In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the northern Italian city of Milan was Europe’s launchpad for the emerging power woman, who is somehow the topic of the season again, 30 years on. There were Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace, facing each other off with their diametrically opposed minimalist/maximalist styles. There was Gianfranco Ferré doing operatic grandeur and endless other brands patrolling the perimeters of that same shoulder-padded, cone-heeled precinct: Krizia, Byblos, Erreuno, Genny, and Complice are just a few of them. Their chief target was the emerging American female executive class, and of these, most have disappeared, save Armani and Versace—and then Max Mara, which forged through it all to become a mega industry of its own based on the classic camel coat and tailored business suit.
So the mind’s eye focuses on what Max Mara is about, who it’s for, and what essential supporting, maybe not starring, role it needs to play. This sort of “purified” idea of Max Mara is not always what we see on its runway. This season the central idea was that this is a time for women to feel strong, and so, commendably, there were women who pass for today’s supermods of yesteryear. They included Lara Stone, Doutzen Kroes, Joan Smalls, and Halima Aden—and at the second-generation end, the daughters of ’80s supermodels, Gigi Hadid and Kaia Gerber. All of them had to carry some pretty fierce propositions: total looks in animal print, slick black leather, English tweed, checks, and blanket materials. There were overcoats, floor-sweeping kilts, and pencil skirts worn over narrow trousers or stirrup pants.
It felt like acres of fabric and repetition to draw attention to a few simple points, or maybe just one: What’s happening with the Max Mara coat this winter? There are teddy bear coats, black leather trenches, military maxis, an animal-spot belted raincoat, and a duffel. The payoff: the camel coat of the season, which has a line of blanket fringing running down the back of each sleeve. It was a little Western-looking, but just conceptual enough to appeal to an adult. Too bad it can’t be seen in these pictures. After all that, it’s 22.
It’s difficult; there’s a sense in which the modern would-be power woman doesn’t want too much fashion all the time. Still, after all these years, there is still a gaping hole in the women’s market for the kind of classy, simple, uniforms men take for granted. Max Mara has some of those solutions, for sure. The more it pared back, the more that message would go across.
