Max Mara has at all times excelled at self-discipline, its home codes constructed on readability and polish. However whereas last season referred to as upon the brooding poetry of the Brontë sisters, for Spring/Summer time 2026, the model has allowed itself a lighter flirtation with fantasy.
Inventive director Ian Griffiths mined Marie Antoinette, the Rococo Queen, not for the surplus one would possibly anticipate, however in a intelligent push-pull between order and decoration.
The ditch coat—Max Mara’s perennial signature—arrived this season with shoulders unfurling into petal-like coronas, extra Versailles backyard than metropolis sidewalk. Pencil skirts had been neat and trim, sprouting gauzy crests on the hip like aquatic fins, whereas frothy organza skirts fluttered with a whole bunch of hand-folded fronds. The outcome was removed from costume, however a thought-about layering of frivolity and basis.
Color was mild. Whispery pastels recalling the famed royal’s porcelain palette, but tempered by belts, harness straps, and modern equipment that grounded the gathering with a recent edge. Griffiths appeared to be saying: sure, class will be playful, but it surely should nonetheless earn its place in a contemporary wardrobe.
There was, too, a spirit of subversion within the combine. Rococo, Griffiths reminds us, was by no means simply ornament.
“Prizing class, candy feelings, and fantasy greater than morals and fact; […] ignoring advantage and conventions to cherish solely the pleasures you might be undoubtedly experiencing now.” That is how the writer Novala Takemoto describes Rococo, and what the Maison included in its present notes, asserting that Rococo “embodies the spirit of punk rock and anarchism greater than any philosophy.”
Past the historic scandal, Antoinette was a girl of concepts and affect—a religious hostess to the artistic and studious minds of the Enlightenment interval, a patron, and a tastemaker whose salon doubled as a stage for philosophy and artwork. To see her evoked at Max Mara on this refined approach is to understand how the frivolous and the mental can coexist.
Like a loosened corset, this season, Max Mara provides a wardrobe for ladies who perceive that whimsy, like wit, can maintain nice energy.
