Nautical has been in style in summer at least since Coco Chanel set sail around the Mediterranean with her lover, the Duke of Westminster, in the ’20s—and even she can’t claim to have invented it, since earlier examples of sailor collars and boaters go back to Edwardian times. Why else would we automatically call a certain shade of dark blue “navy”? So for a purveyor of classics such as Max Mara, the theme is a natural and obvious one. And there’s nothing wrong with obvious! Faced with the oceans of mucked-about and difficult clothes that are proffered as fashion, how astonishingly nice would it be to know there was one store where perfectly cut sailor pants, striped Breton T-shirts and jerseys, peacoats, and the like are reliably available?
Max Mara’s creative director, Ian Griffiths, should not fear that this could be a boring mission—the fact is that non-bonkers, non-branded classics can actually also be synonymous with cool. In his presentation, there were plenty of garments that might fall under the classification of great generics—the sort of clothes that could live with you for years. He threw in a couple of novelty notes—the star-pattern knits (no doubt inspired by officers’ epaulets) and prints of ropes on silk pieces—and he couldn’t hold back on some quirky styling, extending the sleeves of stripy tees and doing up jackets and coats on the wrong button, à la ’80s John Galliano. As a matter of fact, Griffiths really doesn’t need to try to dress up Max Mara’s classics in that sort of way at all. One day, he should see what happens if the company simply marches out 30 variations of a single garment—far from narrowing his audience, he might just convince the young as well as the middle-aged and senior among us. After all, the democracy of chic has no age limit.
