MaxMara

MaxMara 

‘New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down…’ 

Patricia Marx, writer and humorist at The New Yorker 

In the soaring vaulted spaces of the Long Museum in Shanghai, Max Mara marks three-quarters of a century with a collection that is not so much a retrospective as a prospectus, celebrating an unbroken heritage and looking to the future. In the recent past, collections have followed the footsteps of a singular muse, Resort 2027 is dedicated to each and every remarkable Max Mara woman. Together, they coalesce into a composite character—the heroine within every woman. Revisiting, redesigning, and recombining fragments from the brand’s history, this collection addresses the big question: ‘What is Max Mara?’ 

Little wonder that the brand has referenced the Bauhaus so frequently over the years. Functional, accessible and integrated design that results in easy elegance was always the Max Mara way to self-empowerment. Style should never be a struggle, but life is complicated enough, without having to worry about what to wear. Max Mara transforms everyday dressing into an act of effortless glamour; in the words of its founder, ‘to make the ordinary extraordinary’. Combining utility and luxury in equal measure, aspirational, fizzing with kinetic energy, this collection is smart, snappy, and emphatically modern. 

Graphic devices from the archive return with renewed vigor, as stripes and geometric cubic patterns revitalize a palette of camel, cognac, khaki, and champagne, black, white and Max Mara’s own iconic shade of red. Shocks of saturated color and the playful shimmer of paillettes appear in unexpected places, such as on the back of simple chic sweaters. The silhouettes are characteristically sleek and curated to ensure that every Max Mara woman can find her look; coats have a generous swagger, jackets are short and boxy or sharply tailored, skirts hover above the knee with a little fullness from the waist or they are strict and calf length, flat fronted trousers with a patch pocket on the side are cropped to show off a shiny shoe with an ankle strap and a heel. Max Mara is the lingua franca of fashion; the collection is international in its overall flavour but every now and then there is a reference to the costume of its host city, such as a stretchy merino wool cheongsam, a quilted silk jacket, or a crisp poplin shirt with a pankou fastening. 

Back to the big question, ’What is Max Mara?’ begs a further question, ‘How can a product be simultaneously fashionable and timeless?’. The answer to that lies partly in the brand’s unique approach to intelligent design, but a very large part is down to what can only be described as the magic of Max Mara. This is a celebration of seventy-five years of style that is lived in, loved, and always, entirely her (and sometimes his) own.