Max Mara Gives an Object Lesson in Scandi Feminism
You always learn something interesting reading Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths’s show notes. The brief on his Resort 2024 collection shown Sunday in Stockholm is all about the origins of Scandinavian gender equality, filled with references to the Midsommar festival, playwright Henrik Ibsen’s “New Woman” archetype, the 17th-century lesbian Queen Christina of Sweden ( “a feminist icon before the term existed”), and author Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Also, somewhat anomalously: Vikings. “History remembers Vikings for ruthless plundering, but who knew they also sowed the seeds of Nordic gender equality?” (I did not know this, but Wikipedia confirms: Viking women were active in the arts and had property rights about a millennia before modern law codified it.)
Feminism is big for Max Mara, a house founded in 1951 in Reggio Emilia, Italy, to create beautifully tailored coats for modern women, along with other wardrobe classics designed to stand the test of time. There was a new lightness to Griffiths’s resort offering, which was presented at Stockholm Concert Hall, the famous site of Nobel Prize award ceremonies. The show opened with Max Mara’s enveloping camel-hair Teddy Bear icon coat, cut in a soothing cream shade, with decorative studs and tassels added. That juxtaposition of practicality and playfulness continued throughout the lineup, with 20th-century modernist silhouettes including gigot sleeves, ankle-grazing skirts, elbow-length capes, and smart blouses contrasted with charming folk motifs like braids and pom-poms.
Griffiths titled the collection “Septem Flores,” a reference to the Midsommar tradition of young women making crowns from seven types of wildflowers. The collection largely hewed to Max Mara’s traditional neutral palette, but the closing section featured airy black and white dresses speckled with sprigs in paint-box colors like a midsummer meadow. And flower crowns graced many a model’s head.
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