty years, each indent laser-cut afterwards so the finished leather looks woven but stays light – it appears throughout the collection in coats, skirts, bags and shoes.
"Everything about the collection is tapping into a sensory experience," Mario says. "The fabrics are tactile, the colours pop."
Fabric, in fact, is where his passion lies. "We've gone through a decade of very soft, smooth fabrics, and I think we're all losing the sense of sight through our fingers," he says. "I keep saying to the team: think texture, texture, texture."
"I keep saying to the team: think texture"
Although Joseph has no physical archive, the brand's marketing team has built an extensive visual one, dating back to the early Eighties – supplemented, unexpectedly, by two Instagram accounts run by devoted fans that regularly post vintage Joseph editorials. Mario asks them to flag anything new they find.
He speaks fondly of the label's earlier eras, particularly the years under founder Joseph Ettedgui in the early Nineties, when he first lived in London. "You'd go to Harvey Nichols for breakfast, walk round to Armani, then Conran, then into Joseph," he says.
He also credits Louise Trotter's tenure at the brand as another favourite period. Today, longstanding customers, some who have shopped with Joseph since its original concept flagship store in Fulham, stop him to say the new direction feels both fresh and true to the house.
Mario grew up by the ocean in Adelaide in a large, creative extended family: aunts who sang opera, a grandfather who painted and made perfume, and his mother, who painted, sculpted and taught him to sew at the age of eight.
As a child, he turned deadstock fabric he bought for next to nothing into pieces he sold to family and friends. As he grew older, he’d go clubbing at weekends and people would buy the clothes off his back. "They didn't even want it dry cleaned," he laughs. "They'd just say, ‘We'll take it.’"
"Look at the possibility, not what's presented to you"
Adelaide, he says, shaped him. "Australians are good with colour because the light is so clean." The city itself, he adds, is "incredibly creative, but creativity never stays – it always gets to a point and gets out, because it can't grow”.
A mentor's advice has stayed with him: "Look at the possibility, not what's presented to you – that's what starts to open you up to a new level."
He’d spend childhood evenings glued to fashion documentaries. "I'd say to Mum, I don't care if I'm late for school, I've got to watch this – and that would just trigger and inspire me to draw."
A place at the Paris American Academy followed. "I lived in this tiny, five-floor house, one room with a cling-film ceiling, highly flammable, and a little window down to street level, with a bistro below playing Édith Piaf in the evenings.
"I thought, 'My God, I've arrived.' Because one of my favourite shows was the 1986 Saint Laurent show, which he chose purely Piaf music for."
On changing attitudes to fashion, he’s optimistic. The pandemic’s slide into loungewear, he believes, is giving way to a renewed appetite for dressing up, but on the wearer’s own terms, whether that means a floor-length silk dress worn to the office on a bicycle – like one Joseph employee recently did – or a denim shirt that becomes an office-wide uniform. "It’s ultimately up to the woman who buys it, how she wears it," he says.
His dream muse is Cate Blanchett, who he believes "epitomises the Joseph woman". He has previously dressed Salma Hayek Pinault, a favourite from his years running his own label.
And the surprise up his sleeve? At home, Mario and his partner are restoring a 300-year-old neo-Gothic lodge in the Cotswolds, once dressed in magenta shag-pile carpet and now returned, piece by piece, to its original character. "You walk in now and all of a sudden this tranquillity comes over you," he says.
Is there no end to his talents?
