From camel coats to guochao: Max Mara woos China’s luxury brand consumers | Max Mara
“New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down.” For the British designer Ian Griffiths, who encountered this line in the New Yorker, it summed up why China’s biggest city was the right place to celebrate Max Mara’s 75th anniversary. “Max Mara is a product for metropolitan women, and it would be patronising to assume that a metropolitan wardrobe should be western-centric,” Griffiths said. Knotted silk pankou buttons, cheongsam dresses and side-fastening jackets with standing collars translated Chinese aesthetic codes into the language of Max Mara on a catwalk in Shanghai’s Long Museum. Such tributes are fraught with difficulty, as nods to cultural heritage can quickly tip into cliche or appropriation. “We know that it isn’t good enough just to say that we didn’t intend to cause offence, so we had lots of conversations and consultations in advance about the designs,” said Griffiths, who hopes the homages will be viewed in the context of Max Mara’s long relationship with China. The show’s casting was almost exclusively made up of …
