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Max Mara is known for its deep-pile camel coats and conservative northern Italian style. But in tune with the times, this season’s show at the baroque Palace of Caserta outside Naples opened with a pair of very short shorts.
Tight and high-waisted, the vibe was Vogue but the inspiration was the 1949 Italian realist film Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice) and a 19-year-old Italian actor, Silvana Mangano, in a paddy field wearing damp shorts and stockings, which ended up on global billboards.
“Cinema was the thing that really took Italian style into people’s lives, and where Italian style was effectively invented,” said Ian Griffiths, Max Mara’s designer. “But afterwards, Silvana said she didn’t know her image would be so sexualised, and she wasn’t entirely comfortable with it”, he said. “So, I wanted to take this image, and look at how the position of women, real women, had changed”, he said. “The idea is to give [women] something they want to wear, or at least to aspire to.”
It’s sacrilege to mention Neapolitan style without thinking of Sophia Lauren, too, and after the shorts came models in Bardot tops, full skirts and silk hair scarves. “Think how many women watched her in [1954’s] L’Oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples), went out and bought a checked table cloth, Chianti and a low-cut blouse,” says Griffiths. “Plus Sophia Loren was more in control of her sex appeal.”
There were camel coats of course – of the 100,000 pieces the brand makes each year, three-quarters of them are coats. But there were ever-popular pyjamas-as-daywear too. Billowing in the breeze, it was proof that while what appears on the catwalk doesn’t always translate to the real world, some pieces do.
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Perhaps the most interesting counterpoint were the deliberately dour flat tassel brogues. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Lila’s shoes represent social mobility and financial opportunity. Here, among the six-figure coats and the patrician arches of an Italian palace, they are virtually an act of rebellion.
As for whether it is right to glamorise Naples’s postwar style – and its poverty – Griffiths said: “What should fashion do? We can draw attention to times and places and create an idealised, perfected vision of a reality. Art is about truth, and fashion is about fantasy.” The designer, who by his own admission has been called a cultural vampire, added: “I’ve never claimed to be an artist!”
The show was the culmination of cruise season. Historically what people wore on Caribbean yachts, it now taps into the “little treat” post-Christmas market. A relatively recent fixture whereby brands fly journalists, influencers and notables to unusual places, it’s a way of paying homage to a place too, but also of getting our attention. “We’re lucky if journalists pick up a press release from a seat,” says Griffiths of the back-to-back fashion weeks.
Obviously, only the megabrands can whip up these spectacles, of which Max Mara – Italy’s “silent giant” – is one. The Max Mara fashion group’s turnover was £1.6bn last year. “It’s also about flexing your muscles as a brand,” said the Derbyshire-born ex-punk who has overseen the brand after winning a student competition in 1987 – and has remained ever since.
Max Mara was one of the first labels to do ready-to-wear fashion for the middle classes, and is relatively speaking, more affordable than most big brands. But it has since become synonymous with a clean, no-nonsense look – not to mention women in power. In 2018, Nancy Pelosi’s tomato-red coat worn to a meeting with Trump became a symbol of the well-dressed opposition.
Founded in 1951, this was also the year of Ruth Orkin’s infamous Florentine photograph American Girl in Italy, which became a conversation starter about feminism, freedom and the male gaze – including for Griffiths.
Drawing on a collection of totemic women as an extension of Neapolitan glamour is not without its complications. “We had a discussion about [this]”, said Griffiths. “But [in the case of Mangano particularly] we felt it was right, because we gave her her dignity back. These are clothes that you wear, not clothes that wear you.”
