A giant teddy bear kept watch over Max Mara’s 75th-anniversary celebrations at Shanghai’s Long Museum. The supersized mascot was a tribute to the teddy coat, the brand’s fluffy phenomenon, which, alongside the immortal 101801 camel coat, has wrapped countless women in a cocoon of practical chic. The talent for making pieces that survive every trend cycle and emerge impeccable after years of real-life wear is the Max Mara secret sauce. To mark the milestone, the label unveiled its resort 2027 collection in tandem with “The Max!”, an exhibition curated by Olivier Saillard. Think Night at the Museum, Reggio Emilia style.
For the exhibit, Saillard recreated the atmosphere of the Biblioteca e Archivio d’Impresa, launched in 2003 by house founder Achille Maramotti to preserve and catalogue Max Mara’s history. Garments, fabrics, sketches, and photographs were displayed from warehouse-style crates, as if the brand’s memory had been unpacked for public viewing. Pre-show, visitors moved through nine chapters, devoted to the Maramotti cutting and sewing school, the company’s first factory, the evolution of its stylistic vocabulary, the art of tailoring, its enduring icons, and a meditation on color, among other things.
The show itself served as a reminder of Ian Griffith’s remarkable journey at Max Mara. Having joined the company in 1987 and become creative director in 2016, he has enjoyed a level of continuity that is disappearing rare in an industry where designer tenures increasingly resemble short-term leases rather than long-term commitments. Griffith’s longevity feels almost radical.
“Max Mara is fundamentally about city life,” he said at a preview. “Women navigating work, leisure, and everything in between. So for a collection built around urban energy, Shanghai felt inevitable.” There was also a certain historical symmetry to the choice. Max Mara opened a store in Shanghai in 1989, making it one of the first international fashion brands to establish a foothold in China, arriving long before the rest of fashion boarded the same train. He quoted a quip by Patricia Marx, writer and humorist at The New Yorker: New York may never sleep, but Shanghai “doesn’t even sit down.” As city mottos go, it summed up the mood.
“Kinetic chic,” as Griffiths dubbed the collection, had its roots in a long-standing Max Mara obsession: the Bauhaus. He explained that when Achille Maramotti founded the company in 1951, his ambition was nothing less than to create “the Bauhaus of fashion,” a place where good design mattered as much as good manufacturing, and where intelligent ideas were made accessible rather than intimidating. The comparison isn’t entirely fanciful. Max Mara’s original factory in Reggio Emilia bears more than a passing resemblance to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau.
The Bauhaus has remained a recurring touchstone for Max Mara, not least because artists such as Anni Albers, one of Griffiths’s favorites, proved that a few stripes and geometric forms could generate enough visual energy to rival city traffic. The interplay of order and movement aligns with the sense of dynamism that has long run through the brand’s ethos. Griffith pursued the same idea here, using graphic patterns and sharp, cubic geometries in his designs.
Several male models walked the show, wearing Max Mara coats, soft-tailored suits, and knitwear. Griffiths noted that, especially in Asia, men have been adopting the brand. Fashion’s borrowing habits have historically run in the opposite direction, with women raiding men’s wardrobes; Max Mara is watching the pendulum swing back. There’s no dedicated menswear collection in the works, and perhaps there never will be. In today’s increasingly fluid landscape, Griffiths suggested, that distinction matters less and less. Rather than looking back at 75 years of history, team Max Mara seems more interested in what comes next.