“We’re in the business of fantasies,” said Ian Griffiths before a show as fantastical as any conjured during his 38 years at Max Mara. Speaking in a preview space overlooking the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius brooding on the horizon, he continued: “We deal in romantic ideas. So in this collection when we talk about Naples, we talk about a fantasy of Naples. And to me Naples is the most extremely Italian city—the city where you have the most Italian-ness.”
These rhetorical rumblings from the veteran designer signaled the fashion eruption to come, in a collection he entitled Vesuvian Venus. Griffiths’s moodboard featured Sophia Loren in It Started In Naples* and Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice, two volcanically voluptuous protagonists in what the designer described as the cinematically-driven 1950s emergence of Italian style as a globally-known fashion trope.
Attending the show tonight was Gwyneth Paltrow, who in 1999’s ’50s-set The Talented Mr Ripley starred in a retrospective example of the genre. Said Griffiths: “Contemporary culture has become quite homogeneous… So in every place you have to go back to its golden age to discover cultural identity.”
Max Mara, founded in 1951, was itself a product of that golden age, and tonight was the first chapter of its 75th anniversary celebration. The show venue, just outside Naples, was the Royal Palace of Caserta: reputedly the world’s largest royal residence (despite its original royals’ long-standing eviction). Said Griffiths: “We chose it simply because it was the most impressive place that we saw. And believe me, we saw a lot of impressive places in and around Naples.”
This fantasy collection in a fantasy venue was woven from several strands. Central were the short-shorts Mangano wore in that movie on the moodboard. They were used as a point of contrast between the masculine tropes of Neapolitan tailoring (Vincenzo Cuomo provided his expertise) plus the gorgeous 1951-vintage archive patterns contributed by E.Marinella (menswear’s loveliest tiemaker), against a barrage of fierily feminine fashion figurations. A teddy coat in Neapolitan gelato pink, an ivory rib-knit body set with sequins, and a black wool work shirt were amongst the garments whose skewed sweetheart necklines ventured south of Max Mara’s typical thresholds like softening ice cream oozing from its cone.
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