Fabric of dreams on show in Max Mara retrospective
From Emsie Ferreira

BERLIN—Italian fashion house Max Mara has opened its cashmere-lined archives for a new exhibition here that shows the craft and marketing that have made the brand a byword for classy coats. Eighty models that date from the late fifties to this season are on display at the Kulturforum in the city’s futuristic Potsdamer Platz district, along with sketches by legendary designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Emmanuelle Khanh who worked anonymously for the company in the 1970s.
Many of the capes and coats are still asking to be worn, even if an obviously much-loved fluffy Shetland piece from 1958 is frayed in the front. Curator Adelheid Rasche said the coats have not dated because Max Mara founder Achille Maramotti set out to sell bourgeois good taste and a lifestyle made in Italy to a mass market, long before such a thing existed.
“It is not a nice word, but Max Mara always interpreted fashion in a mainstream way. It did not want to be avant garde and make coats for 10 wealthy women,” Rasche told newsmen. The company was started in Reggio Emilia in the Po Valley in 1951, with the production of one suit and one coat. Well before Maramotti died last year and left the house to his sons, it had become one of Italy’s healthiest family-owned fashion companies.
He made two decisions which shaped the brand’s destiny, Rasche said. One was to have luxurious, long-lasting fabrics woven especially for Max Mara, whether it be wool, cashmere or camel hair.
The other was to always hire top fashion photographers to make the timeless clothes part of the ever-changing way women want to look. And so a black-and-white television advertisement full of liberated, leggy women shot by spaghetti western director Sergio Leone was followed by ethereal Sarah Moon photographs from the seventies.
But the most iconic pictures come from the early 1990s when Peter Lindbergh and Richard Avedon photographed supermodels in patrician coats by chief designer Laura Lusuardi that have become the enduring look of the house. “In the 1980s and 1990s Max Mara changed in a certain way. It became a classical brand. They stopped bringing in designers for two to three seasons,” Rasche said.