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Max Mara chose Shanghai to mark its 75th anniversary, staging the Resort 2027 show at the Long Museum on Tuesday night before opening an exhibition to the public through June 28. It is the brand’s second show in Shanghai and its third in China.
The first was in 2008, when Max Mara staged its spring 2009 and Sportmax runway shows in Beijing, and then in 2016, Shanghai pre-fall and capsule show designed with artist Liu Wei. The return is not a coincidence. Shanghai is where this house keeps finding its next conversation.
Michelle Yeoh, Katie Holmes, Eileen Gu, and Maude Apatow sat in the front row alongside Ming Xi, Ye Tong, Tan Yuanyuan, and Zhang Kangle. The mix of names, Hollywood on one side and China’s most visible cultural figures on the other, in a single room at a single Italian fashion house’s anniversary show, tells you more about Max Mara’s ambitions in this market than any press release could.
The starting point for the collection was a line by former Saturday Night Live writer Patricia Marx: “New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down.” Griffiths named the collection Kinetic Energy, a title that captures the restless, in-motion quality he was chasing throughout. Griffiths has been with the house for 40 of its 75 years. At this point he says he can no longer distinguish between what he thinks and what Max Mara is, and it reads less like ego than like the truth.
Graphic Anni Albers-inspired patterns and bold architectural shapes ran through the collection, with the Bauhaus sitting as an overarching reference. Griffiths believes the intention of founder Achille Maramotti was always to establish Max Mara as a kind of Bauhaus of fashion, focused not just on quality of manufacture but also on quality of the idea itself.
The clothes moved between modernist geometry and specific nods to the host city. A merino cheongsam, a quilted silk jacket, and a poplin shirt with pankou fastenings, all references to Shanghai and to what Griffiths identifies as a renewed pride among young Chinese consumers in their own cultural heritage.
A sweater simple at the front revealed a flash of saturated yellow only when the wearer turned away. Small detail, but it captures what the whole collection was doing. The drama was there, just not always where you expected it. Then there was a floor-length crimson teddy coat over a matching red jumpsuit. The house’s most recognizable silhouette in its most vivid extreme.
Then there were the three male models. Griffiths said he is staggered every time he comes to Shanghai by how many young men, and not-so-young men, are wearing Max Mara and that the three looks were simply a way of recognising that audience. He was equally clear that a Max Mara menswear line is not coming.
“We don’t plan to start a separate menswear line, because in a sense, on an ideological level, it would be a kind of betrayal to the Max Mara woman to give men the same advantage,” he said. So the brand acknowledged the men buying its coats, put three of them on the runway, and then closed the door on any further conversation about a men’s line. Max Mara has always been precise about who it dresses and why.
Griffiths drew from the entire run of them all at once, as opposed to building the collection around a single muse as has been done in previous seasons. Marilyn Monroe and Fran Lebowitz in the same collection, forming what he called a composite picture of the Max Mara woman. At 75, the house is not interested in editing that picture down.
The exhibition running at the Long Museum through June 28, called The Max! and curated by fashion historian Olivier Saillard, traces the house archive through its most iconic coats. From the 101801, first created in 1981 by Anne-Marie Beretta, to the Teddy Bear coat designed by Griffiths in 2013. The exhibition’s accompanying bookshop and select stores worldwide are also stocking pieces tied to the retrospective, giving visitors a way to take home a piece of the archive itself.
The choice of Shanghai as the setting wasn’t incidental. Griffiths described wanting to highlight “the whole concept of modernity and living in the city,” choosing Shanghai specifically as one of the most metropolitan environments he could think of. The message was clear without needing to be stated outright: Max Mara is marking 75 years of history while deliberately looking ahead, not back.
Seventy-five years of the same coat, reinterpreted season after season by a creative director who has spent half that time inside the house, shown in a city Max Mara keeps returning to because the conversation there keeps moving. That is the whole story, really.
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