Max Mara - Resort '26

“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.

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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.

Circle skirts and bra tops, thigh high boots, bias-cut silk teddies and even sheer bustiers were impactful additions to the Max Mara dialect of style. Look two’s witty pant dress complete with pleats, the bengal striped shirting bodies, and sometimes-fringed tailored silk separates in Marinella pattern silks all added layers of ‘masculine’ percussion to the siren song of this collection's Venus signifiers. There were references to the history around us in the fresco prints near the end and the coral cameo belts. Shirting with tied-sleeve necklines worn above narrow high waisted chambray denims were a gamine nod, alongside the tailoring, to the contingent fluidity of the gender stereotypes Griffiths was experimenting with.

Although this was often pretty hot stuff, Griffiths took painstaking care to ensure that Max Mara’s Italianate fantasy never looked overcooked. This, he said, was for the customer. “It might be something sexier than she would normally wear, but in a way that is going to make her feel totally comfortable wearing it. Because I can’t overestimate the value of the fact that women rely on Max Mara to give them fashion that will work for them.” And that reality was the core source from which all tonight’s fantasy so entertainingly erupted.

See the full Max Mara Resort '26 collection bellow: