After 75 Years, Max Mara is Still Celebrating Modernity
The Italian label’s Resort 2027 collection was shown at The Long Museum last night in Shanghai
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Seventy-five years in, and Max Mara has zero interest in looking backward. Creative director Ian Griffiths made that clear by staging the Italian house's resort collection not in Reggio Emilia — where Achille Maramotti founded the brand in 1951 — but against the rain-soaked, neon-drenched skyline of Shanghai. The choice was deliberate and a little provocative. "Modernity doesn't have to be Euro-centric or Western-centric," Griffiths said, according to Harper's Bazaar. For him, Max Mara has always been a metropolitan phenomenon, and Shanghai — a city that reinvents itself almost faster than it can be photographed — was the only honest setting for that argument.
The show took place inside the Long Museum, a sculptural concrete institution on the developing west end of The Bund, flanked by construction cranes and rising luxury towers. Inside, guests including Katie Holmes, Maude Apatow, and Michelle Yeoh watched models navigate a maze of floor-to-ceiling structures built to mirror the Max Mara archive back in Reggio Emilia. Alongside the runway, curator Olivier Saillard's exhibition "The Max!" traced the house's full history — Maramotti's early sewing machines, original factory photographs, archival sketches, and a procession of the iconic coats that built the brand's identity.
Structure, Softness, and a Red Finale
The collection itself was a study in confident restraint pushed just far enough. Griffiths opened with an ivory sequined trench belted Obi-style, then moved through houndstooth tailoring, cashmere cropped trousers, and a Chinese-inspired jacket fastened with traditional pankou toggle knot buttons — cultural fluency worn lightly. Bauhaus geometry surfaced in graphic cardigans and pencil skirts; a camel hooded blazer with matching pants demonstrated exactly what Max Mara does better than almost anyone: cashmere that is simultaneously structured and yielding. Color landed in sharp bursts of yellow and cherry red throughout, building toward a finale of a crimson sequined slip gown under a massive red overcoat that felt less like a closing look and more like a statement of intent.
After the show, local influencers posed in front of jewel-toned archival coats while European guests pressed close to Maramotti's original factory renderings. The house's longtime fashion coordinator Laura Lusuardi moved through the room exchanging greetings with a quiet pride that needed no translation. Two continents, seven decades of craft, one very specific vision of what a woman dressing for city life actually needs.
At 75, Max Mara isn't celebrating its past so much as proving that the clothes it has always made — sharp, wearable, built to move through the world — are exactly right for wherever the world is heading next.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
