Enlightenment. Max Mara AW23

February 24, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Who would have thought that in 2023, Max Mara would feel so relevant and desirable. It’s ironic especially since Ian Griffiths looked back a couple of centuries in search for this season’s inspiration. “What’s the relevance of the 18th century to today?” To find the answer, Griffiths engaged his tried and tested creative protocol of fixing upon one historically sidelined but contemporaneously central female creative from the period he was scrutinizing to act as a personification of his thesis. In this case it was Émilie du Châtelet, a burningly intelligent French marquess mathematician who translated Isaac Newton into French – correcting a few of Newton’s errors on the way – and was for years passionately beloved by Voltaire. Griffiths seized upon du Châtelet as emblematic of a period of enlightenment in which female intelligence was increasingly acknowledged by the patriarchy, even as the female wardrobe remained constricting, apotropaic, and controlled. He said: “the fashion at the time was completely not enlightened. So I was imagining how she might have dressed if she had freedom to and how that would translate into today.” That meticulous scene-setting translated into a Max Mara collection that was newly romantic. It either adapted 18th century menswear pieces, like the opening teddy banyan coat, or modernized 18th century womenswear – like look six’s miniaturized pannier skirt in camel brocade with a fishtail detail at the back hem. A long rib knit dress coat and a trio of teddy coats were worn slung over the right shoulder courtesy of an inbuilt strap, which Griffiths said was a contemporary military styling trick, but for men only. Pannier pockets were also used to bolster a double-fronted gray cashmere tunic dress and a black brocade skirt worn over a patent corset belt and a sheer top. Evening pieces came with detachable Watteau backs. Griffifths offered Max Mara versions of contemporary paradigm garments that included a dreamy camel parka, a full length liner coat, and a velvet bomber with frogging. Some models teamed their lug-soled boots with shorts. This was not a wardrobe Émilie du Châtelet would have recognized, but she would, you suspect, have been into it.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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More Than A Muse. Max Mara SS23

September 23, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

It’s quite shocking how good Max Mara is latey. Ian Griffiths is becoming the patron saint of overlooked and underestimated historical “muses.” Following his resort reassessment of fabulous-’50s Lisbon radical Natália Correia, for sping-summer 2023 Griffiths turned his restorative eye two decades earlier. It focused on Renée Perle, a lover and much-snapped subject of early alpha-photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue. “But she also painted all these self-portraits that were absolutely panned by the critics,” said Griffiths. Then there was Eileen Gray, who designed her own feminocratic ideal of the modernist house, the Villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, in 1929. This was much coveted by Le Corbusier, who painted murals in its interior while staying there and was sometimes even wrongly credited with its wonderful design. As Griffiths suggested, both women were cast as muses – objects of masculine inspiration – rather than artists who were themselves inspired. The irony in the benevolently meant result of Griffiths’s rehabilitation mission was that while seeking to recast Perle’s and Gray’s place in history he was also to a degree reinforcing it. For there they were behind him as he spoke, fabulously frozen in time but pinned to his mood board like butterflies. Griffiths’s excavation of these histories allowed him to pitch this collection as a redemption song, but it also provided the designer, whose college tutor in the 1970s was Ossie Clark, to engage with gusto in the fashion conversations that echo between the 1930s and that decade. Yet it would have been remiss for a collection predicated on elevating unacknowledged female cultural protagonists to reject the full-blown “feminine,” and this was delivered in swooping backless dresses worn with doorframe-wide sun hats and a trio of swimwear-inspired citrus looks topped with Esther Williams–worthy swimming-cap hats. A closing bunch of hand-drawn floral gowns and separates, sometimes hitched to trailing bow-tied strips of organza, drew the veil on another dreamy Max Mara meander.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Tactile. Max Mara AW22

February 24, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

This season, some really delightful looks appeared on the Max Mara runway. Backstage, Ian Griffiths presided over a moodboard pinned with images of the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, who was closely affiliated with the Dada movement. Taeuber-Arp is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York showcasing a prodigious career that spanned genres: textiles, marionettes, interior and architectural designs, furniture, paintings, relief sculptures, and photographs. Griffiths said he was attracted by the way she invested even everyday objects with magic and mystery. “After the last two years, we’re craving magic,” he said. Active between the two World Wars, the Dadaists rejected nationalism and violence, which made her an all too apt muse on a day when Russia attacked Ukraine. Griffiths used the shapes of marionettes Taeuber-Arp made for a restaging of the 18th century play “The King Stag” as templates for his designs; they informed the bulbous silhouettes of short skirts and the articulated arms of sweaters. Whimsy was the desired effect of the teddy bear material, which he cut not just into oversized enveloping coats, but also full skirts both short and long, and even sweatpants. These pieces were juxtaposed by others with a more utilitarian bent. Parachute pants with zips up the calves had a smart adaptability; add a second-skin turtleneck and a tailored jacket and a woman would be ready for anything. All this marched out on gum-soled over-the-knee sock boots, which got the playful/practical balance that Griffiths was after exactly right.