And so concludes another Milan Fashion Week, a season marked by its debuts: across the week, Maria Grazia Chiuri presented her opening vision for Fendi as the house’s first sole creative director, young Belgian designer Meryll Rogge made an expressive debut at Marni, and Demna hosted his first runway show for Gucci – a virile mediation on sex and the body which had everybody in fashion talking. Meanwhile at Giorgio Armani, Silvana Armani – the niece of the late eponymous designer – made her ready-to-wear debut at the house. Though true to Mr Armani’s well-established codes, she said this was ‘a new perspective on the Armani style’ – light, fluid and purposely ‘imperfect’.

Alongside, there were standout shows from Prada – in a feat of quick changes and expert layering, 15 models wore 60 looks without pause – and Bottega Veneta, where Louise Trotter conjured Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini in a riot of colour and texture. While at Jil Sander, Simone Bellotti found new freedom in his sophomore runway show after the rigour and restraint of his debut.

Here, reported by Wallpaper* fashion & beauty features director Jack Moss and contributing writer India Jarvis, the 14 standout shows which defined the week.

Fendi

‘Less I, More Us,’ was the mantra Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri chose for her debut as sole creative director for Fendi, emblazoning it across the runway which stretched the length of the house’s Milanese HQ on Via Solari. Chiuri is fond of such mission statements: for her debut collection as the first female creative director of Dior in 2016, she printed the title of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book-length essay ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ across a T-shirt. Over the nine years which followed, she would champion numerous women artists and collaborators.

Her mantra at Fendi is perhaps a feminist one too, despite the fact that Chiuri also showed menswear on the runway (and will be equally in charge of the house’s mens- and womenswear lines). It was, in part, a reference to the collective force of the formidable Fendi sisters: Alda, Carla, Paola, Franca and Anna Fendi, who took over from their parents, house founders Edoardo and Adele Fendi, in 1946. Speaking before the show, she said that people speak too often of Karl Lagerfeld’s influence – the designer was creative director of the house for 54 years – and not enough of the sisters, who employed him and would work alongside him until the company was sold to LVMH in 1999. ‘I would like people to remember all that they created at Fendi,’ she asserted.

Chiuri, who began her career at Fendi in 1989, working with the sisters until her own departure in 1999, said she credits her working ethic to them: ‘They were my mentors. They gave me my career. And I felt part of their teamwork.’ In the show, the idea of collaboration came through projects with women artists SAGG Napoli (colourful football-like scarves were created alongside the Naples-born artist) and the estate of Mirella Bentivoglio, whose slogan-like works appeared across garments. But the idea of a collective ‘us’ stretched to dissolving the divide between mens- and womenswear, too, the designer said: ‘Feminine and masculine cease to be categories of opposition and become adjectives used to describe shared qualities,’ envisioning not two separate collections but ‘one wardrobe’.

As such, the A/W 2026 outing – which eschewed theatrics in favour of a more pragmatic approach – moved between sleek, elongated tailoring and flourishes of romance, from layers of sheer tulle and lace (some evocative of her work at Dior). Meanwhile fur – the founding material of the house – came back to the fore, with Chiuri introducing the ‘Echo of Love’ project whereby clients can have their old furs transformed in an act of circularity. Across vivid two-tone chubby fur coats and patchworked fur handbags, all the materials had been sourced from leftovers in the house’s fur department – another act of practicality over spectacle. ‘Fashion is not entertainment. Fashion is a job. I am that kind of designer,’ she said. Jack Moss

READ: ‘Less I, more us’: Maria Grazia Chiuri lays out her vision for Fendi in Milan

Jil Sander

After a brilliant debut last season, Simone Bellotti continued to cleverly hone his vision for Jil Sander with a sophomore collection which he said was inspired by the idea of ‘home’. Presented in the house’s stark Milanese HQ – this season, warmth was added by the addition of a rust-coloured carpet which had been installed the length of the upper floor – the former Bally designer said he was thinking about home as an ‘an emotional space where one lives, feels safe and belongs to’, leading to a collection which diverted from restraint and rigour of last season towards something freer, more eclectic. Indeed, the designer said this was a collection about ‘flow, flou [and] movement’, with Bellotti imagining garments imbued with a life of their own through an intriguing use of pattern cutting – whether raised shoulder lines, curving seams, folded waistlines, or intentionally puckered tailoring (the slashes through garments also returned from his debut). Meanwhile evocative moments of colour and pattern added visual richness: flashes of electric blue and leopard print met fabrics evocative of interiors – a nod, Bellotti elucidated, to his father’s career as an upholsterer. ‘The question this season is whether abandon can convey restraint,’ he said of this newly liberated approach. Jack Moss

MM6 Maison Margiela

One of life’s great pleasures is watching other people, and what better place to sit and do it than a train terminal? It’s a pleasure that MM6 Maison Margiela tapped into for its A/W 2026 show – one designed around the comings and goings of passengers in an ‘archetypal train station’, in this case Milano Centrale. An archetype is a recurrent, even constant, principle, whereas a station is innately transient – how do the two meet? At MM6 it was with ‘a veritable spectrum of individuality’, and ‘sartorial actions rooted in the genuine appreciation for garments as they are, looking for ways to see them anew, which is where the fun lingers.’

What does that look like? It looks like pea coats with bunched and scrunched hems, loosely tacked to reveal quilted or flannel linings. Clashing stripes with check – something you might serendipitously pair when hurrying to get dressed. Backless khaki trench coats and skirts. And lots of tucking: hair tucked into jumpers, jumpers tucked into jeans, jeans tucked into high-gloss Wellington-style boots.

There was a strong equine theme too – afterall, 2026 is the year of the firehorse, a symbol of forward movement and independence that is characteristically MM6 – from horse motifs printed on oversized T-shirts and teddy fleeces, to full cotton flounced skirts with a decidedly American frontier feel. A train station welcomes all kinds of people going all kinds of places, after all. India Jarvis

Prada

This season, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons played a clever runway trick: instead of the usual 40-or-so models cast in a given season, the pair chose just 15 to walk the A/W 2026 show. In an impressive act of timing, they wore 60 looks in total, walking the runway four times each in quick succession, achieved through removing a layer of clothing during each quick change. When you realised the conceit (for me, I wondered if Bella Hadid had a doppelganger or secret twin after what seemed like an impossibly quick reappearance on the runway), it made for one of the most thrilling Prada shows of recent times – there was a near-breathless energy to the spectacle. (Indeed, chatting to one of the models backstage, she said she had never sweated so much, or walked so far, in a runway show during her career.)

But this was no gimmick: post-show, the co-creative directors said the collection was a reflection of the way that women wear clothing on a given day – the removal of a coat to reveal a cocktail dress, the addition of a scarf. ‘It’s about life, and how you dress each day with the clothes you have,’ said Simons. ‘About real, human people.’ The garments themselves were infused with Prada-isms: purposeful marks of wear (some appeared stained or creased; others saw layers of fabric torn away to reveal another beneath) met an insouciant, bourgeois-inflected glamour in embroidered stockings, feathered and beaded footwear and a use of satin and organza. A feeling of utility, meanwhile, came in uniform-style tailoring and riffs on classic outerwear styles, from the parka jacket to the raincoat. ‘As a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘You make choices, you decide who you want to be.’ Jack Moss

Max Mara

Is a growing interest in the history and aesthetics of the Middle Ages a reaction to the hyper-digitised, blue-lit world of today? An idealised fantasy of a pre-capitalist society? Or perhaps a byproduct of the popularity of the romantasy genre? Whatever the answer, for Max Mara’s Ian Griffiths​, whose unlikely seasonal muse was the 11th-century diplomat and military commander Matilde di Canossa, ‘there is something so strikingly of the now about so-called Dark Age design’.

Griffiths’ interpretation of pre-enlightenment era clothing saw tunics in luxurious, butter-soft suede, ankle-skimming cashmere coats and hooded garments reminiscent of the coif shapes worn by Di Canossa and her contemporaries. Standout pieces included a caramel-coloured bias-cut silk gown with a mohair, funnel-necked yoke; a suede muff worn belted around the waist; and a taupe wool playsuit accessorised with the gathered suede, elbow-length opera gloves that were seen throughout the show. Griffiths has been with the house since graduating from London’s RCA in 1987, and over the four decades which have followed, there is nobody who knows the Max Mara woman better than he. The A/W 2026 collection offered new-yet-medieval twists on the tried and tested house codes, which keep this woman returning to the brand, season after season. India Jarvis

Emporio Armani

Following the death of its eponymous founder in the autumn of 2025, Emporio Armani took an understandable hiatus from showing at menswear week in January, but returned for A/W 2026 with a combined men’s and women’s runway outing. ‘Maestro’, as the collection was titled, was not only a narrative device, but an ode to Mr Armani himself – the eminent composer, conductor, and virtuoso of fashion symphonies for almost 50 years.

The imaginative backdrop for the season was, according to show notes, a music school, and the maestro – and maestra, for this is a co-ed conservatoire – who stepped out in Leo Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani’s first jointly developed collection wore loosely tailored overcoats and baggy denim, and student-y accessories including baker boy caps, backpacks, and ties just visible beneath oversized striped knits. Leg warmers styled over patent leather pumps evoked the chill of a rehearsal auditorium, whereas the show’s second act saw rather more performance-ready pieces in the form of draped velvet, wide-lapelled tuxedo jackets, and starched white collars (a recurring motif in Milan this season: most notably in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s riff on Claudine à l'école at Fendi).

For the finale – the crescendo, if you like – the models turned out in Lydia Tár-esque monochrome. Tight leggings or flowing slacks on the bottom, white dress shirts on top, each with a different button, brooch, pin, collar, or embroidered flourish. ‘A simple and rigorous statement – now more than ever rebellious – of modernity and self-awareness,’ that could only be Armani. India Jarvis

Marni

The Belgian designer Meryll Rogge chose to collaborate with Formafantasma on the runway set for her debut show as creative director of Marni. Transforming the house’s Milanese headquarters with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches – recalling a banal office space, or entranceway to a Milanese apartment block – the space was punctuated with mirrored panels which had been painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’, from office chairs to cigarette lighters. ‘The structure of the set suggests a bourgeois interior wooden frame, hints of domestic architecture – but fragmented, slightly taken apart. It feels familiar yet unsettled, as if a room has been carefully disassembled and reassembled in another order,’ Formafantasma’s Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin told Wallpaper*.

It linked with Rogge’s vision for her tenure at the Italian house: to create something which felt both familiar and contemporary, evoking Marni’s founding principles with her own distinctive twists. ‘I have a very personal connection to Marni,’ she said. ‘It’s a brand that shaped my design sensibility during my formative years, and through the show I wanted to acknowledge that sense of familiarity.’ It made for an astute opening outing: there was the irreverent spirit of founder Consuelo Castiglioni in its eclectic combinations, not only in its amalgam of nostalgic prints, swinging paillettes and boldly graphic jewellery, but also in the way a sweater might be worn with a cocktail dress, or a colourful sporty parka over a suit and tie. Rogge’s own twist on the Marni protagonist was a newfound toughness, figured in some great leather trousers and skirts, some with Western-inspired detailing. In their slung-on sensuality – imbued with a certain 1980s nostalgia – they might well fill a gap for those who are already missing Dario Vitale’s Versace. Jack Moss

READ: Formafantasma created the ‘familiar yet unsettled’ show set for Meryll Rogge’s Marni debut

Sportmax

If there are a few thematic ideas that inevitably crop up and play out in different ways by different brands in any one season, then for A/W 2026 one such example could be travel. At Loro Piana and MM6 Maison Margiela the vehicle of choice was a train; at Sportmax, the journey seemed to be taken by air. ‘Dynamism’ was the word they used, but ‘aerodynamism’ may be just as apt – as the brand itself puts it: ‘There is no clutter weighing the Sportmax woman down.’

Dresses were close-fitting and body-skimming but with movement in the draping, worn with long wraps which fell backwards over the shoulder like wings. Some of the weightier outerwear nodded to aviator-style jackets with their gargantuan lapels and collars, and contrasting textures and fabrics. Clutches were spheroid, almost discus-shaped; one could imagine them flying through the air with ease. Flashes of skin were visible beneath a kind of jumbo mesh effect leather, used for tops which were worn as a base layer beneath more autumn-winter suitable coats and gilets. Speed and movement were the defining characteristics of the collection – even the show itself was a particularly fast-paced affair – as the show notes said, the Sportmax woman has ‘places to go’. India Jarvis

Gucci

Prior to his debut runway show for Gucci, the mononymous Georgian designer Demna said he had been searching for the ‘Gucciness of Gucci’, a trip which took him to the Tuscan city of Florence, where the house was founded as a leather goods company in 1921. There, he visited factories and the archive, though it was stood in front of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus at the Uffizi Gallery – just a few hundred metres from the Palazzo Gucci on Piazza della Signoria – that Demna had his lightbulb moment. ‘Standing in front of it, I felt overwhelmed,’ he wrote in a letter distributed before the show. ‘The beauty in it was unconditional; it was absolute. It made me realise how deeply the Italian Renaissance shaped everything I understand about art, about proportion, about desire, and about beauty. When I left the museum and stepped into Piazza della Signoria, the first thing I saw was Palazzo Gucci. In that moment, I understood the place Gucci holds within Italian culture.’

It was part of the reason why he staged the A/W 2026 collection amid an imagined museum constructed in Milan’s Palazzo delle Scintille, clad in marble and populated with plaster recreations of ancient sculptures (the vast statues had been 3D-scanned and crafted by Tuscan artisans to appear as if hewn from marble). This was a veneration of Gucci as an expression of Italian style and insouciance: after the show, he said this opening act was simply about capturing a feeling, rather than anything more intellectually overwrought. ‘I hope I made you feel Gucci today,’ he said, expressing a desire for Gucci to become an ‘adjective’. ‘That was my main purpose with this show.’

The essence of ‘Gucci-ness’ that Demna landed on was one of unbridled sensuality, a morning-after-the-night before glamour which borrowed from Tom Ford’s transformative tenure at the house in the 1990s (all the way down to a recreation of his 1997 double-G G-string, which here appeared as an in-built thong in a gown worn by Kate Moss to close the show). Other garments had been constructed without seams or with curved hemlines in order to emphasise the relationship between body and garment, while muscled male models burst out of skin-tight T-shirts and jeans. Slung on jackets, lean tailoring, and a final flurry of shimmering evening gowns completed the look. ‘[I think] it’s because of my relationship with myself, to my own body, to the way I want to see myself,’ he said. ‘I want to feel like that. I want to feel sexy.’ Jack Moss

Tod’s

It takes deft craftsmanship to imbue leather with real lightness – after all, leather is better known as a material of protection and toughness. But Tod’s’ A/W 2026 ready-to-wear was characterised by a levity of touch that could only be the handiwork of a house that makes an art out of leather (and a designer who’s got pedigree when it comes to this particular material).

In Matteo Tamburini’s latest, leather may have been the protagonist, but the plot itself was all about artisanal excellence – a fact reinforced by the real craftspeople stitching, folding, or carving objects in the entryway to the venue at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea – cherry-picked by the brand for their impressive skill. Amongst these were brothers Vincenzo and Manuel Aucella, coral artisans and cameo carvers who represent the fourth generation of a family tradition that began in 1892 (that’s around 30 years before Filippo Della Valle started the shoe-making business that would later become Tod’s).

As for the clothes themselves, feather-light asymmetrical leather dresses fluttered with all the delicacy of a silk handkerchief, blanket-style outerwear enveloped luxuriously about the shoulders, and saddlery techniques and hand-finishing synthesised tradition and modernity. Overall, the effect was a masterclass in Italian craft and sprezzatura. India Jarvis

Ferragamo

The 1920s were a formative decade for Salvatore Ferragamo: in 1927, he founded his eponymous footwear company in Florence after returning from Los Angeles, where he worked as a shoemaker for the burgeoning film industry in Hollywood. The British designer Maximilian Davis has found fertile creative ground in the decade, with recent collections channelling what he sees as the ‘liberated elegance’ of the era – one in which conventions of dress were interrupted and marginalised groups found new freedoms (last season, Davis evoked the Harlem Renaissance, the proliferation of Black art, culture and intellectual output from the New York neighbourhood in the 1920s).

This season, in one of the curving Giovanni Muzio-designed upper galleries of the Triennale di Milano museum – dimly lit and sheathed with floor-to-ceiling curtains – he evoked the 1920s speakeasy, ‘a locus of liberation; a space where conventions of class and identity are disrupted’. As such, a louche, after-dark mood infused the collection – negligées, molten-gold dresses and vampish stilettos all featured – while riffs on maritime attire were a nod to those who frequented such drinking spots. Though the evocation of the sailor also nodded to the notion of travel which informs the Ferragamo story – the transformative experience of moving away from your home in search of something new.

‘That’s something that both Salvatore and my own family experienced – he left his home in Italy for America before returning home, and my family moved from Trinidad and Jamaica to Manchester,’ said Davis. ‘They all crossed the water to discover new beginnings.’ Jack Moss

Dolce & Gabbana

Dolce & Gabbana’s A/W 2026 collection was an assertion of brand identity, said designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, all the way down to a front-row cameo from Madonna – perhaps the most well-known house muse and the current face of The One fragrance. The musical powerhouse watched on from the front row as the pair performed their own greatest hits: an outing near-entirely in their signature vampish black, replete with house hallmarks – lingerie-inspired silhouettes, hourglass LBDs, and, of course, plenty of lace. Though perhaps most desirable this season was the tailoring: if best known for their body-contouring dresses, the pair have always possessed a strong sartorial prowess, here encapsulated in some brilliant tuxedos which nipped at the waist and flared across the shoulder, inspired by archival silhouettes from the 1990s (they would make a great Oscars look for those wishing to eschew the traditional princess gown). Post show, Domenico and Stefano were keen to make clear that drilling into the archive was not about ‘nostalgia’ but ‘presence’, ‘a language built on roots that are still alive – Sicily as emotion, black as strength, lace as intimacy, tailoring as authority,’ they said. Jack Moss

Bottega Veneta

The particular joy of good fashion is that it’s a work of art you can actually touch – and with Louise Trotter’s sophomore collection for Bottega Veneta, touch is exactly what you want to do. The shaggy, curvaceous shapes she creates out of fibreglass need to be felt to be believed. Great piles of shearling cry out to be fondled. Even less immediately showy pieces, like a tailored grey coat with exaggeratedly round shoulders and cinched waist which was made from a thick, almost foamy looking fabric, was just begging to be squished between the fingers.

It’s the mark of a talented designer that to describe their work as ‘wearable’ doesn’t just mean ‘commercial’, or, worse ‘boring’. The Sunderland-born designer, whose previous creative director roles were at Lacoste, Joseph, and Carven, makes clothes that are infinitely wearable, but here the word might mean things that feel really wonderful to actually wear. On the practical side: pieces have pockets, shoes are flat, and bags are roomy. The more flamboyant garments are countered by easy tank tops and shirts. But more than that, there is a sensuality and tactility that sets Trotter’s work apart. Is this the byproduct of being one of the few women making womenswear at the head of a luxury house? Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that she is one of the most credible designers working today.

The A/W 2026 collection carried what Trotter described as a ‘suggestion’ of Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini – two of 20th-century Italy’s most erudite and subversive exports, and unlikely friends. Both figures have been brought back to the forefront of the cultural conversation in recent years – operatic prima donna Callas was played by Angelina Jolie in a 2024 biopic, and before that her life and lonely, premature death was dramatised on stage in an opera project conceived by Marina Abramović and co-starring Willem Dafoe. Dafoe, in turn, has played Pasolini, the poet and filmmaker whose brutal murder, presumably at the hands of far-right thugs, was commemorated on its 50th anniversary in the autumn of 2025 through a series of cultural programming and new publications. If these sound like unlikely characters to influence a ready-to-wear collection, consider that Callas and Pasolini had more in common than just tragic ends: formidable artistic talent, potent sexuality, and confident personal style amongst them. For Trotter’s debut last year she described her use of intrecciato as a conceptual device as well as a literal braiding technique – by citing these two artists she is articulating a continuation of that weaving principle, but also making a bold declaration of what Bottega Veneta, under her stewardship, is going to be. India Jarvis

Giorgio Armani

The Armani Privé show in Paris marked the debut collection from Silvana Armani, the late Giorgio Armani’s niece, who worked closely with the designer in his lifetime and was a fitting successor to uphold his legacy. On Sunday in Milan, she made her ready-to-wear debut at Armani, selecting the house’s headquarters on Brera’s Via Borgonuovo to show the A/W 2026 collection (the address was also the site of Mr Armani’s personal Milan home). At the time of the Privé show, we wrote that she had presented a collection ‘not of divergence but of continuance’, and the same could be said of this collection – it felt recognisably Armani in its louche, unstructured tailoring and interplay between Eastern and Western tropes of dress – though there was a greater feeling of softness and ease. Indeed, Silvana Armani said she was looking for lightness in both construction and spirit: jackets were assembled without padding, wrapped silhouettes appeared thrown on, and the slouchier, pleated trousers – held in place with wide belts – felt contemporary in proportion. She called it ‘a new perspective on the Armani style,’ one which she said was informed by being a woman, designing for women. ‘It is fluid, enveloping, perfectly imperfect.’ Jack Moss

‘Decisive, determined, dynamic and resolute individuals,’ is how MaxMara Atelier describes the icons on its storyboard for A/W 2025, ‘Portrait of Radical Women’. With Diana Vreeland, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Maria Callas, Jackie Kennedy and her socialite cousin Edith Bouvier Bale (better known as Little Edie) featured in the line-up, it neatly encapsulates the group of women who collectively wrote the rulebook on timeless style with an easy attitude.

It also defines the spirit of Max Mara Atelier, where fashion director, Laura Lusuardi, has been quietly honing the look for Max Mara’s haute couture offering for the last 16 years. While Ian Griffiths has designed the brand’s biannual ready-to-wear collections since 1985, Lusuardi – who started her design career at MaxMara in 1965 – has been the heart and hand behind Max Mara Atelier since its inception in 2009, establishing it as a collector’s favourite by dedicating her sole attention to a singular garment each season: the coat.

‘Every season we completely change the inspiration and the silhouettes so each coat is a one-of-a-kind piece and you can collect something very special,’ Lusuardi told Wallpaper* at an early preview of the 16-piece collection in Naples this summer. ‘Each [coat in the collection] is also different from the other to represent different women, or the many different sides of the same woman.’

For A/W 2025, Lusuardi’s process started as it always does, by immersing herself in researching volume and construction in tandem with the fabrics. ‘The fabric is really important as it must be absolutely coherent with the style and the story I want to create with each coat,’ she explains.

This season, she evolved the Atelier playbook opting for precious Scottish jacquards, sumptuous felted wools, and cashmere and mohair chinés to craft her cast of silhouettes that run the gamut from enveloping and oversized to cinched and streamlined, crafted by blending elements of bespoke Savile Row tailoring with agile avant-garde experimentation.

Her passion for the latter led her to discover a technical polyester that she says was perfect to preserve the integrity of the Redingote coat’s precision pleats; an intricate silk-blend devoré velvet applied to wool-crepe using a technique that creates an animal-print effect for the Spotted coat; and a new feather-soft nappa leather for the distressed Biker bomber-style that has been included to be a more versatile year-round alternative.

‘I’m always looking forward and undertaking lots of research looking for the best way, I never say something is OK when it could be better,’ she says. The result is one of innovation-meets-classic-outerwear codes, with each coat more luxurious to the touch than the next. ‘When you try it on, it should feel like a second skin. And once you try it on, you should never want to take it off.’

In authentic haute couture fashion, it’s ‘the details for our clients to discover little by little’, that elevate each Atelier collection, says Lusuardi. This season, she selected nude satin for the lining and buttons have been crafted from lacquered woven leather, horn, and Swarovski crystals. As is customary for the Atelier collection, stitching is selectively revealed in scarlet red (‘the fil rouge’ as the brand refers to it), a quiet but distinctive signature that denotes the excellence of the hand-touch of the dedicated design team at the brand’s Reggio Emilia HQ where 80 per cent of the collection is handmade.

‘It’s important to remember that they are not just coats, there is a story behind them – people who have made them and created the fabric,’ smiles Lusuardi. ‘This for us is really important, the art behind them.’

Lusuardi’s enthusiasm stretches beyond the world of design. The designer can be regularly found at Max Mara flagships around the world, waiting to assist clients with finding their perfect investment and help them style it.

‘At MaxMara, how we wear the coat is like a tradition,’ says Lusuardi, who cinches sleeves, pops collars and places hands in pockets to get a feel for how a woman will wear theirs. ‘That’s the modernity of wearing a coat right now.’

‘The most satisfaction I get is to watch a client try on a coat,’ she says. ‘These are real clothes for real women, not just to go to the Oscars or the red carpet. When I try a coat on a woman, everything has to be perfect.’

maxmara.com

‘A rich bouillabaisse,’ is how Italian architect Renzo Piano described his design for New York’s Whitney Museum – an asymmetric assemblage of steel, concrete and glass between the Hudson River and the High Line designed to reflect the neighbourhood’s industrial roots. But Piano, who is best known for the postmodern Pompidou Centre in Paris (co-created with Richard Rogers) and London’s towering Shard, also saw in the building’s stacked terraces and jutting metal walkways a symbol of a liberated, creatively charged America.

‘The Whitney’s collection is about the liberty and freedom of American art, and the building should reflect that,’ he said when the museum opened, replacing the Marcel Breuer-designed former location on Madison Avenue and 75th Street. ‘None of these artists were very polite, after all. So why should we be?’

Max Mara’s Renzo Piano-designed ‘Whitney’ bag turns ten

Yesterday evening (21 May 2025), the Whitney celebrated a decade in the Meatpacking District address with a typically starry gala (attendees spanned artists, curators, socialites and plenty of celebrities, from The White Lotus’ Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb to Claire Danes, Andie Macdowell and Laura Harrier). Also in attendance: the night’s most ubiquitous accessory, Max Mara’s ‘Whitney’ bag, which was designed in a collaboration between Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Italian fashion house to celebrate the building’s opening in 2015.

So, what does a Renzo Piano-designed handbag look like? The ‘Whitney’ – perhaps unsurprisingly – finds its inspiration in the building’s architectural contours. Namely, the blue-grey steel panels which line the Whitney’s façade, and are perhaps its most recognisable design feature. ‘Our aim was to apply one of the most characteristic elements of the museum project to the bag,’ said Piano when the bag was released. ‘Hence the idea of the modular strips enveloping the exterior.’

In the years since, the bag’s ‘ribbed’ exterior has made it one of Max Mara’s most distinctive accessories. Such is its influence, the ‘Whitney’ is now part of the collections at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. The original version came in an ‘aluminium’ shade of leather to reflect the colour of the Whitney’s façade (it has been reimagined in various hues in the time since).

Piano, who said it would be the only time undertaking such a fashion project, wanted to place reduction at the heart of the handbag’s design: ‘We tried to maintain [something] simple and pure, working only on the details by applying a creative use of technology and placing the accent on respect for the materials,’ he said. As such, the only branding is a subtle embossed Max Mara logo and ‘Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop’ on the bag’s interior.

To celebrate the anniversary, Max Mara has created a new ‘edition’ of the bag spanning 13 new colours – from blush pink and ’lichen’ green to classic shades of brown and black – across five sizes, as well as a new ‘five-ribbed’ version. Meanwhile, a reedition of the original aluminium-hued ‘Whitney’ bag will be reissued in a limited edition of 125 pieces.

The Max Mara ‘Whitney’ bag is available from Max Mara stores and the brand’s website.

maxmara.com

December's festive season tends to come with an excuse to shop - for friends, family and ourselves. Gift buying is a true skill that might take a while to perfect, but one that once honed, is both fun and rewarding. Yet, even those better versed among us in its art sometimes need a little bit of inspiration; and it helps to remember that often the best present for somebody is one that the recipient is least expecting.

Wallpaper* Gift Guide: architecture & environment director Ellie Stathaki’s picks

The list below balances things and experiences, offering a blend where there's hopefully something for everyone - and I would certainly welcome every single thing on it. Whether you are looking for something for your days in or days out, something to eat or to learn, the perfect gift is out there; scroll down for some food for thought.

Gift Guide: ideas for 2024

The Max Mara Art Prize for Women, although only in its ninth edition, already has a reputation for playing a key role in the careers of women artists with unique practices. The award includes a residency in Italy, resulting in an exhibition at the Whitechapel in London. Announced last year, the recipient of the 2022-2024 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Dominque White, works with sculpture and installation through methods of deep research, and adds her name to the impressive list of previous winners, including Laure Prouvost, Helen Cammock and Emma Talbot.

White’s Whitechapel exhibition, ‘Deadweight’, which opens 2 July 2024, is a result of her Italian residency, completed predominantly in Todi, near Rome, and Genoa, the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. The show takes its name from the measuring of the weight of ships’ contents, including people and cargo, as a single unit, exploring Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and hydrarchy (the practice of gaining power over land using water). White looks at the submarine world as an Afrofuturistic space for emancipation, a world of possibilities both dangerous and filled with the potential of the unexplored.

Wallpaper* visited White’s temporary studio in the quiet town of Todi, while she was working on the sculptures we see in ‘Deadweight’, and spoke to her about her practice and the exhibition, for which she corroded her work by submerging it in the sea.

Dominique White on ‘Deadweight’ and her Max Mara Art Prize residency

‘Afrofuturism is a site of impossibility, and I don't have to only think of outer space, I can think of new intangible worlds, I can think about the sea and then I also just get really excited about the accidental discoveries that we find in the sea; these deep sea creatures that are so black naturally, that you can’t even see them on camera. All those little nuggets of information have always excited me much more than animals that we find on land, or the idea of outer space,’ White told us.

The work in ‘Deadweight’ takes inspiration from marine ephemera such as anchors, sails and sheets (rope) and combines it with the inherent danger of water and hydrarchy. There are unwieldy, twisted forms in metal, linen stained with carbon, and flotsam and jetsam. White is also interested in volatile materials, and the works, although heavy and static, are also in flux, some even being weighted into shape but never too permanently.

‘I feel like I am almost an anti-sculptor; I hate the idea of [the works] being protected – I want the viewer to feel like they can’t occupy the same space, like you have to tiptoe around the sleeping beast, but you want to see it, you want to get closer,’ said White. ‘I think that [feeling] also relates to this idea of being a difficult artist, not conforming to these very strict, very archaic ideas of who can be an artist or what art even looks like, or how art is supposed to be received.’

A passionate reader, White emphasises the role of research and reading in the making of her works. For ‘Deadweight’, her research led her, for example, to the modern legend of the salvaging of Roman Emperor Caligula’s party boats. The huge, ornate floating structures, decorated with marble floors and pillars, lay for centuries at the bottom of Italy’s Lake Nemi, before it was drained at the order of Mussolini in 1929, and the boats subsequently recovered, only to be lost to fire before the end of the Second World War.

White also travelled to Agnone, Palermo, Genoa, and Milan, instigating conversations with academics and members of the maritime community.

She even referenced the transcendental qualities of Alice Coltrane’s psychedelic jazz music. ‘I think it has that way of storytelling, that for me has always led either to the sea or to something completely intangible.’

Facilitated by the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and partner institution Collezione Maramotti, in Reggio Emilia, White was able to spend time conceptualising and realising the exhibition in collaboration with local fabricators, who helped make the larger sculptures.

On entering her studio in Todi during her residency, works in progress included twisted metal structures that had been exposed to salt water amid an ongoing process of alternation – acquiring and shedding layers of rust.

‘I call myself a mediator because the materials are so unruly,’ she said. ‘I have videos on my phone of my assistant straddling and holding onto a work so it didn’t crush me. They are almost like beasts; even with other works that are suspended, it’s always about finding the balance, so it doesn't crush itself.’

‘Deadweight’ promises to offer a commentary on how we see the past, how we record the past and how the vast unexplored expanse of water on our planet impacts our psyche.

‘It’s where your imagination can go completely free, up off the rails. You’re not limited by rules or boundaries. You can dream whatever you like,’ said White.

‘Deadweight’ runs at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from 2 July until 15 September 2024, whitechapelgallery.org and then at and Collezione Maramotti, Italy, 27 October 2024 – 16 February 2025, collezionemaramotti.org

For more shows, see our guide to this month’s London art exhibitions.

First launched in 2016, the ‘Pasticcino’ bag, by Weekend Max Mara, takes its name from the Italian word for ‘small pastry’ – its scooping design, in gathered fabric, attached with a small metal frame and ball closure, is made to be clasped in the hand as one might a cornetto on a morning commute. The style, which recalls the nostalgic glamour of clasp-fastening evening bags of the 1920s and 1930s, has been in permanent rotation ever since, reimagined in endless iterations of colour, pattern, size and material.

In 2022, the ‘Pasticcino’ embarked on a world tour, setting off from its native Milan, and travelling first to Venice. There it was reimagined in the city’s sumptuous Fortuny fabrics (which are still made in Mariano Fortuny’s century-old textile mill housed in an ancient convent on the Venetian island of Giudecca) and studded with candy-like gobstopper Murano glass clasps by Gambaro & Tagliapietra. The second stop on the tour was France, where a guipure lace exterior by Dentelles André Laude captured Paris’ synonymy with savoir-faire. Meanwhile, a faïence ceramic clasp was created by earthenware factory Manufacture des Emaux de Longwy, founded in 1789.

Weekend Max Mara’s ‘Pasticcino’ bag takes a trip to Kyoto, Japan

This month, the ‘Pasticcino’ makes the next stop on its round-the-world odyssey, landing in Kyoto, Japan, the ancient city long known for its commitment to craft – from decorative fans and glazed pottery to woodwork, kimono dyeing and stonecraft. Titled the ‘Pasticcino Bag Treasures of Japan’, this edition is crafted from the rich and evocative fabrics made by Kawashima Selkon Textiles, a company that has been creating silk jacquards for traditional Japanese formalwear and interiors since 1843. The bag comes in six variants and two sizes, each limited edition, and features different motifs from fluttering birds to blooming peonies, roses and buttercups.

Some of the designs are instilled with hidden meanings: a smattering of pink flowers represents an ancient symbol of fertility, while a reimagined design from 1905 recalls the grandeur of Kyoto’s Imperial Court. Each bag is completed with a colourful woven boule clasp made by the craftspeople of Bottega Nakamori-Kumihimo. The bottega has been creating obijime – the woven cord used to hold an obi belt in place – since 1927, in a process that takes more than 20 days of twisting, winding and dyeing. Each of the 5,000 spheres it created for Weekend Max Mara took up to an hour to complete.

According to the esteemed bottega, the intricate boules, used to open and close the bag, are a symbol of its meticulous ‘commitment to craftsmanship and tradition’, an ethos that is shared by Weekend Max Mara as it plots where the well-travelled ‘Pasticcino’ bag will be heading next on its cultural journey of discovery.

The ‘Pasticcino Bag Treasures of Japan’ is available from Weekend Max Mara’s website, in small (available maxmara.com) and medium (available maxmara.com).

A version of this article appears in the July 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The early flush of summer, between May and June, marks the arrival of the Cruise shows, a round-the-world odyssey that sees fashion brands decamp to far-flung locales to show their latest high-summer offerings (the tradition began in the early 20th century as European fashion houses began to cater for the burgeoning jet set classes). 

After the Cruise 2024 shows took us to Mexico City, Los Angeles and Seoul, this season, fashion houses looked closer to home, swapping cross-continental travel for locations across Europe. First, Chanel showed in Marseille in early May on the roof of the Le Corbusier-designed Cité Radieuse, while Gucci held a blockbuster show at London’s Tate Modern later in the month. On 23 May 2024, it was the turn of Louis Vuitton, seeing Nicolas Ghesquière pay ode to Spain in Antoni Gaudí’s phantasmic Park Güell in Barcelona, followed by a Balenciaga show in Shanghai backdropped by the city’s futuristic skyline. Dior showed at the beginning of June at the historic Drummond Castle in Scotland, while Max Mara provided the season finale in Venice yesterday evening (11 June 2024).

Here, Wallpaper* picks the best of the globe-trotting Cruise 2025 shows.

Fashion odyssey: the best Cruise 2025 shows

Max Mara, Venice

Venice’s Palazzo Ducale, overlooking St Mark’s Square, provided a cinematic setting for Ian Griffiths’ latest outing at Max Mara, which looked towards the Venetian merchant Marco Polo for inspiration. Perhaps the city’s most famous resident – his name hangs over Venice airport – Polo was selected by Griffiths on the 700th anniversary of his death to encapsulate the unique magic of traversing cultures (a fitting thematic for the Cruise season, which originally centred on creating a wardrobe for world travel). So set the scene for an opulent collection which drew on Polo’s travels: from classic Max Mara camel and cashmere wools, which would have once been traded on the Silk Road, to rich brocades, embroidery and ceremonial rope fastenings and twisted headpieces. But this was also a musing on womanhood: Griffiths noted that Polo was ‘open-minded, inquisitive and tolerant’ and perhaps even an early feminist, recounting with awe in a 13th-century travelogue how Tartar women rode horses, and how an island of women in India was only visited by men for three months a year. Whether this was true of Polo or not, here, Griffiths instilled the collection with a stately, otherworldly power, making it more than stand up to the show’s dramatic surroundings. 

Dior, Perthshire

In 1955, Christian Dior presented a collection in the ballroom of Scotland’s Gleneagles Hotel, continuing the designer’s longstanding fascination with the British Isles, its traditions and dress codes. Yesterday evening (3 June 2024), current creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri returned to Scotland for a Cruise 2025 show held in the grounds of Drummond Castle, the countryside seat of the Drummond family since the 15th century (in a nod to Monsieur Dior, guests stayed in the nearby Gleneagles). It began with the skirl of bagpipes as models walked from the main castle down into its famed terraced gardens, a preened Eden which contrasts with the wilder Perthshire countryside beyond. It was a juxtaposition which felt reflected in the collection: punky swathes of tartan, hearty leather boots, mutton-sleeved dresses adorned with ‘nag, hysterical, feisty’ and structured, armour-like bustier tops, met the undeniable polish and femininity of Chiuri’s Dior, figured here in nipped-waist lace gowns, tulle skirts and delicate veils dotted with dew-like drops of pearl. It was completed with a nod to the past, seeing photographs from Christian Dior’s 1955 show in Scotland adorning jackets and T-shirts ’in a kind of cinematic montage’. ‘The presentation of the Cruise collection is an opportunity to follow the footsteps of Christian Dior around the world,’ said Chiuri.

Balenciaga, Shanghai

The futuristic cityscape of Shanghai provided the backdrop for Demna’s latest Balenciaga outing, a Spring 2025 resort collection which was presented at nightfall at the Jean Nouvel-designed Museum of Art Padong (in a nod to the city’s cuisine, the invitation was a ceramic xioalongbao bun in a traditional bamboo steamer). As the show began, a number of the city’s skyscrapers lit up neon with the Balenciaga logo, while the silhouettes in the collection itself were similarly vertiginous, seeing models teeter on super-sized platforms in elongated trenches and overcoats, their hemlines drifting below the line of the heel (in flats, they would have dragged along the floor). Elsewhere, Demna’s idiosyncratic riffs on quotidian garments continued, spanning sporty separates supersized or shrunken (a collaboration with Under Armour was debuted, available directly after the show) and a dishevelled play on the uniform of the Parisian bourgeois, here conjured in body-wrapping blanket dresses, chain-link bags, faux-fur coats and ripped and laddered stockings. It ended – as has become tradition with Demna’s ready-to-wear collections – with a flourish of ballgowns, inspired by those in the house’s archive. This time, they twisted around the body like crumpled golden paper, or came replete with bows and feathers. Another was adorned with handfuls of glimmering jewellery – a wink, perhaps, to the city’s wealthy, high-rolling denizens.

Louis Vuitton, Barcelona

Nicolas Ghesquière’s latest Cruise collection for Louis Vuitton paid ode to Spain and its leading creative figures, an expansive list which spanned its great artists – he name-checked Velázquez, Goya and Zurbarán – to director Luis Buñuel and the futurist fashion designer Paco Rabanne. It was set against the backdrop of the phantasmic Park Güell on Barcelona’s Carmel Hill, a twisting, dreamlike landscape – replete with fairytale towers and colourful mosaic murals – by Spain’s most famous architect, Antoni Gaudí, long a draw for visitors to the city (in 1984 it was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site). ‘An architectural utopia,’ described Louis Vuitton of the choice of location, which continues a tradition of Ghesquière showing his Cruise collections in places of architectural significance, from the UFO-like former home of Bob Hope by John Lautner in Palm Springs to the equally futuristic Niterói Contemporary Art Museum by Oscar Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro.

Shown in the Hypostyle Room of the park – imagined by Gaudí as a marketplace, the classically-inspired colonnade features 86 striated columns and a dramatic mosaic ceiling – the collection itself was described as ‘embracing the country’s passionate character… the fervour of its colours, its loyalty to tradition elevated into artistic expression.’ Tilted wide-brimmed hats, a motif which ran throughout, recalled the traditional cordobés, while layers of sheer polka dots and undulating ruffled gowns referenced flamenco-wear (albeit in Ghesquière’s typically postmodern style). References to Gaudí came in material which appeared to be made from shattered mosaic, while the abundant twisting, taffeta drapes of the show’s closing looks paid homage to the rich depictions of cloth in the work of the Spanish masters.

Gucci, London

‘I owe a lot to this city,’ said Gucci’s Sabato De Sarno as he presented his debut Cruise collection for the house yesterday evening in London, choosing the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Tanks in London’s Tate Modern as the setting. ‘It has welcomed and listened to me. The same is true for Gucci, whose founder was inspired by his experience there,’ he continued, referring to Guccio Gucci’s time at the Savoy Hotel as a porter, which would eventually lead to him creating an eponymous luggage line on his return to Florence, Italy in 1921.

Here, the vast subterranean concrete space was filled for the occasion with 10,000 plants – a clash which he described as one of ‘man and nature, sentimental versus minimal’, the ‘bare concrete Tanks invaded by a poetic panorama of greenery’. The idea of dichotomy ran through the collection itself – De Sarno cited Gucci’s ‘limitless capability to put together contrasts, make them converse, and find ways to coexist’ – with pieces which straddled a mood of delicacy and toughness, seeing romantic pussybow blouses worn with baggy distressed denim, or skirts decorated with intricate floral embroidery combined with chunky creeper-style versions of the house’s horsebit loafer. Meanwhile nods to Britishness came in oversized Harrington jackets, Prince of Wales check overcoats and a play on the Mackintosh raincoat.

Most striking, though, were the flourishes of craft: a matching jacket and skirt were adorned with a grid of thousands of gently clattering hanging beads, while fronds of glimmering tassels emerged from denim jeans. Or the laser-cut organza chamomile flowers, each assembled delicately by hand. ‘This is another piece of me, more romantic, more contradictory,’ said De Sarno. ‘I like taking something that we think we know and breaking away.’

Chanel, Marseille

Chanel travelled southwards for its latest Cruise show, choosing Marseille, the ancient port city that has long been a raw-around-the-edges counterpart to the more glossy Riviera cities of St Tropez and Cannes eastwards along the coastline. Creative director Virginie Viard said this was purposeful, part of a desire to expand the cultural impact of Chanel beyond the rarefied Rue Cambon in Paris and the high-earning locales with which it is most associated (it was also the reason the house chose Manchester’s cobbled streets for its Métiers d'Art show in December 2023, which was inspired by the energy of the city’s underground music scene). The setting here was Cité Radieuse, Le Corbusier’s 1952-completed ’vertical city’, recognisable for its monolithic concrete exterior punctuated with vivid moments of colour on its balconies (such is its architectural impact, Le Corbusier’s modular, utopian vision for living has since been designated a Unesco World Heritage site).

Viard chose the concrete-clad rooftop – the rain just about holding off – to present a collection largely defined by a sense of youthful ease, a hallmark of the designer’s tenure so far. There were breezy white blouses with broderie anglais motifs, colourful crochet mini dresses and spongy-soled flip-flops, while playful nautical motifs ran throughout – from anchor-charm jewellery to hand-drawn fish and plays on wetsuits and diving hoods. Signature Chanel tweed was of course in abundance: here shot through with Le Corbusier-inspired colour, like a grid-like design on a cropped tweed jacket and matching skirt, or a boldly-hued pinafore-style sleeveless blazer in shades of red, yellow and optic white. ‘Marseille is a city that puts me in touch with my emotions. I tried to capture its power of attraction, its breath of fresh air, and to convey the energy that reigns there,’ said Viard. ‘And you couldn't ask for a better backdrop to a runway show than the Cité Radieuse.’

Stay tuned for more from the Cruise 2025 season on wallpaper.com.

Milan Fashion Week A/W 2024 – which took place in the Italian city last week – was a season of debuts. Tod’s and Blumarine both welcomed new creative directors: the former saw ex-Bottega Veneta designer Matteo Tamburini take the helm, while at the latter, Walter Chiapponi (formerly of Tod’s) replaced Nicolas Brognano. Moschino also welcomed new creative director Adrian Appiolaza, formerly of Loewe, where he was ready-to-wear design director for ten years. Other notable moments included a return to Milan for Marni, which has in recent seasons shown in Paris, Tokyo and New York.

Elsewhere, Prada’s arresting A/W 2024 collection saw Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons mine ‘fragments of the past’ to create a collection of the future, while Matthieu Blazy’s latest outing at Bottega Veneta saw the designer seek to exalt the everyday. ‘In a world on fire, there is something very human in the simple act of dressing,’ he said. Rounding out the schedule were the titans of Italian fashion; among them Giorgio Armani, Max Mara, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Dolce & Gabbana.

Here, reported from the shows, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss picks the best of Milan Fashion Week A/W 2024 (also see beauty & grooming editor Hannah Tindle’s stand-out A/W 2024 beauty moments from the runway). 

The best of Milan Fashion Week A/W 2024

Giorgio Armani

It was left to Mr Armani to close out Milan Fashion Week on Sunday morning, a fitting final act from a designer who for close to five decades has been defining Milanese – and indeed Italian – style. Presented in the intimate Via Borgonuovo space in the house’s longtime headquarters, the designer crafted a collection of languorous glamour which the designer said was inspired by the idea of ‘renewal’. Titled ‘Winter Flowers’, the collection began by looking towards flowers that bloom even in the coldest months and ‘herald beauty and regrowth’ (in this, there was a link to Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta collection shown the evening before, which looked towards the resilience of desert plants and cacti for his own exploration of renewal). Here, it made for a collection of extraordinary surface embellishment – whether the painterly floral prints which decorated diaphanous layers of organza or dainty beaded dragonflies – in hues of pale blues, rich greens, and the intense nocturnal blacks and navies of the closing looks.

Bottega Veneta

After last season’s round-the-globe ‘odyssey’ – which saw models traverse an enormous tiled map of the world in garments inspired by their imaginative travels – there was a sparser mood to Matthieu Blazy’s latest collection, which took place in a wood-floored show space throughout which giant Murano glass cactuses bloomed. Blazy said the desert plant was a symbol of resilience against the elements; the ability to survive and regenerate even in the harshest landscapes, a mood which was infused into the collection itself. ‘In a world on fire, there is something very human in the simple act of dressing,’ he said, noting that he imagined his figures emerging as if from a burnt and barren landscape to start again. ‘The idea of rebirth is beautiful. These are the flowers that bloom after the earth is burnt – they give a sense of hope. They come back stronger than ever.’

He did so with an exaltation of the everyday, noting a desire to make the quotidian wardrobe ‘monumental’, capturing a ‘sense of allure and confidence in the pragmatic, utilitarian and purposeful’. It made for a typically extraordinary line-up of clothing which saw the recognisable – trench coats, collared shirts, knitwear – energised in new proportions (largely expansive and enveloping, like the cocooning silhouette of the curved seam overcoats which opened the show) and fabrications, which will no doubt require closer inspection to reveal their secrets. Twisted gowns appeared to have been created instinctively, held in place with shiny gobstopper fastenings, while fronds of bouncing pleats at the hems of gowns suggested flames and fire (so too the final slew of dresses, where the fabric looked destroyed and remade). Others were decorated with faded motifs of maps, as if his wanderers were seeking new worlds. ‘We all watch the same news. It is hard to be celebratory at this point,’ said Blazy, noting that getting dressed to begin a new day is an act of human dignity. ‘Here, elegance is resilience.’ 

Jil Sander

A collection rich in colour and texture saw Lucie and Luke Meier continue to eschew the idea of seasonal ‘themes’ towards a more wide-ranging evolution of their vision for Jil Sander – one rooted, as the pair describe, in a ‘constant search for a balance between sensitivity and form, intimacy and presence, image and intention, concentration and humour’. Taking place in a green-hued ‘smooth and immersive capsule’, decorated with a collection of enormous cobalt-blue horns, the A/W 2024 collection loosely began with the idea of sound and music, and the way it shapes ‘our emotions; desires and needs’ (a live soundtrack was provided by American singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Mk.gee). There was certainly a feeling of emotion to the collection itself, which shifted from the brightly-hued moulded dresses and tailoring of the opening looks, towards more dramatic silhouettes, like a series of caped gowns which recalled mid-century haute couture in their abundance. Elsewhere, texture and fabrication remained key, whether the quilted down or diaphanous chainmail which suggested protection, or the more whimsical flourishes of floral jacquards, fuzzy handbags, and the long fronds of tassels which trailed from knitwear. 

Dolce & Gabbana

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana looked towards the tuxedo, a symbol of enduring sartorial elegance, for their latest collection, drafting in a blockbuster era-spanning cast – which included Naomi Campbell, Amber Valletta, Mariacarla Boscono and Eva Herzigova – to bolster the collection’s timeless mood. ‘The tuxedo is the ultimate symbol of pure style,’ the designers noted. ‘For us, only style transcends fashion: the simpler a piece, a classic like the tuxedo, the more perfect it is, eternal, free from the constraints of time.’ Alongside a multitude of riffs on the garment – cropped to the navel, blown up in proportion, or elongated into an overcoat – were the requisite flourishes of glamour and sensuality synonymous with the house. These included a series of lingerie-inspired looks (a counterpoint to the rigour of the tuxedo), as well as enormous feathered coats, glimmering crystal chainmail dresses and profusions of lace and polka dots. ‘[It’s a] union of contrasts,’ continued the designers. ‘Masculine and feminine, austerity and seduction… allowing every woman the freedom to express her idea of style.’

Ferragamo

Maximilian Davis moves from strength to strength with a deeply desirable A/W 2024 collection for Ferragamo, which saw him translate past to present in astute style (‘the goal is to be timeless,’ he recently told Scarlett Conlon in a tour of the house’s archive in Florence, Italy). Here, it was the liberatory mood of the 1920s that provided the starting point of the collection, with Davis noting that it was a decade that ‘used clothing as a way to celebrate freedom.’ ’That expression of freedom is something which resonates with me, with my heritage, and with Ferragamo.’ There was certainly the fluidity of the era’s dress codes, the feeling of casting off restriction and restraint: a silk halterneck gown fell away into tassels at its sheer hemline (a restrained riff on the flapper dress), while layers of transparency ran throughout. 

Elsewhere, Davis drew inspiration from Hollywood figures like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, noting the way they would adopt elements of masculine dress; here, this meant a series of brilliant wide-shouldered overcoats and tailoring with wide buckled waistbands. For men, a super-abbreviated mini short provided the collection’s defining silhouette, worn with elements which the designer said suggested protection: military-hued tailored jackets, chunky knitwear, riffs on the workwear jacket. A similar line of thinking inspired the cape-like silhouette or the elongated, face-covering collars on outerwear. ‘In the 1920s, as a response to the world that surrounded them, people created their own spaces through speakeasies,’ explained Davis. ‘They were hiding what they were wearing until they were safe.’ Befitting the house’s history, completing the line-up was some terrific footwear – whether elegant T-bar pumps (a stripped-down riff on a style Davis found in the house’s archive), thigh-high wader boots, or those adorned with fronds of colourful sprouting feathers.

Versace

Donatella Versace closed out Friday evening’s proceedings with a stomping co-ed collection infused with a rebellious, punkish spirit – albeit in the Italian house’s hyper-glamourous style. ‘The woman is a good girl with a wild soul,’ said the designer, who formulated this juxtaposition in prim collared dresses, gold-button blazers and riffs on the tweed suit (here elongated to the point the jacket trailed along the floor) opposed with lashings of eyeliner, distressed leopard print sweaters and chainmail-covered jeans sliced open along their front. Elsewhere, a slew of molten dresses, which contoured the body into a narrow corseted waist, had requisite Versace va-va-voom (so much so, actress Anne Hathaway chose one of them to wear while she watched on from the front row). Nods to archival prints, meanwhile, appeared across both the men’s and womenswear collections. ‘This is a collection with a rebel attitude but a kind heart,’ elaborated the designer. ‘Pure lines, innovative fabrications, considered wildness. This is us. This is Versace.’

Marni

After a sojourn around the world, hosting shows in New York, Tokyo and Paris, Marni creative director Francesco Risso returned to Marni this season for a show held in the railway arches on Via Ferrante Aporti. Here, they had been entirely covered in crinkled white paper – one fellow attendee described the effect as feeling as if inside a papier maché igloo – providing a symbolic link to the collection itself, which had begun with a blank slate. Titled ‘Bring No Clothes’ (a reference to Virginia Woolf’s instructions to those visiting her home in the British countryside), Risso said that reference images were banned from the walls of the studio this season, inviting his design team to instead work by instinct and through play. ‘By casting out the idolatry of mirrors, filled to the brim with conquering dreams, we have returned to an almost animal state,’ he wrote in the show’s accompanying letter of intent. Indeed, the collection did have a primitive air: sliced panels of fur slung around models’ necks or trailing in their wake, moments of animal print, and fuzzy, enveloping textures. A mood of childlike creativity, meanwhile, was captured in a series of naively painted garments, their texture raised like an oil painting.

‘For some months now, I’ve been asking myself what it would mean to return to that original state of creation,’ elaborated Risso. ‘In a letter inviting her friends to the countryside, Virginia Woolf once wrote “bring no clothes”. I came to understand that she wasn’t suggesting they arrive naked, but simply encouraging them to strip back the punitive structures of clothing, and all their symbolic implications, because here, it’s just us. It’s a sentiment familiar to my early days in the studio – a sense of community that extended deeper and beyond our titles and roles... because here, it’s just us.’

Gucci

Sabato De Sarno’s sophomore womenswear collection continued in much the same vein as his debut, seeing the Italian designer attempt to capture the essence of his native country’s style in contemporary manner – all the while infused with a mood of insouciance and romance. ‘My dreams, as with my fashion, always converse with reality,’ he elaborated in a brief note circulated prior to the show, which was held in the industrial Fonderia Carlo Macchi. ‘Because I am not searching for another world to live in, but rather of ways to live in this world.’ For him, this means an exploration of the quotidian wardrobe enlivened with the flourishes of glamour and embellishment made possible by the Gucci atelier: mannish overcoats were adorned with a waterfall of sequins and paillettes, intricately layered lace cami tops and dresses recalled lingerie, while slouchy knit cardigans came with shimmering crystal-decorated collars. Elsewhere, tailoring was nipped and worn with abbreviated shorts (the silhouette seemed to recall the 1960s), while an impressive array of leather jackets punched with the double-G monogram showed off the house’s expertise in the material. It ended with a duo of carved strapless gowns, which were seductive in their simplicity, though with enough pizzazz to please his celebrity-filled front row (this season, it comprised Solange Knowles, Kirsten Dunst and De Sarno’s house muse, British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones). ‘[I want to] capture the extraordinary where the ordinary is expected,’ he said.

Sportmax

This season the Sportmax design team diverted from the futuristic austerity of S/S 2024’s all-white collection, looking instead towards underground icon Nico – in particular, her final 1985 album Camera Obscura – for inspiration. On the collection notes, a quote from Gerard Malanga (a poet and assistant to Andy Warhol) about the album’s imagery was chosen to encapsulate the collection’s mood. ‘Nico’s eyes seem to guard a great mystery which, hidden in aloofness, they do not want anyone to know exists,’ it read. ‘Whether or not a mystery is there, the eyes with the enigma of their absence from what surrounds them eclipse the perfection of features and form to add great magnetism’. 

So the woman for this season was steeped in sensuality and intrigue, seeing models stalking the dimly lit upper corridors of the Triennale di Milano contemporary art museum on a curving mirrored catwalk (on which the season’s vertiginous heels pounded). Plunging black mini dresses rose up above the shoulder into spikes, while sharp, wide-shouldered tailoring and a recurring cinched waist (often achieved through clever layering) was designed to recall the ‘resolve of a Helmut Newton muse’. Meanwhile, Nico’s 1980s contemporaries – Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, Annie Lennox and Siouxsie Sioux – were also celebrated in the nostalgic album cover-inspired prints, dotted across the collection like a collage.

Tod’s

Matteo Tamburini chose the Messina Tram Depot in northern Milan to present his debut Tod’s collection, a symbolic gesture that this was a brand in forward movement (indeed, a number of the yellow Milanese trams had been adorned with the Tod’s logo for the occasion). It linked with the collection’s inspirations, which the designer said was rooted in a search for contemporary Italian elegance – one at once inspired by the energy of the street (here epitomised by the presentation, where models appeared to be rushing to catch the tram on a misted morning) and a deep-rooted appreciation for local craft. So for men and women, Tamburini attempted to create a comprehensive everyday wardrobe in luxurious style, from layers of ribbed knitwear and roomy trench coats to more dramatic leather gowns adorned with tassels (in these, there was an echo of Bottega Veneta, where Tamburini worked from 2017 to 2023). The designer was at his best, though, with the narrow, streamlined looks which opened the show, comprising sharply cut overcoats, double-layer striped shirts and gently flared tailored trousers with wide folded hems – a convincingly contemporary silhouette. As for footwear – which remains the bedrock of the brand – a version of the Gommino loafer for men with a minimal metal bar in lieu of the usual tie fastening had definite appeal, while for women the style was adorned with playful fronds of leather tassels.

Prada

‘An instinctive attraction to history.’ So began the description of Prada’s A/W 2024 show, which was presented in the same OMA/AMO-designed space as the house’s menswear show in January, where vast Perspex tiles revealed a simulacrum of a forest floor beneath attendees’ feet (this time, the twisting lines of spinning office chairs had been removed; so too the desks and Prada-screensaver computers which had stood in the space’s entranceway). Though still striking, the set felt less prescient here – in the menswear show, its clash of the great outdoors and the corporate office was reflected in the clothing itself – with co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons instead looking towards ‘fragments’ of historical dress as the collection’s starting point. (Read more about OMA/AMO and Prada show sets in our Rem Koolhaas interview on 25 years of the collaboration.)

But this was not about misty-eyed nostalgia – something Miuccia Prada asserted, in typically plain-speaking style, that she ‘hates’. Rather, it was what the pair deemed an ‘emotional’ exercise – an exploration of the way clothing holds onto memories, even romance. ‘History, for me, is always connected to the lives of people,’ explained Miuccia Prada. ‘There is a sense of romance to this collection – of values of love and caring embedded in the clothes… it is not so much a theoretical statement, but a conversation about emotions. For me, these are vital ideas, they are always present in what we create. Creating beauty, creating things with love.’

So there were dresses decorated with a multitude of bows, petticoat-style slips revealed beneath sliced-away skirts, or sculpted tailoring recalling a midcentury silhouette. ‘[They] could be Victorian, 1920s, 1950s,’ said Simons of the references, which were shaken up to create the richly imagined collection. ‘This is not about a narrative history… it’s an attraction to different moments in time which now feel new.’ Other pieces worked in the other direction: a series of technical anoraks, for example, were reshaped using a historical line, imbued with new elegance. 

But there was a sense of warning here, too. The profusion of feminine adornments, from bows to ruffles, had an uncanny effect (‘Why do they persist? Why do they attract?’ asked the pair via the collection notes), while suggestions of military attire lent the collection an undercurrent of lingering darkness. As one expects from Prada, this felt purposeful. ’Reflecting on history teaches us our mistakes, our strengths. The past is the only thing we have,’ said Miuccia Prada. ’This is a collection shaped by history… who we were, why we dressed like that. It’s about remembering our past, using this knowledge to move forwards.’ 

‘In this moment, which is such a complicated moment, it is vital to know your history. Who you are, where you come from,’ added Simons. ‘You can only realise your future if you know your past.’

Emporio Armani

Starting backwards, Emporio Armani’s A/W 2024 show ended with a flurry of snow (a micro-trend in Milan, with Jacob Cohën’s presentation earlier in the day at Teatro Lirico complete with its own blizzard of faux-snow). Through it Mr Armani’s models marched, umbrellas overheard and seemingly unfazed by the change in weather, clad here in a series of eveningwear looks in lieu of more temperature-appropriate wear – from sequinned tuxedos and shimmering crescent-moon adorned suits to crystal bra tops and sculpted evening gowns. They captured the mood of the collection, which was titled ‘Night Glow’, seeking to evoke the ‘luminous night sky’ and its changing tonal hues (the colour palette spanned midnight black to mauve, violet, jade green and tones of grey). Silhouettes, meanwhile, were designed to capture the feeling of freedom which remains at the heart of Emporio Armani – whether billowing trousers with sweatpant-style gathered hems, diaphanous organza skirts, or the boldly coloured flourishes of chubby faux fur. 

Max Mara

During his three-plus decades at the helm of Max Mara, Ian Griffiths has established a canon of notable women from history to provide the inspiration for his collections. Such was the case for his A/W 2024 offering, presented on a drizzly Milanese morning in a brightly lit former industrial space on Via Giovanni Battista Piranesi. This season, it was the turn of rebellious French author Colette, who is best known for her sensual prose that at the turn of the 20th century provided a then-rare glimpse into the interior life of a woman, her passions and desires. In this spirit, what followed was a seductive collection which suggested moments of pleasure: typically enveloping overcoats in soft-to-the-touch textures, ribbed knit bands which gently cinched the waist, or asymmetric skirts draped and folded onto the body. The subtle juxtapositions which have become a signature of Griffiths’ tenure ran throughout – between weight and lightness, glamour and ease, the masculine and feminine – like his riff on a military officer’s coat or fisherman’s sweater, a nod to the way Colette would defiantly dress between genders. At the end of the press notes, a quote from the author seemed to define the liberated collection: ‘Beautiful? For whom? Why, for myself, of course.’

Fendi

The Fendi showspace on Via Solari was divided into various rooms, their partitions constructed from enormous drapes of coloured silk. Indeed, the collection itself – which creative director of couture and womenswear Kim Jones said began by looking at archival looks from the mid-1980s – was full of such impressive contortions of fabric, whether the cinching day-glo strip of fabric which was layered over a simple black roll-neck, or the variously complex knits, which were crisscrossed over the neck or became slinky, colour-blocked ribbed dresses. The drapes also recalled those found in Roman statuary – a nod to Fendi’s home city – which also appeared as prints or as intricate embroidery on the garments themselves, part of a continuing exploration of the Italian city’s unique brand of elegance (a fascination of Jones since he started at the house, who takes particular inspiration from the personal style of house scion Delfina Delettrez Fendi, who in 2020 became Fendi’s artistic director of jewellery and in 2016 was a Wallpaper* Design Awards judge). 

But delving into the archive also reminded Jones of the dress codes of his native London in the 1980s, particularly the vivid, subversive uniforms of the New Romantics and figures like performance artist and club impresario Leigh Bowery. Here, the liberated mood of the era was expressed in flourishes of polka dots (a Bowery signature) and moments of piercing colour, which contrasted rigorous, sculpted black tailoring elsewhere. ‘The sketches reminded me of London during that period: the Blitz Kids, the New Romantics, the adoption of workwear, aristocratic style, Japanese style,’ Jones explained. ‘It was a point when British subcultures and styles became global and absorbed global influences. Yet still with a British elegance in ease and not giving a damn what anybody else thinks, something that chimes with Roman style.’

No. 21

Alessandro Dell'Acqua’s always intriguing vision of womanhood at No. 21 – where underneath his clothing’s exterior beauty something darker lurks – continued this season with the Italian designer’s riff on bourgeois dress codes. He used the expression ‘bon ton’, a byword for elegance and good taste that was first used to describe British high society in the 19th century – and later reemerged during the haute couture revival of the 1980s – to encapsulate the collection’s mood. The latter era emerged here in plunging black gowns that tied at the shoulders with bows, cocooning double-breasted overcoats, or nipped tweed suiting, all of which drew inspiration from the decade’s outré haute couture collections (‘It’s as if I had cast my gaze deeply into a fashion story [and made it] come alive again,’ said Dell’Acqua of the nostalgic mood). But it was the designer’s eye for juxtaposition that continued to enchant: whether the functional, harness-style fastening which sat in the side seam of an otherwise ladylike dress dripping in crystals (and exposed the body beneath), the men’s brogues worn with a satin strapless gown, or the combination of a slouchy Fair Isle jumper with an embellished sheer skirt and pointed pumps, each combination captured the disruptive sensuality which pulsates through his work. ‘[I wanted] to capture and express a very conscious form of bourgeois eroticism,’ Dell’Acqua concluded. 

A mood of escape and discovery infused the S/S 2024 womenswear collections, with designers taking a round-the-world odyssey – both real and imagined – to create a series of striking, craft-rich looks which offer a dramatic and colourful riposte to the banality of the everyday.

Here, as seen in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (on newsstands worldwide now), photographer Nicolas Kern, Wallpaper* fashion and style director Jason Hughes and Dutch model Bente Oort take a trip to the otherwordly landscapes of the Canary Islands, capturing the season’s best looks amid the archipelago’s unique vistas and volcanic black-sand beaches. 

From Matthieu Blazy’s pom-pom-adorned dress for Bottega Veneta – which appears on the limited-edition cover of the March 2024 Style Issue – to the cocoon-like wrapped forms of Issey Miyake, or the intricate embellishments that adorn looks from Isabel Marant, Feben and Carven, it makes for a series of electrifying ensembles which capture the mood of offbeat elegance set to define the S/S 2024 season ahead. Enjoy the trip. 

S/S 2024 womenswear looks for escape and discovery

Model: Bente Oort at Platform Agency. Casting: Ikki Casting at The Art Board. Hair: Daniele Falzone at Blend Management using Davines. Make-up: Jimmy Owen Jones at Julian Watson Agency. Photography assistants: Francesco Colombo, David Gimenez. Fashion assistant: Kris Bergfeldt. Post-production: Ink. Local production: Studio Volca.

A version of this article appears in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* available on international newsstands in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

’Everyone’s favourite fashion teddy,’ is how Italian fashion house Max Mara describes its Teddy Coat, an enveloping piece of outerwear designed by creative director Ian Griffiths which this year celebrates its 10th birthday. Inspired by a 1980s design Griffiths had discovered in the house archive, the cocooning design – with abundant, oversized proportions – takes its name from the supersoft ‘teddy bear’ fabric it’s made from.

Teddy Ten: inside Max Mara’s ‘Fluffy Residence’

Opening today (16 December 2023) celebrations – which have so far taken place in Chengdu, China, Milan and New York – arrive in London’s Covent Garden during the buzzing pre-Christmas rush, with a suitably transporting ‘fluffy residence’, an immersive walk-through pop-up evocative of an apartment, complete with furry teddy-clad walls, furnishings (from kitchen appliances and a laid table, to tiny details like jade roller in the bathroom or a teddy version of an iPhone) and even an enormous teddy bear hovering over the bed. As such, it provides a magical escape from the bustle of last-minute shopping – complete with ‘magic mirror‘ which transforms the viewer into its own ‘teddy alter ego’ (Max Mara says it’s ’teddy’s favourite gadget’).

Elsewhere, a series of interactive windows give views across an imagined city – naturally clad entirely in fluffy teddy fabric, and fit for the fairytale spirit of the season. Max Mara calls the space ‘intimate and enchanting’, crafting it as an ‘imagined’ residence for the ultimate Teddy Coat wearer – a woman who ‘never forsakes the warmth of hosting a dinner with friends’. As such, Max Mara says the residence is open to all – especially families (fittingly, for the anniversary, the house has created a miniature version of the Teddy Coat for intergenerational coordination).

The ‘Fluffy Residence’ continues festivities which began in New York where a ‘Teddy Ten’ pop-up opened in the city’s SoHo district, coinciding with the arrival of fashion week in the city (a similar pop-up in Harrods opened the following November). Max Mara has deemed it the ‘great big global fashion adventure’. 

Alongside, the house has created a series of special-edition pieces inspired by the Teddy Coat, spanning teddy-covered mittens, ear muffs and hats, as well as a new ‘sparkling’ iteration primed for the abandon of the season. Alongside the children’s version, the entire collection is available from Harrods).

Max Mara’s The Fluffy Residence runs from 16-26 December 2023 (except 2t December) on Russell Street, Covent Garden. Reservations are not essential but fast access can be booked at maxmara.com. 

The Teddy Coat and 10th anniversary collection is available from Harrods

Max Mara has long been synonymous with excellent outerwear. It was in 1981 that Anne Marie Beretta designed the now-signature ‘101801’ for the Italian house, an elegant, masculine-cut wool overcoat which straddles luxury and pragmatism – a dichotomy which continues to run through Max Mara’s collections today. Treated with due reverence, not a single stitch has been changed since its advent, and it continues to be the house’s bestselling piece today. 

It is not without competition, though. Since Max Mara’s founding in 1951, the house’s various designers have added to Max Mara’s famed outerwear canon; most recently, British creative director of the house Ian Griffiths, who began working at Max Mara after graduating from London‘s Royal College of Art in 1987. His collections have included a multiplicity of outerwear, though it is the Teddy Coat – first shown on the runway in 2013 – which has been elevated to the house’s ‘Icon’ status. This year, Max Mara celebrates its ten-year anniversary with a series of events and pop-ups taking place around the world.

Max Mara: Ten years of the Teddy Coat

Originally inspired by a 1980s design which Griffiths discovered in the Max Mara archive, the cocooning Teddy Coat is generously oversized – the house describes it as ’abundant’ in volume, recalling the extravagance of the era – and is crafted from supersoft ’teddy bear’ fabric which is at once warm, protective and surprisingly lightweight (the trick is a blend of soft wool and alpaca or camel fibres on a silk base). It has been aptly likened to a wearable blanket, though it nonetheless remains instilled with the house’s distinct Italian brand of elegance. As such, it has been a hit with celebrities looking for off-duty attire, among them Katie Holmes, Julia Roberts, Blake Lively, Kim Kardashian and recently Hailey Bieber, who has adopted the style for a new generation.

Festivities began with a celebration of the first ’Teddy Ten’ pop-up in New York’s SoHo district, coinciding with the arrival of fashion week in the city. Clad with the Teddy Coat’s signature fabric, it sets the blueprint for other pop-ups taking place around the world which include a recent opening in Chengdu, China and in London’s Harrods department store, with further events scheduled in cities around the world. Max Mara calls it the ‘great big global fashion adventure’.

Alongside, Max Mara has created an exclusive offering of special-edition pieces inspired by the Teddy Coat – notably, the new ’sparkling’ iteration in camel or white which is crafted with shimmering fibres that feel apt for the arrival of winter and its ensuing festivities. Max Mara is also introducing the ’Mini Teddy Coat’, designed for children aged five to 12, with matching mittens, ear muffs and fluffy hats with teddy ears also available. An array of other products in the teddy fabric – from handbags to bucket hats – are also part of the offering.

Finally, an accompanying tenth-anniversary campaign is lensed by American image-maker Tyler Mitchell and stars Italian supermodel Mariacarla Boscono, running with what Max Mara calls ‘the mantra of every self-respecting icon: “I was, I am, I will be”.’ Another campaign, photographed by Italian photographer Giampaolo Sgura, stars model Arizona Muse and her daughter, who models the ’Mini Teddy’ in the uplifting series of images.

The ’Teddy Ten’ collection is available online and in select retailers and pop-ups world wide. The Harrods pop-up is open until 15 November 2023 and the Teddy Coat is available at harrods.com

maxmara.com

Max Mara, Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti have announced Dominique White as the recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2022 – 2024. The biennial award, now in its ninth edition, was set up by Iwona Blazwick and established in 2005 with the Max Mara Group, with further participation of Collezione Maramotti. Its aim is to support and nurture women-identifying artists at a pivotal stage in their careers. 

White was chosen from a shortlist including Rebecca Bellantoni, Bhajan Hunjan, Onyeka Igwe and Zinzi Minott, by a panel comprising gallerist Rozsa Farkas, artist Claudette Johnson, writer Derica Shields and collector Maria Sukkar. The panel was chaired by the Prize’s guest curator, Bina von Stauffenberg, in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery director Gilane Tawadros. 

White’s practice focuses on both the cultural, metaphorical and environmental potency of the sea. Her large-scale, ethereal installations use discarded nautical objects, including old sails, masts, chains and rope to explore imagined worlds, nautical legends and Afrofuturism. 

‘It is truly an honour to be awarded this year’s Max Mara Art Prize for Women and I’m thrilled to have been the recipient of an award that not only enables the development of seemingly unattainable skills and ambitious areas of research but also (quite literally) supports the emergence of a new body of works,’ says White, who is based between Marseille and Essex. ‘I’m so grateful to have shared this space of distinction with Rebecca Bellantoni, Bhajan Hunjan, Onyeka Igwe and Zinzi Minott and I would like to express my deepest gratitude again to the jury, Whitechapel Gallery, Max Mara and Collezione Maramotti for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’

White’s winning proposal is titled Deadweight, a body of work that takes ‘deadweight tonnage’, a maritime industry term used to calculate how many units of weight a ship can take before it sinks. During a six-month residency in Italy as part of the prize, White will have the opportunity to develop the idea and interrogate the meaning and exploitation of ‘deadweight tonnage’, tracing its relevance to the historical slave trade and its contemporary forms in the Mediterranean. White intends to build and then submerge elements of the final work in the Tyrrhenian Sea off Italy’s west coast, which will become the foundations for her solo exhibition in 2024, launching at Whitechapel Gallery and touring to Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy. 

‘On behalf of the jury and Whitechapel Gallery, I want to congratulate Dominique White on being awarded this year’s Max Mara Art Prize for Women,’ says Tawadros. ‘The youngest of the shortlist, Dominique’s winning proposal showed a maturity, rigour and consistency of creative approach that is entirely in keeping with the aims of the Prize, which is ultimately to enable women-identifying artists to develop and create projects that speak of and to the world around them. The themes she explores in her work feel especially timely and relevant today, and we are delighted to be able to support her over the course of her residency and through a solo exhibition. At a time when the need for refuge and safe space is so acute and the passage of individuals and communities by sea poses such risks to lives and exposes so much injustice, the interrogation and exploration of both the historical and contemporary systems that control movement and identity seem especially urgent.’

As Luigi Maramotti, chairman of Max Mara, said, ‘I am delighted that the Max Mara Art Prize for Women continues to be such a special project for all partners and stakeholders and that it is enthusiastically supported by Gilane Tawadros, the new director of Whitechapel Gallery. This award offers the winners a rather unique opportunity to focus on their artistic research, to develop an idea and create an ambitious project in relation to their long residency in Italy. I am confident that Dominique White will be able to make the most of this opportunity.’

The Max Mara prize for Women, for UK-based female-identifying artists, is the only award of its kind. Previous winners have included Emma Talbot (2019 – 22), Helen Cammock (2017 – 19), Emma Hart (2015 – 17), Corin Sworn (2013 – 15), Laure Prouvost (2011 – 13), Andrea Büttner (2009 – 11), Hannah Rickards (2007 – 09) and Margaret Salmon (2005 – 07). 

whitechapelgallery.org; maxmara.com

When Patricia Urquiola – the Spanish multi-hyphenate whose eponymous Milan-based studio spans product, industrial and furniture design, as well as architecture and art direction – got to the point of showing her capsule clothing collection for Weekend Max Mara last February, she decided to break with tradition. Until then, the Italian fashion label had always presented its collections in its own Milanese showroom; instead, Urquiola chose the headquarters of rug manufacturer CC-Tapis, a label with which she has long collaborated. ‘Sometimes you just have to change the rules,’ she says. 

The collaboration itself marked a first for Urquiola. Despite having forged strong connections with the fashion industry throughout her career (she has worked on projects for Missoni, Salvatore Ferragamo and Louis Vuitton, and had a close working relationship with the late Virgil Abloh), this is the first clothing collection she has created. (Urquiola, though, is insistent it is not a ‘collection’ but ‘just a capsule’, ‘then you are braver and you don’t think about the responsibility,’ she says.)

It arrives as part of Weekend Max Mara’s Signature line, an ongoing project whereby various international creatives are drafted in each season to create a collection that fuses their own approach with the label’s heritage. Previous collaborators have included model Alek Wek, costume designer Gabriella Pescucci, interior designer Anthony Baratta, and artists Richard Saja and Donald Robertson. Urquiola is the tenth participant. 

The collaboration is an expansion of Urquiola’s comprehensive previous work with textiles that is defined by a broad if sometimes unconventional use of colour. She had always been aware of Weekend Max Mara – ‘I’m a woman, I live in Milan,’ she says with a smile – and says the appeal of this project was its allowance for working across disciplines with freedom, an unrestrained approach that she has long championed in her own work. ‘They described to me this idea that, through Weekend Max Mara, they wanted to share more and more conversations with people who are not from their world, to get the energy of colour, of having another approach to the work. They were really insistent on that.’

The capsule is titled Habito, a Spanish word that Urquiola explains means both ‘habit’ and ‘to inhabit’. ‘I approached [the capsule] not only as a designer but as a woman,’ she explains, noting that each item of clothing, which often features hybrid elements, is designed to reflect the needs and contradictions of everyday life. ‘I think the clothes that women wear are an emotional habit, they are the tools we need for living.’ That said, Urquiola notes that she was ‘not searching for a woman’s silhouette’, instead designing garments that felt stripped of traditionally gendered elements to create a reflection of the way she dresses day to day (often, she says, this emerges in the use of oversized, cocooning silhouettes). 

The capsule began in Max Mara’s archive, a place Urquiola was keen to explore at the start of the project. ‘They had all the pieces from the first collections, from the 1980s, and out of this came the dimensions, the oversized shapes, they were the volumes we were looking for,’ she says. As such, the collection comprises a series of coats – ‘coats are the most representative [pieces in the collection], the most hybrid ones’ – in variously amplified proportions, combining playfully juxtaposed fabrics (in particular, heritage wools and ribbed knits with technical nylon). Other elements include a vividly coloured gilet, reminiscent of her colourful CC-Tapis rugs that formed the backdrop of the presentation, giant clasp-top clutch handbags (a version of the house’s ‘Pasticcino’ bag), and shirting with expansive plissé sleeves. 

Urquiola believes that now is the time for such experimentation, ‘to do capsules, to put yourself in new situations, to give new voices to companies,’ she says, noting this approach was in part inspired by watching Abloh work so broadly across design disciplines. ‘This project with Weekend Max Mara was about mixing our ideas, a playful moment where you interact with different worlds, and other points of view. I came out of my comfort zone,’ she says. ‘Which is always a good thing.’

INFORMATION

A version of this article appears in the November 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!

weekendmaxmara.com
patriciaurquiola.com

The show ‘The Age/L’Età’ is the culmination of Emma Talbot’s six-month residency in Italy, facilitated by Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, after she was awarded the eighth Max Mara Art Prize for Women, in 2020. 

Presented first at Whitechapel Gallery in London before travelling to Collezione Maramotti in October, her exploration delves into the violence of Greek mythology and the balance of permaculture and paganism. Her work leads us to question the ‘role of destruction in the foundations of patriarchy’, explains curator Laura Smith. During her Italian residency, Talbot used knitted sculptures, animations from drawings, huge silk-screen paintings and disorientating soundwork to imagine a world anchored in nature’s wisdom.

Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, 1905, was the springboard for Talbot’s show. The painting, displayed in 1911 during Rome’s International Exhibition, organised to mark the 50th anniversary of Italian unification (Risorgimento), signifies the progression from tradition to modernity, and the birth of a united state. Able to observe the painting first-hand during her residency, Talbot imagined the elderly woman as emblematic of an old and ‘tired’ Italy. In response, she reframes the character as a saviour in a post-apocalyptic pagan dystopia, rooting her actions in the 12 permaculture design principles and a pagan respect for nature. 

At first glance, the show seems overtly feminist and uncomfortable. The loud, humming sounds offer a sense of unease and the images seem complicated – but what else could be expected from such a wide-ranging practice? A little time spent reading about the context of the exhibition sets the scene for Talbot’s imagined world, and is worth the extra moments of effort. It’s a rare treat to dive, layer by layer, into such depth of thought.

In Ruins and Volcanic Landscape, split across two silk screens, we follow the woman ‘trying to navigate the landscape of broken history’, as Smith explains. The tapestries hanging from the ceiling of Whitechapel Gallery contrast the serene with the brutal, depicting the woman in different forms; she nurtures hurt animals, is a 12-limbed figure busily twisted over swirling backgrounds and peers into cracks in her universe. The tone in the bubbles of speech dotted across the images range from advice that ‘life is a transformative process, keep going, learn and adapt’ to vehemently urging us to ‘use (our) agitations to rise up and survive’. The pieces portray the woman questioning the way of the world, presenting an amalgamation of thoughts that relate us in common moments of meditation. 

The facelessness of the woman is important; It enables the character to represent a universal ‘self’ and encourages understanding. In the 25-minute-long animation, The Trials, we see the elderly woman’s response to the mythical Twelve Labours of Hercules. Smith explains that Talbot doesn’t bind herself to conversations around womanhood, touching on ‘epic themes around feminism, age positivity and climate catastrophe’. Rather, she speculates on an alternative story of strength in which matriarchal wisdom prevails over violence. The charmingly awkward stop-start video depicts the woman redirecting power from The Lernean Hydra to more productive means, building trust with and calming The Nemean Lion and coexisting peacefully with The Cretan Bull. She uses patience and empathy to solve problems that Hercules famously blundered through with violence. She draws dystopian parallels between myths and modern-day problems, in turn questioning our role in change. The animations are also sprinkled with text, disjointedly narrating the story in questions such as ‘do you roar, is your rage suppressed?’ and reminding us that ‘your power comes from within’.

Across her media, Talbot offers finely orchestrated concepts, which nudge gently into one another and will us to question truths about contemporary Western society. The show’s title work, The Age/L’Età, stands proudly in the centre of the room, the elderly woman in full form. Her skin is made from recycled fibres and appears like a muscular armour, her long silver hair frames dark, sparkling eyes which reflect into the portal in front of her. Talbot refers to her sculptures as ‘3D drawings’, they project a dream-like foreign reality, and along with the overwhelming and indistinct sound played throughout the room, the show is disordered, which allows exploration between the works and lets you jump in at any point to piece it all together. 

Overarchingly, ‘The Age/L’Età' is a reminder to reflect. Here, we can ponder Talbot’s fabricated universe, question our internal compass, find solace in resolution and consider ‘how will you survive in this climate?’

Information

Until 4 September 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery, whitechapelgallery.org

‘The Age/L’Età’, Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Emma Talbot, Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, 23 October 2022 – 19 February 2023

It began with a painting: a woman sits on a chair, legs crossed, caught in profile. Two others sit at her feet, one staring outwards, holding the viewer’s eye. ‘I stopped in my tracks when I came across it,’ says Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths of the work, which is by midcentury Portuguese artist Nikias Skapinakis.

Yesterday evening (28 June 2022), Griffiths returned to the place of discovery: the Calouste Gulbenkian Collection in Lisbon, Portugal, hosting his Resort 2023 collection amid the gardens of the foundation’s modernist complex. Further research had revealed the subjects of the portrait: pianist Maria João Pires, novelist Fernanda Botelho and, most striking to the designer, Natália Correia, an author, intellectual and activist born in the Azores in 1923. 

‘You get an immediate sense of this woman’s stature,’ says Griffiths of Correia’s depiction. ‘She’s gazing straight ahead as if she’s looking into the future, and in fact the picture was painted in 1974, the year that the Carnation Revolution brought about the demise of the military government that Correia constantly campaigned against. There’s a sense of calm destiny and confidence that made me want to know more. And the more I found out, the more I was inspired. I was looking for a strong central figure around which to build the collection’s narrative – that just had to be Natália.’

Correia is the latest to be elevated into what Griffiths calls the ‘Max Mara pantheon of strong women’, spanning culture, politics and celebrity; last season (A/W 2022), it was Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a multidisciplinary artist closely associated with the Dada movement. Correia, Griffiths said, deserved her place for ‘her own brand of feminism with its emphasis on erotic liberalism [which allowed] her to express her sensuality. I think we’re all looking to live our lives in a way which satisfies the various facets of our personalities – the creative, intellectual and sensual. Here’s a woman who managed to achieve it, and here’s a collection that celebrates that achievement.’

An intellectual sensuality has long been embedded in Griffiths’ collections for the house, here also playing into the choice of location: the gardens of the Calouste Gulbenkian Collection, where lush vegetation and pools of water meet clean concrete lines and stepping stones (built in the 1960s, they are based on a project by landscape architects António Viana Barreto and Gonçalo Ribeiro). ‘It’s the best setting I can imagine for this collection,’ he says. ‘We will be showing just before the sun sets; I’m hoping we will capture the contented, sensual mood that you get at the end of a sun-baked day.’

Of the collection, Griffiths describes a ‘quasi-minimalist sense of rigour, a collection that’s both sexy and serious’. Drawing particular inspiration from Correia’s passionate defence of sexual freedom – epitomised best in Antologia da Poesia Portuguesa Erótica e Satírica, her anthology of erotic poetry that was seized by authorities for its content – Griffiths sought a ‘voluptuous, curvier silhouette’, expressed in or sheath dresses and pencil skirts, while cropped tops (revealing a slice of midriff beneath) and ‘a new look at the [off-the-shoulder] décolleté’ also captured a similar mood.

Elsewhere, Griffiths looked towards traditional Portuguese dress; notably, the figure of Amália Rodrigues, the ‘queen of Fado’ (a traditional form of music from the country that originated from Lisbon) and an attendee of parties at Correia’s home and bar, Bar Botequim. Looking at photographs of the artist on stage, the designer noticed a ‘passion for plissé’, here translated in pleated waistbands or slips that emerged from the hem of pencil skirts. A nod to the country’s craft traditions also ran throughout, referenced in vivid folk-inspired prints and a series of handkerchiefs, hand-embroidered by Portuguese craftspeople and stitched onto T-shirts (called ‘handkerchiefs of love’, they are traditionally gifted to prospective romantic partners). ‘It all adds up to a new feminine kind of modernity with a pinch of folk culture,’ says Griffiths. 

‘I didn’t know Portugal well before I started this project; it’s been a journey of discovery for me, but naturally I have followed avenues where there has been a personal resonance,’ he says of the location, which marks the final stop in a season of Cruise shows that has transported attendees around the world, from San Diego to Monaco. ‘I always look for a destination where not everyone has been, but everyone has ideas about. When you say Lisbon, an image of the city springs to mind, a city of romance, charm, and character, where new and old blend seamlessly’ – a spirit reflected in the era-spanning collection itself.

INFORMATION

maxmara.com

A common style trick over the last 12 months has been to throw a tailored blazer over a tracksuit for a impromptu Zoom meeting, or to pop a smart layer over loungewear when nipping outside for essentials. Now that there's more opportunity to embrace elegant dressing codes, an elevating women's jacket should be the top item on your shopping list. Here we present the brands for bolstering your smarter spring mood, whether you're easing back into office life or simply sitting en plein air.

Lanvin: Hit the right buttons

Lockdown has made us more aware of life's smaller details. Lanvin's elegant double-breasted jacket accentuates the body with eye-catching mother-and-daughter motif buttons.

Paul Smith: Hot under the collar

Months at home put you in a more relaxed state of mind? Layer up in a sleek textured shirt, as demonstrated by Paul Smith's luxurious leather design, which also features a handy front pocket.

Max Mara: Coffee-break colours

The chicest way to celebrate your first coffee outdoors? Complement your cappuccino with your clothing, courtesy of Max Mara's smart, organically hued blazer. This silhouettes scores office-worthy style points, even if you're only sitting in the park.

Petar Petrov: In good sport

If you're unsure you'll ever separate yourself from sports-inspired comfort, Petar Petrov has the ease-fuelled answer. The Viennese brand's sleeveless leather anorak speaks of luxurious yet laid-back style.

Paco Rabanne: All dressed up

Glam has been perilously low on our style radar. Keen to inject some going-out inspired chic into your wardrobe? We suggest sporting Paco Rabanne's double-breasted coat as a mini dress.

Louis Vuitton: Buckle up

Bring some belted bite to your blazer with Louis Vuitton's waist-cinching buckled jacket. This silhouette has a futuristic, deconstructed silhouette, a fitting way to embrace today's new world.

Chanel: Stay in touch

Jacket, £1,950; shirt, £1,450; trousers, £950, all by Fendi. Photography: Alexandre Guirkinger. Fashion: Benoit Martinego. Originally featured in the May 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*265)

With social distancing limiting our sense of touch, tactile fabrications take on a new importance. Chanel's bouclé jacket revels in the maison's signature fabric, accentuated with beaded embellishments.

Boss: The palette cleanser

Spring calls for palette-cleansing colours. Draw attention in optic white silhouettes, like Boss' minimalist duster coat. The simplest way to avoid grass stains? Carry a picnic blanket when embarking on a sit-down sortie.

Gucci: An exotic escape

If an exotic escape feels like something of a pipe dream, let tropical prints and motifs take your fancy instead. For spring, Gucci's casual button-up jacket shows an affnity for the eye-catching pattern of snake skin.

Hermès: Make it minimal

Look to Hermès for an incredibly elevated take on 1990s minimalism. Sometimes pared-back silhouettes have the most power, as demonstrated by this zip-up leather coat, which is conceived in the finest of fabrications.

Peter Do: Utilitarian attention

For the more adventurous of dressers, consider the apron your new take on outerwear. Peter Do's version is sumptuous in its tactile finish, and should be worn to reveal a flash of flesh.

Bottega Veneta: Craft flair

A hand-crafted finish will draw attention, whether you're sitting outside on a terrace or sauntering through a city street. Bottega Veneta's denim jacket features a delicately crocheted hooded detail, fusing sportswear with sophistication. 

INFORMATION

A version of this article first appeared in the April 2021 issue of Wallpaper* (W*264) – available to download here

It's fitting that the group term for butterflies is ‘kaleidoscope', because Weekend Max Mara's S/S 2021 collection is emblazoned with prismatic prints of fluttering wings.

For spring, the Italian brand has teamed up with renowned American illustrator and artist Donald Robertson, on a breezy womenswear collection of ‘Flutterfly' motif pieces, which are the result of instinctive inspiration. ‘Imagine my ear is a door into my brain. The Weekend Max Mara designers crawled up and into my head – they seemed to understand exactly what I wanted to create from the start,' Robertson explains.

‘Social media requires speedy content and oil painting takes way too long to dry'

Robertson is famed for his expressive, uplifting and playful illustrations, which revel in a spontaneous sense of form and colour. The artist has collaborated with a host of brands and retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Smashbox. Celebrating fast-paced creativity, he often uses graphic gaffer tape in his Instagram-emblazoned designs, which is used recreate the heart-shaped Comme des Garçons PLAY logo or form the bodies of stylish stick figures. ‘Social media requires speedy content and oil painting takes way too long to dry. Tape is instantaneous and super photogenic,' he explains.

The material played a central role in Robertson's designs for Weekend Max Mara which see rainbow stripes and bold butterfies formed from strips and scissored shapes of gaffer tape. It also informs the construction of silhouettes, including a summer dress with geometric straps and criss-cross waistbands. ‘I go between figurative fashion stuff and super graphic stripes. That is where the gaffer tape comes into play,' Robertson says. ‘The butterflies were an experiment to make something delicate out of hard edge tape.'

While Robertson's designs have a naturalistic nod, the artist has revelled in the indoors solitude of the last 12 months. ‘I have waited my entire life to be told to go to my room and not come out,' he enthuses. ‘I don’t want to leave my studio. I love it in here. I am a complete creative criminal! I borrow ideas from everyone, my kids, other artists, dead artists, that elephant on YouTube that paints... everything inspires me. I am just waiting for the police to kick down my studio door!'

INFORMATION

maxmara.com

The work of Emma Talbot is part art, part poetry. Much of her ideas are autobiographical, yet also confront some of society’s most pertinent structural issues, from gender inequality to environmental collapse. Her work eschews pessimism and cynicism in favour of hope, a timely sentiment as spring emerges and the world begins to recalibrate in response to one of the bleakest periods in recorded history. 

Coinciding with International Women’s Day earlier this month, Talbot became the latest Circa artist, staging work on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights screen following projects by the likes of Patti Smith and Ai Weiwei.

For the commission, Talbot created four animated films in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, Collezione Maramotti and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Titled Four Visions for a Hopeful Future, the films follow a woman at the gateway between an old and new world. Mirroring the year, the screens light up with Talbot’s work at 20:21 each evening, disrupting the usual advertising on a rolling four-night schedule throughout March. ‘I really wanted to make some work that spoke of our times, to narrate the extraordinary zeitgeist,’ she tells Wallpaper*. ‘In lockdown, I’d been struck by the way a lot of contemporary thinkers (e.g. Valarie Kaur, Rebecca Solnit, Isabelle Stengers, Starhawk) were articulating the need to take time to reconfigure the ways we act, to build a more equal, considerate, sustainable, responsible, caring future.’ 

Talbot’s influences for the piece are wide-ranging – from Arundhati Roy’s article, The Pandemic is a Portal to the work of medieval visionary Hildegard von Bingen. Her work is anchored in the here and now, observing the bleakness of recent times, while also harnessing the transformative and cathartic power of springtime. The films, comprising hand-drawn landscapes of dreamlike natural beauty, rich with floral and bodily forms. ‘The four animations come at the subject from different perspectives – they ask various questions; what a city is, how have power structures have been constructed, how powerful can communities be, what voices get heard, how can we connect with nature,’ says Talbot, who taught herself how to translate her drawings into animation during the first lockdown.

Last year, Talbot became the recipient of the eighth Mara Art Prize for Women, a biannual award established in 2005 in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. As the sole visual art prize for women in the UK, it aims to promote and nurture female artists who are yet to receive a major solo exhibition. Talbot’s winning proposal focused on the perceived shame attached to female ageing, a feminist response to Gustav Klimt’s painting The Three Ages of Woman (1905). Klimt’s work depicts a baby, a young woman and a nude elderly woman seemingly stooped in shame. ‘I was fascinated by the painting on a personal level, thinking about the ways ageing is considered negatively, but I also had a sense there was more to the subject,’ Talbot explains. 

In response, Talbot will turn the concept on its head, reframing the woman as someone with agency. ‘The elderly woman will be a future survivor, who learns permaculture and sustainable living, relearning ancient practices and she will go back to the past and reconfigure the roots of power. To do this, she will perform the twelve trials of Hercules. Instead of resolving the tasks by killing, capture, theft and trickery, as Hercules did, I imagine the wise elderly woman would use more considered, benevolent means, such as commensalism and mutualism.’ 

When travel restrictions permit, Talbot will embark on a six-month residency organised by Collezione Maramotti. On her trip, she plans to research Etruscan pottery depicting the Herculean myths in Rome, visit permaculture sites and the ruins of the Temple of Hercules in Sicily, and explore the history of hand-painted silk in Italian fashion houses and learn intarsia knitting in Reggio Emilia. This will result in a new body of work to be shown first at Whitechapel Gallery and then at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy in 2022.

INFORMATION

Four Visions for a Hopeful Future will be on view in Piccadilly Circus, London until 31 March, 2021. circa.art

emmatalbot.org.uk

maxmara.com

collezionemaramotti.org

whitechapelgallery.org

As fashion journalists spend another season taking in fashion shows remotely, through a screen, there’s been much chatter behind the scenes regarding how they might emerge style-wise next season, when there’s a chance of shows being staged with a live audience. There’s the suggestion of a new Roaring Twenties, which will see people around the world glammed up as they emerge from lockdown, wearing bold outfits and eschewing loungewear and flat shoes for evening looks and stilettos. There’s also the parallel concept that after a year of yearning only for cosy silhouettes, we may simply never want to dress up again.

As in New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week before it, Milan's designers mused on these concepts for autumn, creating collections and tying together 2021 trends that swung between romp and relaxation, extravagance and ease. Authenticity was also integral to a host of Italian brands, conscious that when consumer attitudes shift towards spending once more, people will be keen to buy from brands with long-lasting aesthetics. 

This concept was paramount to Kim Jones, who presented his heritage-nodding debut women’s collection for Fendi, following his first, Bloomsbury Group-themed haute couture collection for the Roman house earlier in February. Jones looked to the archival designs of Karl Lagerfeld, who was creative director of the house for 54 years, and the wardrobes of the five Fendi sisters, with a collection brimming with elegant, ladylike and luxurious silhouettes. Think cappuccino, khaki and midnight-tone slip dresses, tuxedo jackets, tailored coats and body-hugging knits, in luxurious fabrics including marbled silk, double cashmere and organza, and adorned with details of the past, such as Lagerfeld’s ‘Karligraphy’ monogram and the embossed stitching of the brand’s ‘Sellaria’ bags. The show’s accompanying set, an evolution of its haute couture set-up, also alluded to the past, featuring F-shape transparent vitrines, with crumbling columns resembling Roman artefacts inside.

Max Mara’s signature camel tones have reinforced its reputation for timeless, trend-subverting dressing, a concept that resonates strongly today. For the brand's 70th anniversary collection, creative director Ian Griffiths celebrated the classic house tones with an offering of elegant yet easy Italinate pieces, such as caramel teddy bear-fur coats, outdoorsy quilted gilets, loose knits and pleated skirts. Griffiths also applauded the ascendant nature of the women that wear his clothes (back in 1951, in contrast, the brand's founder intended them for ‘the wives of the local notaries and doctors'). In a playful twist, the collection referenced the stylings of the British aristocracy off duty in the British countryside, featuring flat caps, foulard headscarves and oversized retro sunglasses.

Brunello Cucinelli also celebrated natural tones, broadcasting his brand's show live from its home village Solomeo. The offering luxuriated in creams, beiges and browns, featuring relaxed yet sumptuous silhouttes, including 1980s-inspired suiting, textural knitwear and robe coats.

Post-pandemic, as people consider their fashion choices, many will desire eye-catching silhouettes that still retain the ease of lockdown dressing and the luxurious nature of its fabrics. For A/W 2021 Loro Piana considered this requirement, with an offering that catered to work, leisure and beyond. Think shearling coats, uniform-centric knitted two-pieces, sharp overcoats and double-layer parkas in a spectrum of rich hues, from bottle green to chocolate, merlot to mustard.

This sense of comfort was also reflected by Tod's Walter Chiapponi, who served up a collection of soft, bourgeois-meets-sportswear shapes, including frilled puffer jackets, jumbo-corduroy trousers, padded dresses and pleated skirts. Similarly, Missoni drew on movement and the comfort of its knitwear heritage, creating sparkling-stripe pleated dresses and chevron-stripe knitted flares and cardigans – for looking and feeling good in.

For Prada's Milan Fashion Week menswear show back in January, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons mused on the restrictions encountered during the Covid-19 era, as well as the liberation from conventional routine that lockdowns have also brought. The brand's women's show evolved this concept with an offering that considered polar opposites, and ‘the point between simplicity and complexity, elegance and practicality, limitation and release'. In the same OMA-conceived show set (myriad graphic interconnected rooms lined with tactile fake fur) models sported pieces that alluded to Simons’ and Miuccia's design canon, like oversized nylon MA-1 bomber jackets with retro jacquard linings, faux fur and sequin wraps clutched around the shoulders. Standard dressing codes were subverted, with tailored peacoats imagined in paint-box hues, body-hugging evening gowns replaced with knitted all-in-ones and conversative tailored skirt suits spliced to reveal the body. There was an exuberance and ostentation to the collection, which shimmered with paillettes among shaggy faux fur and bold upholstery prints.

Where Prada subverted and played with the parameters of dressing up, so No 21's Alessandro Dell'Acqua celebrated them in all their going-out glory. Dell'Acqua is clearly ready to shake off his sweatpants and, for A/W 2021, created a collection that swapped bedroom comforts for something a touch more boudoir. For women, there were fringed dresses that revealed lace knickers, leopard-print pencil skirts and stomach-baring sweaters. Dell’Acqua brought together ultra-mini 1960s skirt lengths, shrunken peacoats and platform shoes, and paired them with grungey separates, like plaid shirts that were slung on top of revealing bodysuits.

At MSGM, Massimo Giorgetti also made a case for going-out gear, with a collection that celebrated the underground nightlife of Milan, featuring latex pencil skirts and puffer jackets, rib-knit velour dresses, paint-cracked denim and holographic roll-necks, all in vibrant tones. Dolce & Gabbana, too, was in the mood for club-kid fashion. While the brand's A/W 2021 menswear collection nodded to the exuberant e-boy fashion made famous on TikTok, the women's kaleidoscopic offering addressed the e-girl, and abounded in 1990s raver silhouettes, with graffiti-splattered puffer jackets, foil jeans and shaggy leopard-print knitwear. The collection also alluded to the body-cinching shapes that Dolce & Gabbana was renowned for in that decade, with ruched dresses, bodysuits and form-flattering, double-breasted jackets.

Across fashion cities, designers have mused on the new requirement to create clothing to be viewed digitally, through a screen, rather than in person. At Marni, Francesco Risso's imaginative runway shows – resembling other-worldly greenhouses or forestscapes formed from paper – are a way of welcoming his fans into his art-inflected, ecclectic world. For A/W 2021, he used Instagram to invite show watchers to three Zoom events, a breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Here, he presented clothing that was a hyperbolic, larger-than-life interpretation of designing for digital, with oversized puffer jackets swathed in shaggy fake fur, crochet two-pieces and tie-dye knitwear. Ruffles, ruching and multicoloured prints, along with bags blown up to XL proportions, appeared larger than life no matter how small the computer screen. 

In 2020, Giorgio Armani was the first designer to cancel his fashion show on the final morning of Milan Fashion Week, due to the increasing threat level of Covid-19. As regions around Milan began to close their borders, journalists travelling home or straight on to Paris began questioning their safety and considering the reality of a European lockdown. On Giorgio Armani’s A/W 2021 catwalk, there was a fluid relaxation to the silhouettes. The collection includes relaxed suiting in velvet and explosive floral jacquards and gowns in wispy transparent fabrics. There was an optimism in the bold blue and turquoise hues that accented the offering, which riffed on powerful 1980s tones. 

The 1980s was a decade that also inspired Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli. He referred to his decision to stage his A/W 2021 show in the empty auditorium of the historic Piccolo Teatro di Milano, which has been shuttered since the pandemic hit, as ‘punk’. This attitude was echoed across a solemn, largely monochromatic collection that featured ultra-short ‘scissored’ skirt lengths, shirting and slick tuxedo suiting. Elsewhere, DIY and punk elements came in spliced knitwear, slashed into Argyle shapes or cut out into floral motifs; stompy biker boots festooned with rose petals; and boxy, studded accessories. The austere nature of the collection was emphasised by models walking to the sounds of the Milanese symphony orchestra. 

Salvatore Ferragamo is a label familiar with operating during hardship. Its founder famously innovated with materials due to resource restrictions during and after the Second World War, incorporating tree bark, hemp and fish skin into his shoe designs. For A/W 2021, creative director Paul Andrew was focused on shapes and fabrics for a new world, presenting Future Positive, a science fiction-inspired film, with ultra-modern menswear and womenswear silhouettes. Andrew looked to a range of cinematic references during the collection's development, including Gattaca, Until The End Of The World, and The Matrix. Suiting was deconsctructed and bold, outerwear imagined in transparent plastics, metallics and leathers, and footwear had a motocross-meets-astronaut feel. Andrew innovated with materials across the collection, which included accessories made from upcycled pre-consumer offcuts and recycled pre- and post-consumer wool and cashmere, a dress made from recycled polyester, and footwear soles formed using pre-consumer TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) and metal-free leather tanned with plant-based materials.

Sportmax also operated with futuristic intent, looking at inspirational female figures across history, spanning statues of mythological figures and Annie Lennox, to create a forward-thinking fashion statement. The brand's collection featured models striding in parachute-volume taffeta gowns, The Matrix-worthy leathers and sparkling silver dresses, paired with shield-like sunglasses and thick soled wader-centric boots. 

Ferragamo dedicated its collection ‘to all those who must walk' – citing its founder – ‘at a time when we must be united in our determination to reimagine, rebuild, progress’, it summed up the impetus behind Milan Fashion Week A/W 2021 as a whole.

Mood board: The sea has proved inspiration for designers for A/W 2020. Take Simone Rocha’s collection, inspired by the 1904 play, Riders to the Sea by John Millington Synge, which had a shipwreck sensibility, featuring rope like Aran knits, trailing pearls and fishing net inspired bags. Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths imagined his intelligent, executive women — who favour sharp pinstripe tailoring and the brand’s classic camel coat — dreaming of an Arctic open sea adventure, and her accompanying dreamt up outfits had a whimsical, nautical nod. This meant an offering in deep ocean blue, browns and greys that featured frothy ruffles, nautical stripes and technical waterproof nylons, from frilled shirting to puff sleeve divers coats (padded with luxurious cashmere fleece), tactile teddy bear fur jackets to lean velvet dresses with beaded chain details.

Best in show: Leg of mutton sleeve shirting nodded to one of autumn’s most enduring constructions, and had a bold eighties attitude. A sweeping navy and camel stripe coat in teddy bear fur would take any Max Mara woman straight from the office to portside-embarkation and a pinstripe jersey suit with tasseled toggles would ensure she sets sail in crease free tailoring.

Finishing touches: Nautical rope belts were used to cinch the waists of poufy sleeve overcoats and tied around high waisted tailored trousers, while an array of beanie hats had a sailor-chic all-aboard sensibility.

A hazy tie-dye pattern resembling a sun-scorched desert, schoolgirl-centric checks in grayscale tones, lush assemblages of tropical fronds…prints define the sartorial sway of the fashion season. So much so, that for our March 2020 Style Special issue (W*252), we took a magnifying lens to the most magnificent womenswear motifs of S/S 2020, enlisting Paris-based set stylist Marie-Noëlle Perriau to fold our favoured fabrics into origami-centric shapes, photographed by Patricia Schwoerer.

It’s not the first time we’ve enlisted Schwoerer, who has shot advertising campaigns for Issey Miyake, Prada and Dior. She also lensed the overhauled interiors of Celine’s rue de Grenelle boutique in Paris, for our June 2019 issue (W*243).

Perriau has collaborated with brands including Delvaux, Bulgari, Prada and Comme des Garçons and defines her set styling approach as an ‘effortless intervention,’ composed of ‘natural gestures’. It’s a sublime approach for letting prints including MSGM’s romantic rose motifs, Chanel’s panoramic sketch of Paris’ rooftops and Celine’s vintage upholstery prints shine. For our pattern-focused special, Perriau worked to ‘find the right balance’ between Schwoerer’s striking close up photography and Marianne Kakko – Wallpaper’s Assistant Market Editor’s – styling motifs. ‘You had to navigate between these two elements,’ she adds.

For 2020, Perriau is working on a wide range of brand-focused and personal projects. Of particular importance is an experimental art installation titled ‘cellule d’expérimentation esthétique’, installed in healthcare facilities, which will engage one visitor at a time inside a small room, and explore their interaction with plastic forms. Just like the magnifying lens we took to S/S 2020’s standout prints, we’ll be sure to zoom in Perriau’s next project too.

INFORMATION

marie-noelle-perriau-deco.com
patriciaschwoerer.com

In December 2016, the multimedia Chinese artist Liu Wei, renowned for his intricate cityscapes formed from piles of school books, created a metropolis-inspired runway set for Max Mara’s Pre Fall 2017 show, held inside the domed foyer of the Shanghai Exhibition Center. His collaboration was not simply a catwalk accompaniment, as the Italian label’s longtime creative director Ian Griffiths, also enlisted Wei to create a capsule collection imagined in the house’s neural hues.

Inside Wei’s imagined metropolis, formed from mirrored, copper and gold columns and naturalistic orbs (installations that evoked Wei’s 2015 ‘Colors’ exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing), models walked wearing elegant shift dresses, sweeping cardigans and bomber jackets. These designs were imagined in a spectrum of browns and beiges and layered with aerial sketches of a fantasy city, or laser-cut with abstract topographical shapes. ‘[Liu Wei and I] produced something that has given me, as a designer, a new direction that I can incorporate now as part of the Max Mara identity,’ Griffiths told Vogue of the collaboration. Just like the hydraulic lifts which raised the roof of Wei’s city-centric catwalk installation, so the Chinese-Italian partnership bought new heights to the camel coat specialist’s DNA.

INFORMATION

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The most fruitful creative alliances are, ostensibly, those which straddle several different disciplines at once. Evidence for which: Max Mara’s new collaboration with CoopDPS – the title shared by painter Nathalie Du Pasquier and designer George Sowden – bridges art, fashion and industrial design, to create a limited-edition pair of bright, geometric sunglasses. What better formula for enthusiasm, energy and innovation? 

That CoopDPS’ legacy is so deeply rooted in Milan, where the artist and the designer first met at a party in 1979 and have lived together ever since, makes it a natural fit for the Italian house. They began developing ideas and drawings together immediately, and two years later, in September 1981, the very first Memphis exhibition took place during Salone del Mobile. With it, the duo – partners in life, as well as in work – became founding members of a movement which was to redefine postmodern design and architecture.

Du Pasquier and Sowden continued to work together through Memphis for seven years before deciding to refocus on their painting and industrial design practices respectively. But in 2014, they relaunched their collaboration under the new title, CoopDPS. ‘Interestingly and importantly, work done in collaboration takes on a quality which is different to projects developed individually,' says Sowden.

Circles and squares collide in the resulting style for Max Mara, named Neoprism and inspired by the two shapes which form the Prism logo. The geometric style is available in two bold colourways – orange, and black – and nods to the creative duo’s legacy, while also drawing on the combination of function and elegance at the core of the brand’s identity. ‘The prism being a combination of a circle and a square is quite a "modernist" idea,' Du Pasquier explains. ‘It takes us back to the time women started participating in the working life, it takes us back to the origin of Max Mara.'

The house’s eyewear collections have long been fertile ground for artist collaborations; in recent seasons, it has turned to graphic artist Shantell Martin and muralist Maya Hayuk, among others, to reimagine its Prism style. ‘Both art and fashion are representing the time in which they are made,' Du Pasquier concludes. In its collaboration with CoopDPS, Max Mara’s new styles reflect a contemporary society which happily looks back, in order to look forwards. 

INFORMATION

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Mood board: Feminist cinema fans breathed a sigh of relief, when, in April it was announced that Fleabag and Killing Eve scriptwriting star Phoebe Waller Bridge was consulting on the upcoming James Bond film. For Bond 25 next spring, it’s reported that Lashana Lynch will take the role of a female 007 for the very first time. Spy reboots are all the rage for 2019 too. Just look to the upcoming release of the new Charlie’s Angels. 



For S/S 2020, Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths imagined the wardrobe for the new 007, from the suiting shapes worn when striding through the whispering corridors of Whitehall to downtime get ups on paradisal shores, arrived at by private jet. The sartorial tricks up her secret agent sleeve? For stunt-worthy missions, three-piece short suits sported with ties, army caps and aviators – in executive greys or sugary shades, or nature-blending jumpsuits with gadget-awaiting utility pockets. For an office debrief, slouchy 1970s culottes and silk blazers in a smattering of polka dots, and for glamorous undercover events on private islands, frilled silk gowns in delicate paisley print or bias cut dresses with sultry harness backs. Bond has never looked so stylish.

Team work: Last season, Griffiths bought empowering pizzazz to his A/W 2019 runway, with models strutting boldly in groups of twos and threes. The same communal strut followed for spring, with Candice Swanepoel, Gigi Hadid, and Doutzen Kroes opening the show together, sporting those executive short-suit looks. At the show’s finale, Max Mara’s secret agent set strode together in an empowering army, ready for their next mission.

Best in show: The 007 looks rendered in beiges, greys and Prince-de-Galles fabrics showed a subtle, utilitarian wearability, suitable for any working woman.

Max Mara’s late founder Achille Maramotti was born and bred in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia, best known for being the progenitive city of the famed Reggio Emilia approach to educational philosophy. Now, growing this local legacy in forward-thinking discussion, the Collezione Maramotti is one of the most important – and intelligent – contemporary art collections in the country.

The building, first built as a Max Mara factory in 1957 by the architecture firm of Antonio Pastorini and Eugenio Salvarani, was converted into a gallery between 2003 and 2007 by English architect Andrew Hapgood. The building, and its contents, are kept under the close watch by its protective family owners, spearheaded by Luigi Maramotti, Achille's son and the chairman of Max Mara. Though free to enter (at the wishes of Achille), the Collezione is reserved for appointment-only guests (of up to 25 people at a time) and no children under 11. ‘Visitors must take their time and spend a couple of hours to see it,' explains the Collezione's senior coordinator Sara Piccinini. ‘That’s what we request: to enter into a personal relationship with the works’.

We first visited back in 2009 for the March fashion special of Wallpaper* (W*120). ‘The gallery may reveal occasional glimpses of its founder's idiosyncratic character,’ we wrote at the time, ‘but ultimately it conceals as much as it reveals’. In places, evidence of its former life as a factory has been retained; in the floors, stained by the memory of machinery long-removed, and in the Memphis-style cafeteria, with its gloriously vibrant orange booths and checkered tables. Elsewhere, in the sweeping reception hall opened up by Hapgood, and the architectural, slatted windows that tesselate across the facade, this is a polished, world-class art gallery.

Over the last few years, the collection seems to be openings itself up, and revealing precious more about its ethos and environments. Last year, for example, the Collezione Maramotti played host to its first Max Mara fashion show (the Resort 2019 collection), where the visceral work of Lutz & Guggisberg’s debut Italian exhibition provided textural counterpoint to the double-faced cashmere, gauzy silk organza of the collection.

Indeed, art and fashion continually cohabit within the Max Mara identity. ‘From the very start, Achille Maramotti thought that there may be a fruitful interchange between artistic creativity and industrial design: some of the art pieces were on display in the premises of Max Mara when the company was here, to positively inspire designers and creative collaborators,’ Piccinini continues. ‘But at the same time he had clearly in mind the intrinsic differences between these two languages: the artistic gesture and artworks are an end in themselves, they don’t need any reason, while fashion, as exclusive as it may be, only exists because a user exists, someone who will wear it.’

A good example: since 2005, the brand has sponsored the biannual Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with London's Whitechapel Gallery. In 2016, a fascinating show by artist Emma Hart drew upon the academic legacy of Reggio Emilia. She spent six months in the town, and travelling Italy, immersing herself in its culture, theory, and academia.

Likewise, the collection is proudly Italian, and has particular strength in Italy's colourful postwar optimism; though it also presents an elegant chronology of key moments in both European and American contemporary art. The permanent collection features around 200 works from the late 1940s onwards, belonging to some of the most significant artistic trends of the second half of the 20th century: art informel, arte povera, German and American neoexpressionism, New Geometry, alongside more recent experimentations from the 1990s. Continuing to chart and represent emerging movements, the new exhibition ‘Rehang’ emphasises the family's restless fascination with the new, with a selection of works created by today’s bleeding-edge.

In the exhibition, the work of ten artists that exhibited at the Collezione since it opened to the public in 2007 have been rehung in new contexts. Solo shows from Enoc Perez, Gert & Uwe Tobias, Jacob Kassay, Krištof Kintera, Jules de Balincourt, Alessandro Pessoli, Evgeny Antufiev, Thomas Scheibitz, Chantal Joffe and Alessandra Ariatti, pick up notes central to the collection, particularly its keen eye for the evolution of painting.

Joffe's paintings are equal parts seductive and arresting. In the four large format paintings on display, the British artist represents a large single figure, her then-teenager niece Moll, an Alice in Wonderland-esque figure, with enigmatic qualities. Through broad brushstrokes and blurred details of the face and dresses, the girl looks immersed in a dense, pictorial flow.

Elsewhere, Jacob Kassay's silvery painted sheets (pictured above) act as an antidote to the almost overwhelming range of work on show throughout the museum. His room, filled with nine mirror-like works, is cast in a moonlit atmosphere; each individual painting contributing to a kind of peaceful immersion.

Interestingly, the collection doesn't have a curator, as such, and never has. Instead, the artists themselves play a keen role in directing the hanging of the works, and the flow of their exhibitions. All ten artists featured in Rehang attended the private view, indicating their level of engagement. The lack of curatorial input, too, reveals the extend that the Maramotti family contribute to exhibitions. They play a crucial role. ‘The Maramotti family enter into conversations with the artists and make decisions about the shows to present, as well as the artworks to purchase; taking care of the daily dialogue with artists, supporting them step by step and making projects happen,’ Piccinini says. ‘The dialogue and the continuous interaction between these roles is the core of our working practice.’

INFORMATION

‘Rehang’ continues until 28 July 2019. For more informarion, visit the Maramotti Collezione website

If you scroll through American interior designer Anthony Baratta’s Instagram profile, you’ll find it near impossible not to screenshot the neat and ocean-kissed home décor images that abound there. Think elegant wing chairs upholstered in sorbet deckchair stripes or layered with bold patchwork quilts, check or tartan wallpaper, fixtures festooned with nautical motifs, and rooms brought to life in vibrant shades of yellow, blue and red.

It transpires too, that Max Mara can’t get enough of Baratta’s interior design acumen. After spotting his Instagram profile online, the Italian label has enlisted him to collaborate on a breezy Weekend Max Mara capsule collection, inspired by the American summertime island retreat Nantucket.

‘What a funny world we live in today. Where people see everything that you do. It’s fascinating!’ enthuses Baratta of the social media serendipity. His 12-piece Weekend Max Mara collection is made up of his interior design calling cards, and features a lightweight duster coat emblazoned with Chinese porcelain vases, flared skirts with decoupage roses, gingham and rickrack detail sundresses and trousers tiled with Baratta’s own furniture designs.

‘I approached the collaboration in a similar way to a decorating job,’ Baratta explains. ‘In my work generally and in this collection, I work to convey a casual attitude, through the use of classic fabrics and colourations’. Whether you’re headed to Nantucket or somewhere closer to home, there are beachy yet bold, romantic yet rollicking pieces here for any summertime sojourn. 

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Anthony Baratta website and the Max Mara website

Mood board: In recent seasons, brands have been recalibrating their concept of sexuality. Post #MeToo, as the awareness of the male gaze has become heightened, male designers and women alike are questioning how we can be both provocative and powerful. Max Mara knows strong dressing inside out. Its 101801 wool and cashmere coat has been a powerful woman’s wardrobe mainstay since 1981. Glamour was a particular style note of this decade, and it’s a look Italian brand’s are well versed in. See Versace, Cavalli and Fendi. This was the main inspiration behind Max Mara’s A/W 2019 offering, with creative director Ian Griffiths referencing Linda Evangelista as an autumn icon. Silhouettes were strong, wider, boxier and leggier. Utilitarian and executive. Imagined in shades of black, caramel and beige, with pops of highly saturated colour and a swathe of sensual animal prints.

Best in show: Max Mara is the progenitor of beige, and it’s the tone dominating the A/W 2019 catwalk and the street style scene outside the shows. Griffith opened the show with three models strutting down the catwalk together, wearing wool blazers, mohair cardigans and knee high boots, in monochromatic cyan, cerulean and corn yellow. The proceeding beige oversized jackets, houndstooth coats and wide tweed trousers also made for punchy power dressing.

Scene setting: Max Mara switched up its usual show venue location, bringing guests to a vast subterranean atrium at Universita Luigi Bocconi. The stark space was built by Italian practice Grafton Architects in 2008. When the women attend this year's graduate, we know what they’ll want to be wearing.

Mood board: There’s mythology behind Italian label Max Mara. In the fashion canon, the status of its 101801 wool and cashmere coat is comparable to an epic poem. For S/S 2019, the brand’s creative director Ian Griffiths was preoccupied with classical mythological narratives, namely the tale of Amphitrite, the goddess of the sea, who after being forced to marry Poseidon, was relegated to consort by the 12 ruling Greek Gods. Like classical prose, Griffiths came well versed in underwater references, and Max Mara’s timeless shapes abounded with aquatic allure. There were trench coats and court shoes with tendril like ruffles, slippery asymmetric tops, and pencil skirts and glossy raincoats in shades of algae and seaweed green.

Finishing touches: Griffiths was considering unreliable narratives, and the dominance of male perspectives within classical literature. He namechecked Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which sees Homer’s Odyssey rewritten from the perspective of his wife Penelope, who waits two decades for the return of her husband. Longstanding creative director Griffiths is also faithful to the working wardrobe of the Max Mara brand. With the exception of some eye-catching sou’wester yellow ensembles, the collection’s predominant colour palette of beige, brown, grey and black will stand the test of time.

Best in show: An oversized Prince of Wales check suit, a chestnut overcoat and a black trench coat with a ruffle at the hem… all the things of wardrobe legend.

Last night, Max Mara held a fashion show for the first time at the Collezione Maramotti; fifteen years after its founder Achille Maramotti founded the Reggio Emilia-based art museum. The space, which houses over 200 paintings, sculptures and installations from 1954 to present day, by artists including including Francis Bacon, Basquiat and Giuseppe Penone, was originally designed by architects Antonio Pastorini and Eugenio Salvarini in 1957. Prior to this, the location was home to Max Mara’s original headquarters and factory.

The Italian brand has long maintained a commitment to the arts: take the Max Mara Art Prize for Women which was established in 2005, its continued collaboration with artists on limited-edition sunglasses, or its Seoul-based exhibition ‘Coats!’ which opened last November, and featured an archive-inspired commission by London-based Korean artist Yiyun Kang. 

For Max Mara’s Resort 2019 collection – imagined in a range of elemental colours, from midnight blue to zinc white, and featuring crinkly plissé dresses, androgynous tailoring and an innovative celebration of the brand’s signature sleek outerwear – creative director Ian Griffiths looked to early acquisitions housed in the Collezione Maramotti’s permanent collection. It is housed in 43 rooms, spanning the upper two floors of the museum. Manzoni’s china-clay on canvas ‘Achrome’ (1958) inspired folded textures, Twombly’s fascination with script was evoked in calligraphy knits, and Anselmo’s twisted iron and fustian sculpture 'Torsione' (1968), inspired coiled dress straps and shoes with intertwining ribbons.

The Collezione Maramotti also houses temporary exhibitions in its ground-floor spaces, which focus largely on 21st-century artworks. On view until Dec 2018 is ‘The Garden,’ by Swiss artist duo Lutz & Guggisberg. The exhibition, spanning five rooms, features photographs of sheds, tables, coloured plastic tubs, and rubber tubing piled up in abandon, and assemblages of found objects, like blocks of wood, bright plastic refuse and perspex boxes.

Just as Max Mara’s Resort 2019 show was the first held by the brand at the Collezione Maramotti, ‘The Garden’ marks Lutz & Guggisberg's debut Italian exhibition. Its pieces, made up of a near violent composition of throwaway abandoned items, provided a textural counterpoint to the double-faced cashmere, gauzy silk organza and camelhair wadded creations debuted in the rooms above.

Max Mara Resort 2019

'The Garden' by Lutz & Guggisberg, exhibition view at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, April 2018

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Max Mara website and the Collezione Maramotti website

What can a pair of sunglasses have to say about our relationship with crisis and anxiety? According to the artists behind Max Mara and the Safilo Group’s latest eyewear collaboration, quite a lot.

This year marks the third time the brand has teamed up with artists in this way. Last year, it collaborated with Shantell Martin on a pair of doodle-inspired black and white frames. For 2018, the painter Kerstin Brätsch and the United Brothers collective, founded by performance artist Ei Arakawa, and his brother Tomoo Arakawa, who runs tanning salons in Fukushima, collaborated on Lavaprisms, a limited-edition pair of sunglasses inspired by lava and the very ground underneath our feet.

The trio first began working together in 2011, after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. ‘Out of crisis in Fukushima, our original idea was to bring this idea of abstract anxiety, something invisible, such as nuclear energy, into our artistic work,’ explains Brätsch. ‘When we first collaborated, not only did we work with the artificial light of Tomoo’s tanning salon space, we also worked with the idea of incorporating sunlight into our artworks. I created glass works, for example, which we brought up Mount Fuji, the highest point in Japan. With that in the back of our mind, when Max Mara approached and [curator and former Venice Biennale director] Francesco Bonami suggested us – I thought our collaboration with United Brothers was the perfect fit. It deals with the same content: sunlight.’

The trio then visited volcanic sites around the world to get a closer look at lava, as a starting point for how the sunglasses might look and feel. They were struck by how the magma at the centre of the earth also connected these disparate locations across the globe. Brätsch explains the concept further. 'The idea [was] that the earth’s core is magma, and at different places in the earth, volcanoes exist. Then lava, even if it’s not erupting all the time, is connecting geographically different places in the earth.’

‘Our beginning point was the Fukushima disaster,’ says Ei Arakawa. ‘And that happened because of the earthquake, but also because of human fascination with this artificial energy, nuclear power. So somehow from there we thought, “Lava can be interesting, if it connects different contexts.” We wanted to incorporate that into the design of the glasses as well.’

The design, which launches today with a performative installation in the Galleria Giò Marconi at Salone del Mobile, walks the line between pure concept and actual wearability. There’s a nod to sci-fi and an almost retro idea of the future in the broad rimless lens and the goggle-like flat top that joins the lenses together. The influence from magma can be found along the temples, where soft rubber is coated with a natural stone coating not unlike the igneous rocks that surround those volcanic sites. The sunglasses, then, are essentially a mediation, as Ei Arakawa explains, between sunlight and eye. Overall, the result feels similar to the character of the ongoing collaboration between United Brothers and Brätsch: an intricate, considered process of bringing one kind of art into another context, shedding some light on form itself along the way.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Max Mara and Safilo websites

Anna Blessmann is not someone who finds seasonal trend pieces appealing. ‘In luxury today, fashion garments are so distinctive’ says the German artist. ‘You can immediately tell what label someone is wearing.’ It’s fortuitous then, that following a meeting between Blessmann, her partner in life and art Peter Saville, and Virgil Abloh, the Off-White founder (one ironically known for his love of branding) invited her to create a versatile clothing collection based on the concept of the everyday wardrobe. 

When growing up in Berlin, Blessmann had a penchant for repurposing old military jackets which she picked up in surplus army stores. A_Plan_Application’s debut, which features men’s and women’s styles, has a similar utility-focused flair. Imagined in monochromatic gradations of blue, from azure to indigo, pieces include cotton drill sweatshirts, straight leg denim, and a kimono style wrap dress. ‘Something you can keep on if you need to quickly leave the house or studio,’ Blessmann explains of the pieces designed to carry you from work to private view.

Splitting her time between London, Berlin, and Milan, Blessmann was searching for something not just travel-friendly and timeless, but for garments that cater to women’s figures. She modelled the collection on herself using a series of illustrative self-portraits. A_Plan_Application women’s silhouettes include a pair of workman’s overalls ‘modelled on milkman’s uniforms’ with a nipped in waist. Elsewhere, a hooded sweatshirt has powerful boxy shoulders and gently skims the hips. The pieces are also wonderfully practical. A sock boot is imagined in a comfortable mid-heel, a fetishistic boxy leather tote can hold a laptop, and a duvet coat has internal zip pockets

A_Plan_Application’s collection lacks any pattern, save for one Peter Saville-designed scarf print titled ‘Blue Blue Glitch’, which is a graphic amalgamation of the blue tones in Blessmann’s debut. Every season a new print will be added to each collection, the designs acting as wearable artworks which wrap around the body in an otherwise monochromatic wardrobe, designed for ease, durability, and a dash from an exhibition install to an evening out.

Mood board: In 2018, the boundaries between the boardroom and our out of office hours have become blurred. With the concepts of agile working, shared workspaces and the conservatism around executive dressing finally being challenged, what we wear to work on a day to day basis has become more fluid. Max Mara celebrated this notion in the brand’s A/W 2018 show — it’s a label synonymous with strong working women, and the brand’s camel coats have long been a staple of executive chic. With a runway show set to the screaming sounds of Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Creatures, this was a collection of elegant rebellion, featuring leopard print and leather, punky checks and fringing. There were World’s End worthy punky pencil skirts, layered with skinny trousers and dangling suspenders, sexy ruched dresses in clingy pinstripe and picnic blanket-like long plaid skirts. Wares for a working woman who’s fighting back.

Best in show: A Max Mara coat is the top of a lot of women’s wishlists, and here there were plenty for her shopping basket. The classic camel style came updated with swathes of rodeo fringing. There were also long tuxedo jackets, a teddy bear-fur coat in candyfloss pink or a soft leopard print trenchcoat, all essentials for earning styling points in the boardroom.

Finishing touches: Long evening gloves in leather had an elegant yet punk sensibility, while model’s messy up-do’s were cinched with twinkling ‘M’ motif diamante hair clips, their eyes lined with lashings of black kohl or covered with cabaret-style cat eye sunglasses. Meow!

To say that knitwear is in designer Carolyn Yim’s blood would only account for some of the passion she brings to her womenswear label, Ply-Knits. Yim’s family are veterans in the knitwear manufacturing business. In addition to helping clients like Givenchy, Max Mara, Christian Dior and Ralph Lauren manufacture knitwear from their bases in Hong Kong and China today, Yim’s grandmother (and founder of the family business) most notably made an embroidered bias-cut pointelle gown for John Galliano and Dior Couture in the late ’90s.

For Ply-Knits, Yim combines both these facets of her family background to create quiet yet impactful pieces. Her poetic collections fuse technical expertise with a classic artistry, not only on the stylish surface, but on the textile level as well. Primarily made from deadstock yarn because of its superior quality, each Ply-Knits piece is designed for comfort, durability and wearability – characteristics that are all supported by the type of knit used.

For example, the label’s signature knit pant is made from a finely tuned merino wool and cashmere mix that possesses just the right tension to offer support and a sleek fit, while simultaneously being water repellent (thanks to the natural properties of wool) and armed with a sensual feel that wearers will be able to enjoy day after day.

‘We really work with the materials and make our own textiles each and every time,’ explains Yim of her detail-oriented manufacturing process, which often begins with an assessment of the vintage yarns and experimenting with different knitting and spinning techniques to create the right fabric. ‘We believe in the integrity of the textiles to hold the structure of every garment.’

Although Yim’s in-depth knowledge of knitwear sits at the heart of the label, Ply-Knits’ understated but detail-oriented aesthetic is just as alluring. With standout pieces including a herringbone-ribbed, mandarin scholar’s mock-neck top in techno cotton and a correspondent’s jacket in a merino wool and viscose mix that retains its polish despite long hours of travelling, Ply-Knits’ offerings easily fit into any well-appointed wardrobe.

Filled with invisible details, such as elastic thread or reinforced waistbands to support regular wear, along with unexpected knit patterns that bestow minimalist styles with a seductive impact, Ply-Knits redefines everyday luxury with its holistic design approach.

‘I think each garment should function as architecture and it should make the human body look good,’ Yim reflects. ‘I design intuitively, but am also influenced by industrial design principles. Dieter Rams’ “Ten Principles of Good Design” is something I always come back to.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Ply-Knits website

Left, scarf, £350; roll-neck, £355; trousers, £595, all by Pringle of Scotland. Earrings (used throughout), £111 each, by Maria Black. Right, coat, £1,305; sleeveless coat, £1,080; trousers, £325, all by Max Mara. Shoes, £110, by Geox. Fashion: Lune Kuipers. Writer: Laura Hawkins

Fashion’s answer to weathering winter chills with style this season is the sleeveless over-layer. At Max Mara, creative director Ian Griffiths was keen to put a new spin on the house’s signature camel coat. ‘I wanted to find a way to wear two at once, without cooking yourself. This sleeveless style works perfectly over a neat mannish overcoat, or brilliantly by itself,’ he says of the Italian label’s camel hair and silk version. At Pringle of Scotland, womenswear design director Fran Stringer was inspired by féileadh-mór, the wrapping and draping element of Highland dress, creating an asymmetric cashmere ribbed scarf that twists itself around the body. Margaret Howell, meanwhile, was inspired by playground apparel. A dress by the British designer, worn open, takes its form from school pinafores. And Italian brand Brunello Cucinelli riffed on the concept of the female explorer, creating a soft, sleeveless trench coat, in a classic city shape, that is completely water repellent.

As originally featured in the December 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*225)

Left, gilet, £5,850; trousers, £930, both by Brunello Cucinelli. Jumper, £725, by Oyuna. Right, wrap dress (worn as gilet), £495; trousers, £395, both by Margaret Howell. Jumper, £295, by Oyuna

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Max Mara website, the Pringle of Scotland website, the Margaret Howell website and the Brunello Cucinelli website

Max Mara has commissioned London-based Korean artist Yiyun Kang for its latest exhibition, ‘Coats!’, being held in her home town of Seoul. Kang, known for her large-scale, site-specific digital mapping projections, has remixed imagery from the Max Mara archive into her installation, ‘Deep Surface’, which projects animated, vibrant patterns onto a specially-constructed 20m dome, designed by architects Migliore + Servetto and located in Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP). The dome arches atmospherically over a central space divided into seven different rooms, each representing a different era in Max Mara’s past, from the 1950s to the 2000s.

The starting point for the exhibition, the concept of the perfect coat, ‘combines the idea of surfaces, from the way the fabric folds, to the way it meets the skin, and sits on the body’, says Kang. The dome itself also reflects the sensations of being wrapped in a coat. ‘It’s an environment that really immerses the human body.’

'Max Mara is more than fashion,' says the label's creative director Ian Griffiths. 'Our coats have an renowned cultural value that merit artistic exploration.' The Italian fashion house was founded in 1951, with a principle of ‘making the ordinary extraordinary.’ This has meant taking everyday items and transforming them into garments that can completely revive daily experience.

'For me, a perfect example of this cultural conversation, was our collaboration in 1999 with Goldsmiths,' adds Griffiths. 'Together with artists Volker Eichelmann and Ruth Maclennan’s, our Designer Coat Swap invited people to make offers for a classic wool and cashmere 101801 coat. The results offered a fascinating dissection of the coats' complex layers of meaning and symbolic worth.'

As part of her research, Kang visited Max Mara's archive in Reggio Emilia in Italy. ‘I was mesmerised by the collection – it’s not only about the object, but about human history, about the Maramotti family, who founded the brand, and the history of Reggio Emilia, about men and women’s fashion in the past, present and future. It’s alive and breathing.’

Kang, who usually works alone, admits that exchanging ideas with a large team from the fields of fashion and architecture was a tricky transition but ultimately enlightening. ‘I remember Luigi Maramotti mentioning the idea of collective creativity – for him it was a real focus because not a single product can be completed without the help of many people.’ Griffiths points similarly to ‘a great synergy’ with Kang. ‘Her installation reflects the monumentality of the brand’s image, while showing that human element.’

What does Kang hope local visitors will take away from the experience? ‘As a South Korean, everyone is aware that we’re in a very politically tense situation. Through this amazing collaboration I hope to create some soothing moments for the people who live in Seoul during this time.’

A version of this article appeared in the December 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*225)

INFORMATION

’Coats!’ runs from 28 November - 12 December. For more information, visit the Dongdaemun Design Plaza website and the Max Mara website

ADDRESS

Dongdaemun Design Plaza
281 Eulji-ro 
Jung-gu
Seoul
South Korea

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Bulbous ceramic jugs hang upside down in the darkened Whitechapel Gallery. Sickly yellow light pours from each, casting cartoonish speech-bubble shaped shadows across the floor and walls.

‘They're not just jugs – they are decapitated heads, chopped open below the nose,’ says their creator, Emma Hart – the sixth recipient of the biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women. This pioneering award, in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti, offers a female artist the luxury of time, space and funding to create a significant body of work.

Hart used the six month, bespoke residency offered by the Prize to travel around Italy. Joined by her young daughter and partner, Hart immersed herself in Italian culture, meeting with artists in Milan, ceramicists in Faenza and researchers in Rome.

Installation view of 'Mamma Mia!,' by Emma Hart.

Issues surrounding family dynamics preoccupied Hart on her travels, reflected in the finished work, which she refers to as ‘a family of jugs’. Each is interconnected in literal ‘family ties’ by reems of red rope, curled around the ceiling beams.

Notably, Hart observed family therapy sessions while she was in Milan. Shadowing psychotherapist Matteo Selvini, she learnt about the Milan Systems Approach – a constructivist method of therapy, that emphasises the importance (and power) of non-verbal communication.

And so the skulls are mouthless; their colourful ‘brains’ fall out of their open, gaping necks, with no lips to speak of. Their stark black and white exterior walls conceal vibrant underbellys. ‘The interior patterns reflect my state of mind while I was in Italy, and the things that I saw,’ Hart explains. ‘One design features a green lady. She might be me, I don’t know. She’s trapped in a jealousy plant and she can’t get out. She’s constantly looking over her shoulder to see the person next to her.’

Another sees a tessellation of heads, each crying speech-bubble shaped tears. A third pattern features a tangle of arms with their thumbs up or down, depending on which way you look at it. It's the first time Hart has attempted illustration, and the drawings’ childlike nature belies their ulterior, difficult subject matter.

More grown-up, violent symbology comes courtesy of the swinging ‘cutlery’ ceiling fans, that skim dangerously close to the base of the skulls. Each rung features a knife, fork or spoon, flinging elongated shadows across the floor. The flying cutlery recalls tea-time traumas, and tantrums around the kitchen table.

It's uncomfortable viewing. Many gallery-goers skirt the edges of the installation, hesitant to walk into the jugs’ bright spotlights; or scared to be clonked by a swinging spoon. ‘Awkwardness has been an ongoing theme in my work,’ Hart says. ‘By using the light in this way, I was really trying to think of how the sculptures could affect a viewer. There’s trepidation when you’re forced to step into its projection. The light shouts on you, it spits on you – or it just talks to you. You choose.’

INFORMATION

’Emma Hart: Mamma Mia!’ is on view till 3 September. For more information, visit the Max Mara Fashion Group website, and the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

With its art and film prizes for women, Max Mara has long been a proponent of female recognition in the arts. In November 2015, the luxury Italian label extended this encouragement to the field of optical design, collaborating with the artist Maya Hayuk on a reinterpretation of its studded sunglasses designs in kaleidoscopic ‘stained-glass’ form. Now for S/S 2017, Max Mara has paired up with the British-born, New York-based visual artist Shantell Martin on a limited-edition sunglasses collection, the doodle-inspired artwork of each pair unique to the wearer.

‘The collection is super playful yet sophisticated,’ Martin explains of the curving cat-eye designs, created with the Italian optical company Safilo. They each feature digitally reproduced sections of an expansive black pen illustration she created on canvas for the collaboration. ‘The fact no two pairs are the same really explores the idea of self-identity,’ she explains of the project, which is titled ‘Prism in Motion’ and conceptualised around the idea of the multi-faceted Max Mara woman.

Martin's stream of consciousness style features scribbled words and abstract faces inspired by those she meets, in black marker on a white background. 'There is something magical about working with black and white,’ Martin explains. ‘People are often drawn to different areas of the work and rediscover new things on subsequent viewings.’

She used innovative techniques to create her Max Mara artwork. ‘I 3D printed this drawing tool which allows me to draw with multiple markers, or different thicknesses of markers at the same time,’ she explains.‘I used that to create the initial framework of the drawing. Then I filled these negative spaces with words, faces and characters that reflected the idea of movement and conversation.’

The use of black and white resonates with Max Mara’s own aesthetic; the brand is renowned for its refined and natural colour palette. Its most recent A/W 2017 collection features an exploration of browns, reds, greys and blacks. ‘Anyone can create a line, but a lot of time goes into making a simple black line recognisably yours,' Martin says.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Max Mara website, and the Shantell Martin website

Mood board: Awash with monochromatic autumn shades – from red to brown, black to Max Mara’s signature camel – this collection was made up of enduring and elegant wardrobe staples, such as suits, double-breasted coats, pencil skirts and chunky knit sweaters. Creative director Ian Griffiths took inspiration from Slöjdföreningen, the campaigning body set up in Scandinavia in 1845 and tasked with improving standards in domestic design. Its treatise was that objects should never resemble anything other than their own intrinsic form. In terms of the pieces in Griffiths’ collection, these forms have never looked better.

Team work: Max Mara collaborated with DJ Johnny Dynell on a soundtrack which layered the classical sounds of Vivaldi with a modern Scandinavian dance beat.

Finishing touches: The ideas decreed by Slöjdföreningen restricted superfluous embellishment, but a little surface detail was still seen here in soft double-handled leather bags, finished with overflowing and detachable shearling trims.

Mood board: When Max Mara name-checked Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi in their show notes we couldn't help but be captivated. Though there were not any Brutalist concrete and glass structures on the runway, the collection was nonetheless touched by a welcome wash of modernism: clean, sporty shapes jazzed up by exuberant Tropicana prints and bright pops of color.

Best in show: The tropical prints were outstanding in the show. The best versions were done in crisp white pique cotton covered in lush leaf and humming bird scenes that covered sweeping pool side overcoats worn with matching printed bustier style bathing suits.

Finishing touches: Just in case there was any doubt that Max Mara was taking a sporty turn for spring, each model came armed with a long brimmed visor. Oversized bucket bags with saddle stitching were another nod to Bo Bardi, reflecting the Bola de Latão chairs she had installed in her home.

INFORMATION

Photography: Jason Lloyd-Evans

It’s not everyday that a fashion house puts up one of its identifying features, like a logo or an emblem, for artistic interpretation. Hence the freshness of Max Mara’s latest enterprise, which saw the Italian label invite the artist Maya Hayuk to reinterpret the iconic stud details that grace its sunglass and optical offering, especially for the Autumn/Winter 2015 season.

Under Hayuk’s creative control, the studs have been reimagined as an energetic prism formation in a hue of rainbow colours that adorns a modular artwork – a geometric diptych that can be assembled in numerous formations and is scheduled to travel to boutiques around the world over the next few months.

‘Max Mara invited me to create a painting inspired by a new prism shape that symbolises strength, femininity and progress,’ says Hayuk, who is based in New York City. ‘The original intention of Max Mara's invitation was to simply make an artwork that could translate well as a graphic for the packaging of their sunglasses, not for sunglass frames themselves.'

Indeed, the colourful pattern, which Hayuk christened ‘Optiprism’ will be featured on three different styles of sunglasses, bringing a bold touch of whimsy to their architectural and cat-eye silhouettes. ‘In the process, I inadvertently created a re-contextualised graphic pattern that very fortuitously translated beautifully to a miniature "stained glass" sunglass frame. Max Mara has now produced a very small edition of these special little objects. Who knows what's next!’

The project did not veer too far from Hayuk’s own productions – eye-catching geometric murals that have appeared anywhere from on a billboard in Chelsea, New York to walls in Brussels, Baltimore, Portland and even the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. (The artistic partnership is not Mara's first, having recently teamed up with the king of canine conceptualism himself, William Wegman.) 

‘It happened quite organically. When I was making the painting itself, I couldn't have foreseen the art applied to sunglasses. I wasn't even thinking about designing sunglass frames! But once I made the repeating pattern and placed them into the sunglass templates, little surprises, like [how the] light refracts onto the viewer's face in unpredictable and beautiful ways, sparked up.’ 

INFORMATION

The ’Optiprism’ print will be available in Max Mara’s Gem I and Gem II sunglasses, as well as the MM 1246 optical frame, around $320 each, in January 2016

ADDRESS

Max Mara

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William Wegman’s canine connection was well documented in our guest editor’s issue last month. Over the next few weeks, there’s now the chance to see his photographs in the flesh, thanks to a travelling exhibition of the polaroids at Max Mara boutiques that’s currently making its way across the United States.

Starting in Boston (Wegman was born just outside of the city) and then New York last week, ‘Dogs in Coats’ features photographs of Wegman’s Weimaraners donning Max Mara’s signature 101801 camel-coloured coat, which the photographer originally produced for the fashion label’s 50th anniversary back in 2001. The collection of eight images not only demonstrates Wegman’s creative and humour-filled style, but also casts Max Mara’s classic piece in a whole new light.

In celebration of the showcase, Max Mara has reissued 30 limited edition 101801 coats in its original silhouette. Since its launch in 1981, the double-breasted cashmere and wool beaver coat has evolved into different styles over the years, so getting a hand on an original is truly rare indeed. With next stops for the exhibition to include Toronto (29 October), San Francisco (12 November), Houston (18 November) and Waikiki (1 December), a visit is highly recommended for dog and fashion lovers alike.

INFORMATION

’Dogs in Coats’ travels to Max Mara boutiques in Toronto (29 October), San Francisco (12 November), Houston (18 November) and Waikiki (1 December)

Mood board: Max Mara borrowed from what are commonly the most clichéd corners of the fashion industry – i.e., nautical and stars/stripes iconography – yet twisted these over-used concepts into one of the freshest, coolest collections we’ve seen yet in Milan. The stars and stripes were blown up into exaggerated proportions, executed in fresh turquoise blue and coral red and thankfully never used together. The sailor theme, meanwhile, materialised on sharp black striping on slim knitwear and sharply cut suiting. Either way, it was brilliant.

Best in show: A part from the umbrella stripes that made for fantastically graphic trapeze dresses and knitwear, Max Mara also presented a terrific sailing rope print that was executed on a bright red silk matching top and trouser two-piece and later mixed with fresh white and turquoise striped sweaters.

Finishing touches: The models wore platform shoes with cool, striped crepe soles and carried bags that looked suited for a boat. Oversized drawstring totes and regular handbags all came swinging on thick, sailing rope.

INFORMATION
Photography: Jason Lloyd-Evans

When I meet Canadian artist Corin Sworn, recently returned from six months in Italy to her adopted city of Glasgow, she is completely, unapologetically in love. The object of her obsession does not ride a moped, nor does it have anything to do with gorgeous sun-beaten colours or masters of the Renaissance. It is what she describes as the ‘loud, wild, licentious, sometimes problematic’ commedia dell’arte.

Sworn’s studio space, on the top floor of a warehouse overlooking the city, has become an immersion den. Books on the subject are everywhere; photocopies of library articles spill out of plastic bags; old prints of famous commedia masked characters (sassy Columbine, greedy Pantaloon, wily Zanni) are scattered around along with cuttings of costume sample fabrics.

Sworn is the fifth winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, picking up the award early last year. The golden ticket as far as opportunities for young female artists go, the prize funds one rising UK-based artist on a dream research trip across Italy, and includes an invitation to show the fruits of her travels in a solo show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.

Sworn was awarded the prize for her proposal to research the social origins of the commedia dell’arte in Mannerist Italy by spending time in and around some of the cities where early touring troupes originated. What attracted Sworn to the subject was her belief that there are little-explored dimensions to commedia that have contemporary relevance – particularly aspects of movement and expression which illustrated history books can’t capture.

Sworn makes installation and film works that reflect on social and cultural history. She’s previously had work shown at Tate Britain and Whitechapel, but her breakthrough was her well-received solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2013, where she was one of three artists representing Scotland.

Sworn approaches all her material in a scholarly way, even describing herself as an academic. The wellspring of her inspiration is invariably the world of critical ethnographic ideas. Her interest in touring theatre stems from her fascination with its ability to transcend differences in language and class. The advantage of commedia’s unscripted, impulsive nature, and its gypsy-like movement across regions and countries, is that it gave actors a licence to break rules and challenge hierarchies. ‘The early plays broke through the class barriers of the day. These pieces would be performed both in market squares and at royal weddings.’

The contents of Sworn’s laptop testify to the breadth and depth of her research. An archive of hundreds of images includes antique costumes, actors learning commedia traditions, Palladio’s 16th-century trompe l’oeil theatre in Vicenza, a commedia-inspired puppet show put together by an eccentric actor in a Naples street, and studies of street theatre audiences. One shot is a detail from a painting by Vittorio Carpaccio she snapped on her iPhone in Venice. Carpaccio, the son of a leather manufacturer, paints in splendid detail the lithe-leged young posers in Venetian streets during the 16th century. ‘Look at those tights. Look at all these young dudes,’ she says.

Facts and theories about the place of theatre in mid-16th century society bubble up constantly in our conversation. The whole scene is worthy of a Borges story – a mad scholar wilfully conjuring the life and essence of the past in order to funnel it into the future. It’s a process she grapples to express: ‘I think that’s what I find a bit of a battle: how do you make a historical object, like a costume, how do you make action happen around it so that it’s employed in a way that allows us access to other ways of thinking?’

Born in London in 1976, Sworn grew up in Toronto, before studying for her BA in psychology and art history in Vancouver. ‘I was lousy at essays so I decided I’d take an art class. That way I could explore the ideas I was intrigued by but I didn’t have to write papers.’ She went on to do her MFA at Glasgow School of Art and still lives there with her partner, artist Luke Fowler, and their young son. ‘Someone told me Glasgow was like Vancouver because it’s not an enormous city but has a very strong art community,’ she says.

The ‘Glasgow miracle’, a term coined by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, is common parlance in the city because seven Turner Prize winners have either lived or studied there. Sworn puts the Glasgow miracle down to open-mindedness. ‘People turn up at exhibitions ready to be surprised and spend time trying to come to terms with work that they’re not used to. That helps build a strong community.’ What Sworn has described are the same qualities she looks to encourage in her audience. ‘I want to make people encounter objects in a way that’s counter-intuitive to the way we read things now. These days cinema uses the face as a way of gauging an actor’s emotions on a micro-level. That had never happened in the past.’ She opens a book on a beautiful picture of commedia’s most famous character: Harlequin, the melancholic fool. In the picture he’s crying. Sworn copies him using her thumbs, hands and arms to portray emotion – an action ridiculous to us in its simplicity and emotional extravagance yet, she points out, fresh and moving to a contemporary.

Her research also took her in a direction she hadn’t foreseen when she hit on a little-explored theme, and one that struck her as being particularly relevant: the role of women and costume – or more specifically, women liberated through costume. (Max Mara has been so delighted by this turn of events that it has agreed to create costumes for Sworn’s show at its headquarters in Regio Emilia, northern Italy.)

Commedia was the first form of theatre to foster thinking actresses, and Sworn has used its cast of feisty feminist characters as inspiration for the performance and installation she’s planning at the Whitechapel Gallery. ‘Columbine, for example, could be agile and notoriously quick-witted. In one of the more famous stories she would play games of cross-dressing. She dressed as both defence lawyer and prosecution, then performed a battle with herself.’

But if there is a feminist drive behind her show at the Whitechapel, it’s gentle and teasing. Before Sworn closes her laptop she giggles at a picture of a Roman marble statue, a coquettish Venus with her towel slipping. ‘I thought I could use something like that in the performance, when the actress is cross-dressing. What if she just happens to moon the audience?’ she says. ‘I’d love it to be a little bit naughty.’

Originally printed in the June 2015 edition of Wallpaper* (W*195)

Fashion week, these days, is about much more than just the collections. Showmanship is the name of game, and in the meticulously executed sartorial extravaganzas, the sound space is an element that no producer or designer can afford to overlook. Music royalty - past, present and future - is enlisted to ensure a full assault on the senses. Here, we bring you Milan Fashion Week's catwalk mega mix from the S/S 2015 womenwear collections.

WEDNESDAY 17/09

No 21
'Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush; 'Come Undone' by Trentemoller; 'Love Is A Battlefield' by Pat Benatar
Music production: Mode-F

THURSDAY 18/09

Max Mara
'Requiem Pour Un Con - Remix 91' by Serge Gainsbourg; 'Laide, Jolie Laide' by Serge Gainsbourg; 'Pink Elephants' by Mick Harvey; 'Histoire de Melody Nelson' by Serge Gainsbourg; 'Paris Quatre (Instrumental)' by Malcolm McLaren; 'Intoxicated Man' by Mick Harvey
Music production: Frédéric Sanchez

Emporio Armani
'Brutal Hearts (FlicFlac Radio Edit)' by Bedouin Soundclash; 'Universe Lovesong' by Laid Back; 'Neeve' by Woolfy vs Projections; 'What's My Name (Extended Disco Mix)' by The Kenneth Bager Experience & Sofie Grabol; 'Lion' by Pang!

Fendi
'Car Ambient #3' by Babe Rainbow; 'Minnesota Winter' by Babe Rainbow; 'Need This (12" Dub)' by Bok Bok Feat Trago; 'Boring Angel' by Oneohtrix Point Never; 'Cocco di Mamma' by Laura Betti
Music production: Michel Gaubert

Dsquared2
'Hideaway' by Kiesza; 'When A Fire Starts To Burn' by Disclosure; 'When A Fire Starts To Burn (C2C re-edit) by Disclosure; 'The Roof Is On Fire' by Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three; 'Children Of The Revolution' by Mark's; 'Boongie Drop (feat Jay Z & DJ Military' by Lenny Kravitz; 'Breathe & Stop (J Period Remix)' by J Period & Q-Tip; 'Partition' by Beyonce; 'All About That Bass' by Meghan Trainor; 'Flawless (MIA Partysquad remix)' by Beyonce; 'Wiggle' by Jason Derulo (feat Snoop Dogg); 'Flawless (MIA Partysquad remix)' by Beyonce

Prada
'Kiss Me (Maggot Brain)(Edit)' by Psychic TV & PTV3
Music production: Frédéric Sanchez

Ports 1961
'Down In The Traffic' by To Rococo Rot; 'Besides' by To Rococo Rot
Music production: Frédéric Sanchez

FRIDAY 19/09

Sportmax
'Mambo' by Wally Badarou; 'Speechless' by Kruder & Dorfmeister; 'All Under One Roof Raving' by Jamie xx; 'Private Life (Dub version) by Grace Jones; 'Grillwalker' by Modeselektor
Music production: Michel Gaubert

Marco de Vincenzo
'We Share Our Mother's Health' by The Knife; 'Dreamy' by Go Dugong; 'Quad Boogie' by Populous; 'Fall' by Populous.
Music production: Stefani Libertini Protopapa

Missoni
'Les Ondes' by Motorbass; 'Force Marker' by Brian Eno; 'Shanzhai' by Fatima Al Qadiri
Music production: Frédéric Sanchez

Tod's
Speech from 'La Notte' by Michelangelo Antonioni
Music production: Frédéric Sanchez

Versace
'2020' by Suuns; 'All I Hear Is Drums' by Kasper Bjorke; 'Sex-O-Matic (Club)' by Melt; 'Video Fear' by Bitches From Queens

Philipp Plein
'Right Here, Right Now (Orchestral Version by Thomas Roussel)' by Fat Boy Slim; 'Enjoy The Silence (Orchestral Version by Thomas Roussel)' by Depeche Mode; 'Blue Monday (Orchestral Version by Thomas Roussel)' by New Order

SATURDAY 20/09

Bottega Veneta
'Triumphant Procession' by Tuxedomoon; 'Libertango' by London Concertante; 'Piazolla-Libertango' by Yo-Yo Ma; 'Libertango' by The Swingle Sisters; 'I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango)' by Grace Jones
Music production: Sebastien Perrin

Giorgio Armani
'Hazey' by Glass Animals; 'Open' by Rhye; 'Candy (Steve Moore Remix)' by Lower Dens; 'Save' by Frankey & Sandrino; 'Tell Her Today' by Tom Baxter; 'Wicked Game' by Queen of Hearts; 'Last Words' by Amirali; 'Electric Sunburst (Phoreski Remix)' by Coyote; 'Blow Up' by Kid Francescoli

Roberto Cavalli
'Trap' by Camp Claude; 'Lost and Found' by Camp Claude; 'Hurricanes' by Camp Claude
Music production: Michel Gaubert

Jil Sander
'Four Solos' by Ars Nova & Tamas Veto; 'Living Room Music IV' by Ars Nova & Tamas Veto; 'Fermi' by Pan Sonic; 'Shaker Loops' by Dan Smiley, Lowendusky, Judiyaba & Ridge String Quartet; 'Release, Depart' by Scanner; 'Spacings' by Takehisa Kosugi
Music production: Frédéric Sanchez

Emilio Pucci
'Hey Now (Tensnake Remix)' by London Grammar; 'Hey Now (Arty Remix)' by London Grammar; 'The Cloud Atlas Sextet (Elektro RMX JK)' by Tom Tykwer, Kristjan Jarvi & MDR Sinfonieorchester; 'Ultraviolence' by Lana del Rey; 'All The Days' by Haerts; 'Dreams (Axwell remix)' by Deep Dish feat Stevie Nicks; 'Andare' by Ludovico Einaudi
Music production: Jeremy Healy

SUNDAY 21/09

Marni
'Moonrise Kingdom' by L'Orchestra Numerique
Music production: Frédéric Sanchez

Salvatore Ferragamo
'Teenage Lightening 2005' by Coil; 'Say Aaahh Again' by Chicago Damn; 'Mars' by Caribou; 'Merta' by Picchio Dal Pozz

Max Mara, the king of coats, is not a company we normally think of when it comes to print. But the Italian powerhouse went all out on pattern for spring and the results were refreshingly on point. The success here had to do with a strong, tightly edited theme that started with black and white micro feather prints and evolved - subtly and smoothly - into compact florals and slightly larger geometrics. The pattern packed a modern graphic punch in its infinite - but surprisingly wearable - layers. Printed ponyskin skirts were worn with matching printed silk georgette blouses, and finished off with printed boots and folded fisherman's hats. The coordinated sets had a certain bourgeoisie stylishness but that didn't mean Max Mara ignored its core no-nonsense consumer. There were plenty of military blouson jackets, nipped waist blazers and three-quarter length skirts to wardrobe the waves of working women next spring.

The Glasgow-based artist Corin Sworn has been announced as the fifth winner of the bi-annual Max Mara Art Prize for Women. The prize, run in collaboration with London's Whitechapel Gallery, has become increasingly high profile with Laure Prouvost, who picked up Max Mara award in 2011, going on to win last year's Turner Prize.

For Sworn, apart from the press and glory, it means a six-month fully funded Italian residency. Unlike other art prizes, The Max Mara award is based an artist's submission about the work they would produce in Italy, if given the chance. A four-strong judging panel devises a short-list of three to five artists - who have to be UK-based and yet to have a solo survey exhibition - and Sworn out-paced rival presentations from Beatrice Gibson, Melanie Gilligan, Judith Goddard and Philomene Pirecki to pick up this year's award.

Sworn, who uses drawings, video and installation in her works, has an interest in how we construct stories and narratives from fragments of sometimes random information. Foxes, a film and installation, was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Sworn's Max Mara funded project will look at the relationship between Commedia dell'Arte and Italian cinema. She will spend three months in Rome, before moving to the newly restored Museo dell'Arte Contemporanea in Naples and on to the Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, home to one of the oldest artist residency programmes in Europe. Which all sounds rather lovely. Sworn's piece will be shown at both the Whitechapel and Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia some time next year.

'She is a vivid storyteller,' explains Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick, 'and the judges were swept away by her proposal inspired by the 16th century Commedia dell'Arte travelling theatre troupes woven together with oral histories. We can't wait to see the impact of the residency on her scripts and filmmaking.'

For Sworn, it means a level of support that most young artists, without the backing of one of the ‘mega’ galleries, can only dream of. 'One of the wonderful aspects to the Prize is all the people who are there to support the research with you,' says Sworn. 'I think this will allow me to surpass my usual ways of working. With young galleries, it still feels as though everyone is helping out and supporting you and your work, but the nature of what you can produce is very different.'

At some point, while immersed in artist Laure Prouvost's new video installation at London's Whitechapel Gallery, you realise you are being watched. You turn around to find two smaller screens, each featuring a woman swaying languorously, eyes focused eerily on you, like a hippie Mona Lisa.

Provoust's 'Farfromwords' sneaks up on you that way. It seduces you with a big-screen ode to the Italian countryside - all rushing streams and sun-kissed rose petals - but keeps you in check with surreal elements that make you wonder if this garden of earthly delights is as it appears.

The London-based French artist was the winner of the fourth Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011, offered in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. The award came with a six-month residency in Italy, home of the fashion label. It was not, however, without strings attached. Prouvost returned this year with a show that displayed the fruits of her labours in rural Biella, near Milan: a mini-coliseum installed in Whitechapel's Gallery 1 that immerses the viewer in the landscape, palette and eccentric energy of rural Italy.

The circular structure is an allusion to classical Rome, plastered inside like a fresco with evocative elements. There are Roman pillars, olive trees, stone fountains and disembodied extremities (breasts and all) that recall marbles from the Borghese. This is where the smaller screens are displayed, with models who seem to stare in your direction, no matter where you wander.

On the main screen, a film called 'Swallow' cuts together spring-like images (fitting that the exhibit launched on the vernal equinox). There are feet steadying themselves on the river rocks, lips parting over soft ice cream, bathing nymphs - all to an audio track of constant breathing, like the earth coming to life after winter. Then it, too, gets surreal, with flashes of lips on a live goldfish and bare toes squishing raspberries.

The exhibit's full-length name is 'Farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells' and as part of the finale, guests exit past a series of mounted car mirrors upturned into platters for fresh raspberries for the taking. Savouring the tartness brings it all home.

Watch an extract from 'Swallow', 2013. Courtesy the artist and Mot International

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London
E1 7QX

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The winner of the fourth Max Mara Art Prize for Women was announced last night at the Italian Embassy in London. Laure Prouvost, whose work includes film, performance and installation art, was chosen from a shortlist of five artists for her 'gripping short films and intriguing environments'. The prize, awarded in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, serves to promote female artists based in the United Kingdom.

As part of the biannual prize, which was established by the Maramotti family (who own the Max Mara brand), Prouvost will now embark on a two-part six month residency in Italy - splitting her time between the American Academy in Rome and the Pistoletto Foundation in Biella.

Featured in W*105, artist Michaelangelo Pistoletto's foundation, known officially as the Cittadellarte, is one part multi-disciplinary art school, one part Utopian community and one part ideas laboratory. It is founded on Pistoletto's belief that art should impact every aspect of society.

Max Mara has a long tradition of supporting the arts. The brand, founded by Achille Maramotti, even has its own art museum; the Maramotti Collection in northern Italy's Reggio Emilia, as seen in W*120, houses an impressive collection of artworks.

Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick said that one of the prizes aims is to 'promote a strong relationship' between the fashion brand, the winning artist and the gallery across Europe. Blazwick once again presided over this year's judging panel - comprising the 'gate keepers of the art world,' as she puts it. Among the judges were Lisa Milroy; collector Muriel Salem; gallerist Amanda Wilkinson and critic and lecturer Gilda Williams, who all spent 'a glorious day' discussing the shortlist of five artists (a departure from last year's shortlist of three). The four runners up are Spartacus Chetwynd, Christina Mackie, Avis Newman and Emily Wardill.

Prouvost, speaking candidly at the awards ceremony of her win, said: 'Thank you to England for adopting me and Italy for inviting me'. Following the six month stint, the French-born London-based artist will show her resulting work at the Maramotti Collection and the Whitechapel Gallery in 2013.