Speaking shortly before Kaia Gerber cast off to lead the cast down his decking runway, house captain Ian Griffiths charted the course ahead: “I was imagining the Max Mara woman sitting at her desk in the—let’s face it—humdrum office and dreaming of running away to sea for adventure and even love. So it’s a romantic journey across the seascape that begins in Morocco and goes north to Russia.”
The Moroccan connection explained Gerber’s djellaba-accented poncho, the stripes on those that passed later in the convoy, the rope belting that sinuously cinched a double-breasted hooded cashmere coat, and the neckline on the two velvet dresses near the end. Not entirely by chance, the Russian connection presaged the brand’s St. Petersburg–bound cruise collection on the horizon in May, but it was articulated less overtly here than the Moroccan: You could just about venture that the fringing detail on two mid-section duffles—a grey coat and black jacket—echoed the officer’s frogging on Griffiths’s mood board. Other nods to the nautical included a house flagship teddy coat presented in black-on-beige mariniere striping, which also eddied through via knitwear.
As Griffiths had already noted, the prevailing wind that propelled this voyage was romance, and this came articulated in the ruffles that barnacled organza or cashmere sleeves and hems, and that also whispered of the skull-and-crossbones piratical. This in turn led to Griffiths’s own home port, the New Romantic club scene of London’s 1980s, which was referenced in the Boy George braids in Sam McKnight’s hair work, Captain Sensible on the soundtrack, and the dropped leg-of-mutton shoulder that ran throughout the collection. Very sensible were the nylon-coated padded jackets that were stuffed not with down but off-cuts of Max Mara cashmere wadding. This was a collection of show coats to showboat, fit for the land-locked and sea-borne alike.
