Max Mara is surprisingly Scandinavian, and these are the reasons why

Few individuals can claim to have played a part in revolutionising the fashion industry. Achille Maramotti is one of these people. Having grown up surrounded by clothes and entrepreneurial women, at 24, Achille Maramotti founded Max Mara with just two looks: a camel coat and a geranium red suit.

The year was 1951, and at the time, Paris dictated fashion. Looking to Haute Couture, women turned to their local tailors or picked up needle and thread to have their garments in the latest fashion. But in the post-war era, with industrialisation booming, Maramotti realised that the garment industry was about to change drastically.

“Achilles wanted to replace the standard practice at the time,” says creative director Ian Griffiths, a self-described “punk rocker from Manchester” who joined Max Mara in 1987. As we’re talking, we walk through the brand’s vast archive situated in Reggio Emilia. More like a museum than a storage unit, it contains almost every sketch and fabric sample since 1951 – a rarity in an industry which usually purges the workroom after each season.

Maramotti’s aspirations were to merge American industrial innovation with French savoir faire to manufacture ready-to-wear garments primed to grab off the rack. “He preferred Balenciaga because of his cocooning silhouettes,” says Griffiths when flipping through Maramotti’s early sketches in the archive. Dior’s New Look was too fitted for the Italian founder, making it harder to standardise.

The '80s was a significant decade for Max Mara. “It was when the Max Mara we know today came to be,” Griffiths says. The concept of “Made in Italy” started to stand for not only quality, creativity and craftsmanship but a modern, fast, and glamorous lifestyle as well. It was also the decade of power-dressing, when women finally made their way into the male-dominated corporate world.

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Laura Lusardi, Max Mara’s design director emeritus, whose main domain today is the company’s impressive archive and library, once said that Max Mara is about “the logic of a man’s wardrobe, but for women.” Borrowing from menswear, with its utilitarian silhouettes, the trench coats and tailoring, not to mention impeccable shirting, is a sartorial choice echoed in Scandinavia.

“Just take the blazer,” says Nicola Gerber Maramotti, Max Mara’s retail director and Achille Maramotti’s daughter-in-law. “It is the one item in my wardrobe I can always rely on to feel powerful.” We’re having a ‘dolci’ in the intimate ivy-covered restaurant Caffè Arti & Mestieri attached to the back of the brand’s first-ever physical store, a glass-covered cloistered stone building in Reggio Emilia.

Nicola likes to think of it in terms of confidence. “It is a difficult thing, but one of the ways you can help women develop their self-confidence is through fashion,” she says. The best way to illustrate this sartorial sentiment is that it is always women wearing Max Mara, and never Max Mara being worn by women. A woman wearing Max Mara is nothing but a stronger version of herself.

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Nicola describes how fashion can be a sort of armour to women in a meeting room surrounded by men. “Sometimes, power dressing is required,” she smiles. And Nicola is the definition of a power woman. Marrying into the family in 1993, she has been described as the ‘quintessential Max Mara woman’ in the past. Driven, entrepreneurial, and always well-dressed. Her first Max Mara piece was, of course, a coat. But it is the second piece which stands out. “It was a very elegant ‘Pianoforte’ dress in black and white,” she reminisces.

The Max Mara woman finds her roots in the “camel coat feminists of the early 1960s,” according to Ian Griffiths. “She was a pragmatic sort of feminist,” as Griffiths describes it. She may not have been burning her bra, but she is reflected in Scandinavia’s suffrage history and strove for gender equality. “Women never change,” Nicola laughs, referencing the post-war era women who inspired Achilles to first launch Max Mara. “Maybe society wasn’t as permissive at the time, but women haven’t changed,” she says.

With the aim to dress the Italian middle class, Max Mara became a pioneer of inclusive and democratised fashion. “Today the word inclusivity is quite fashionable,” says Nicola. “But when the brand was founded, it was just this idea of giving women the same opportunity to wear beautiful clothes, the latest fashion from Paris, off the rack.” Max Mara has kept to its core principle of quiet inclusivity, being the first Milan show to feature a headscarf-wearing model in 2017.

As we speak about the democratisation of fashion, the liberation of the working woman, and the creation of a timeless, inclusive wardrobe, it is indisputable: there is an undeniably Scandinavian sensibility to Max Mara. A sensibility seen in the brand’s coats.

Few brands have found as much success in a single product category as Max Mara: the camel coat has become synonymous with the brand. The brand’s classics are generational, the type of evergreen staple intended to “pass down from mother to daughter” as Nicola puts it.

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Listing one iconic model after another, Griffiths lets his hand slide over rack after rack with sepia-toned cashmere as we walk through the archive. Having built a sartorial empire on the shoulders of outerwear, there’s an undeniable link to the Nordics. Especially considering we spend most of the year wrapped up in woolly layers.

Take the 101801, for example. A true Max Mara signature, the kimono-sleeved camel coat is as linked to the Italian brand as the 2.55 is to Chanel. Inspired by Achille Maramotti’s original 1951 camel coat, it became an instant classic when Anne-Marie Beretta designed the modernised version for the company in 1981. The coat became a firm favourite of Ingrid Bergman, who allegedly gave one to her daughter Isabella Rossellini as a rite of passage.

“The Teddy Bear is the only one people know by name,” Griffiths says, stopping by a fuzzy section of faux fur in the archive. Designed in 2013, the ‘Teddy’ found its way onto the runway after an archival deep-dive where the predecessor of the must-have coat was rediscovered among the brand’s ‘80s collections. “At the time, we were looking for an alternative to fur,” says Griffiths.

Griffiths explains that the brand has never set out to consciously create icons, instead happening upon them when “a design is finished.” Using the wrap coat ‘Manuela’ as an example, the creative director describes the design as “untouchable.” A true classic, the Manuela coat has remained the same since it was created in 1998 and is always available in the Max Mara stores in four colours: camel, black, red and navy.

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Then there are the more literal ways that Max Mara has made a nod to the Nordics. For example, the Italian heritage brand’s 2017 autumn/winter collection was based on Swedish icons Ingrid Bergman and Anita Ekberg.“It was definitely a Scandi collection,” Griffiths says.

While the 2017 season’s signature swishy skirts were “directly inspired by Ingrid Bergman,” the unapologetically strong silhouettes were plucked from Ekberg, who became a household name in Italy and beyond after her appearance in Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita. Emblematic of mixing Scandinavian sensibility with an Italian allure, she arguably embodies why Max Mara works in the Nordics. The understated sexiness of a cocooning camel coat clutched closed when heading out into the chilly autumn air.

All things considered, it only feels natural for the brand to open its first owned-and-operated stores in Stockholm this year. Cementing its Scandinavian love affair on Birger Jarlsgatan with a Max Mara and a Weekend Max Mara, the brand has proven time and time again that the brand’s camel coats are Nordic wardrobe staples. What better way to combat the cold than a cashmere cocoon, after all?