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“New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down.” For the British designer Ian Griffiths, who encountered this line in the New Yorker, it summed up why China’s biggest city was the right place to celebrate Max Mara’s 75th anniversary.
“Max Mara is a product for metropolitan women, and it would be patronising to assume that a metropolitan wardrobe should be western-centric,” Griffiths said.
Knotted silk pankou buttons, cheongsam dresses and side-fastening jackets with standing collars translated Chinese aesthetic codes into the language of Max Mara on a catwalk in Shanghai’s Long Museum.
Such tributes are fraught with difficulty, as nods to cultural heritage can quickly tip into cliche or appropriation.
“We know that it isn’t good enough just to say that we didn’t intend to cause offence, so we had lots of conversations and consultations in advance about the designs,” said Griffiths, who hopes the homages will be viewed in the context of Max Mara’s long relationship with China.
As one of the first western brands to take China seriously, with stores in the country for 33 years – there are 27 boutiques in Shanghai alone – Max Mara has come to symbolise social status and professional success in the minds of Chinese women.
Navigating this delicate territory with grace is big business. With Chinese luxury consumption rallying from its post-Covid slump on the back of a rising stock market, European luxury brands are on a charm offensive. Chinese consumers account for about a quarter of the world’s luxury spending.
But the era of the Chinese consumer as a grateful recipient of western luxury is over, and brands who treat the country’s appetite for fashion as an ATM find themselves out of favour.
The most significant trend in Chinese fashion is guochao – “national wave” – a new appetite for style with local resonance. Guochao is not nostalgic patriotism, but a fashion-forward shift towards a consumerism closely linked to cultural identity, and which reflects the instinct of gen Z everywhere to centre their own experience.
Max Mara, which has aligned itself with the rise of Chinese female ambition, hopes to channel the spirit of self-confidence that is at the core of guochao. The show’s casting was almost exclusively made up of local models.
Star of the front row was the Chinese-American Olympic skier Eileen Gu. The cheongsam came stripped of decorative detailing, floral silk swapped out for pale stretch wool, a sophisticated riff on the office staple that is the sleek, body-skimming shift dress.
Max Mara recently provided wardrobing for a Chinese production of Prima Facie, positioning the brand’s visual language alongside the global cultural phenomenon of Suzie Miller’s one woman play, and in support of the story’s exploration of gender and empowerment.
Recent Max Mara catwalk shows made up an esoteric feminist history syllabus, with muses for recent collections including 18th century mathematician and physicist Émilie du Châtelet, medieval military strategist Matilde di Canossa, and Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel prize for Literature.
“There was a moment when people might have said Max Mara is safe and dependable, but maybe a bit dusty and boring. But hopefully we’ve left that behind,” Griffiths said.
Between the camel coats with which the brand is associated, the catwalk was spiked with red, which in China represents joy and luck. “There is something so primal about red. I think of it as the pre-eminent non-neutral colour. It is such a colour that it’s almost not a colour at all – almost a neutral, really,” the designer said backstage.
But he was not proposing red as the colour of the season. “There are no trends any more,” he said. “Fashion doesn’t dictate any more. Everyone chooses their own look.”
