Antonio Marras admits to having obsessions. “I can listen to the same song a hundred times in a row, and watch a movie ten times, every time discovering something new,” he says, sitting inside his SoHo flagship store on Wooster Street.

One of them is Alice in Wonderland. He watched it with his son Efisio a dozen times, learning much of the dialogue by heart. He recently drew on the story to celebrate the first anniversary of his New York store, transforming it into Marrasland, filling it with set tables, oversized objects, and masked figures inspired by Lewis Carroll’s fantastical world.

What fascinates him most is still Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, the idea of stepping into a reality you did not know existed. That sense of discovery is built into the SoHo boutique designed so that visitors step through the door and find themselves in another world.

Opened in 2025 at 121 Wooster Street, the more than 7,000-square-foot space occupies a 19th-century building and brings together clothes, furniture, artworks, installations, and objects gathered from different places.

Many of the objects were found in and around New York. Old windows and beds came from warehouses and antique dealers outside the city; a ladder from a chicken coop now hangs overhead, while a barber’s counter discovered in Massachusetts became a display. They sit alongside Italian design furniture and rugs by Marras, made in Sardinia. On the walls, old frames found at American flea markets were taken to Alghero, where their contents were reworked with embroidery and collage.

“I like the process that transforms things,” he says. “I do the same with objects that I do with clothes.”

SoHo has always had a particular pull. “When they told me there was a possibility of opening here, I said: okay, I’m moving in.” But all of New York is a source of inspiration. Surprisingly, he compares it to Alghero: “The high sky, the clouds, the colors, the sun, the sea. It gives me that same feeling.”

He loves photographing buildings as the light changes, searching for vintage pieces, and talking to strangers. He recalls something the poet Franco Arminio once told him: think about the time we lose sitting opposite someone for hours on a train, never speaking. “You could hear the story of a completely different life.”

When asked about his American fashion references, his choices were unpredictable: Halston, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and Zoran, whose radically reduced forms seem far removed from his layered aesthetic. “I always say I start out a minimalist, then I get messy in the process,” he laughs.

That creative impulse extends beyond fashion. Marras is currently editing a short film shot in Sardinia after a wildfire burned some 700 hectares, a landscape he remembers as “sadly beautiful”, but where small green shoots were beginning to appear. The film follows two people who believe they are the only survivors, wandering through the same deserted landscape without ever finding each other.

He would like to bring the finished work to New York. “That would be beautiful,” he says. “Really beautiful.”