Shortly after he founded Sportmax as Max Mara’s younger sister back in 1969, Achille Maramotti observed, “Women’s tastes and demands can be oriented by the same standards in which they must be interpreted. In fashion one can even ‘impose,’ but only the things that, albeit unconsciously, are already wanted.”
In other words, to create a fashion collection that fires minds and sends hands racing to wallets, you must shape something that is not simply “new” for the sake of it, but which represents the answer to a question that has not yet been articulated yet which is hanging in the air. Half a century later, any worth-their-salt cool hunter would recognize the truth of this.
This Sportmax collection felt tangibly “new” in that an aura of romantically tinged ’90s grunge supplanted the more literally sports-driven and high-gloss fabrications of the past few seasons. Bookended between two haunting sections from Bruno Alexiu’s soundtrack to a documentary about the unfinished 1964 Romy Schneider film L’Enfer (The Inferno), Michel Gaubert’s soundtrack eddied and flowed, deliberately choppy, in a manner that expertly echoed the collection it accompanied.
This played the formal architecture of masculine tailoring in constructed shoulders and dart-waist dresses (the first tan, the second gray) against a note of abandon conveyed via roughly unfinished hems. There were also oversized tailored jackets and coats in apricot and pistachio silk, and tightly wrapped top-to-toe pinstripe cottons. A series of very well-realized draped and ruched leather dresses came in black, synthetic green, and royal blue: Their solidity perhaps contrasted with the opaque fine knits and layered technical nylon dresses. Two constants were the gleaming steel belts and bracelets and the chiseled toes on boots and sandals.
The design team played with the polarized colors of the early special effects you can see in what survives of L’Enfer on YouTube. The tie-dyed prints toward the end were also consistent with that proto–lava lamp aesthetic. Going back to Maramotti’s original rubric (and also the question posed by the singer Mina on the soundtrack of yesterday’s Max Mara show), it was not immediately apparent what question this collection answered; however, watching it unfold was diverting enough.