Patricia Marx once wrote that New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down. It’s a fitting provocation for Max Mara’s Resort 2027 show, staged in the vaulted spaces of the Long Museum and pulsing with the restless metropolitan energy that Creative Director Ian Griffiths has spent the better part of a year trying to articulate, bottle, and dress a woman in.
This is, after all, a 75th anniversary collection. Which means it arrives burdened (or gifted) with history. Griffiths, who has been with the house for 40 of those 75 years, seems unbothered by the weight of it. “I can’t sometimes distinguish between what I think and what Max Mara is,” he told me the day after the show. “That happened a long time ago.” It reads less like ego and more like inevitability: a creative director so thoroughly absorbed by a house that the distinction has simply dissolved.
The collection is called Kinetic Chic, kinetics being, as Griffiths explains, “a kind of energy.” Its intellectual scaffolding is borrowed from Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher who wrote about modernity as a language: the ways of dressing and being in a city as codes that “oil the wheels of a difficult and complicated life.” It’s a heady reference point. But Griffiths is clear-eyed about the limits of theory at the door of a showroom. “A woman who has never read Walter Benjamin has to see those clothes and understand them straight away.” And she will.
The clothes are very good. Graphic archive devices return with renewed confidence, stripes and geometric cubic patterns revitalising a palette of camel, cognac, khaki, and the brand’s own irreducible red. Silhouettes are sleek: coats with generous swagger, short boxy jackets and sharply tailored alternatives, skirts that hover above the knee or fall strict to the calf. Flat-fronted trousers cropped to show off a shiny ankle-strap heel.
The details, though, are where the collection earns its kinetic fix. Shocks of saturated yellow and sky blue appear but never where you’d expect. A sweater, simple and chic at the front, reveals its yellow secret only when its wearer turns away. “When a person’s in a room, you see her in 360 degrees,” Griffiths points out. Glamour, the collection quietly insists, is not always frontal. Sometimes it’s what happens when you leave.
The Shanghai context is handled with intelligence rather than tokenism. A stretchy merino cheongsam, a quilted silk jacket, a poplin shirt with pankou fastenings all nods to the host city and, more meaningfully, to what Griffiths identifies as a renewed pride among young Chinese people in their cultural heritage. “Modern dressing doesn’t have to be necessarily Eurocentric,” he says simply. The collection doesn’t dress for a local market, but it listens to one.
When I ask Griffiths what sophistication means to him today, his answer is characteristically unshowy: “Looking like you’re not trying.” Max Mara has always known this, that the highest form of dressing is the kind you eventually forget you’re doing. “Put something on and then forget you’re wearing it completely,” he says, “and just be yourself.”
Seventy-five years in, the Max Mara Resort 2027 collection doesn’t feel like a retrospective. It feels like a woman mid-stride, kind of like somewhere between the archive and wherever she’s going next, entirely at ease in both directions. Because she always was.
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