How Max Mara perfected the ‘quiet wow’ in women’s luxury fashion
Amid the growing din of a crowded fashion landscape, Ian Griffiths’s Max Mara stands as a testament to the not-so-quiet power of its exquisitely resolved, whip-smart clothes.
“The chaotic world gets more chaotic.” Chaos? Disorder? This is not the usual terrain of Max Mara’s Ian Griffiths, at least not outwardly as he helms the nearly 75-year-old house, a bastion of serene, supremely luxurious Italian style. He is speaking about women’s lives today from his studio at the Max Mara headquarters, a slick, modern campus, like an Apple Park of fashion, in Italy’s northern Reggio Emilia. He continues apace: “This woman gets up in the morning and her head is crowded with things that she has to do: her agenda at work, the kids, her husband, her ex-husband, her travel, her job, the garden.”
To hear him speak about the tumult of the everyday so matter-of-factly – a straight-talking, Manchester-raised, steady hand – has, for a moment, a destabilising effect. In part because he paints a truthful, unvarnished portrait of success in 2025 where other fashion houses tend to present, what is to most, a glossily unattainable ideal. But he also confirms the increasingly turbulent, discombobulating pace the world has reached – even the civil, camel-coloured world of Max Mara, with its dependable quality and constancy, in rural Italy.
Thankfully, we can still depend on him. “A successful person has a more complicated life, for sure,” he says. “And she’s successful because she approaches everything with this polish, so she can’t let that slip.” As with everything Griffiths has done across his 38-year tenure at the house, his razor-sharp pragmatist’s approach meets the customer where she is. It has earned him a foothold – Max Mara feels like it has always, and will always, be there – in an era when micro trends and digital streams of information overwhelm us. “There are so many messages being communicated that people cling to Max Mara like a rock,” he notes. It is a position both envied and extremely rare in fashion.
To give an idea of how unlikely the station is in which he finds himself, it is hard to name many other creative directors leading a major European house after working there for a decade. Nicolas Ghesquière has just marked 10 years at Louis Vuitton, Julien Dossena the same at Rabanne. Those currently clocking multiple decades could almost be counted on one hand. Miuccia Prada, Giorgio Armani, Silvia Venturini Fendi and Ralph Lauren have, granted at their namesakes, otherwise there’s Véronique Nichanian at Hermès menswear or Victoire de Castellane at Christian Dior high jewellery.
“You could wear a suit, but it didn’t mean to say you’d abandoned your revolutionary ideas”
Max Mara may not be thought of as ever present if it wasn’t for Griffiths, who could rest on the archetypes the house created before him – the 101801 coat, the wool and cashmere creation with the draped lines of men’s outerwear that’s been made continually since 1981, is one example – or ride the recent wave of quiet luxury: that minimalist, well-crafted but ultimately sedately uninteresting stream of design. He’s circumspect about the latter and restrained in offering a treatise on it. “It’s something to do with the fact that we’ve been through a period of uncertainty in the world,” he says instead. Max Mara deliberately chose not to engage with it as a trend.
“As a kind of nomenclature, I kind of take issue with it a bit,” Griffiths continues. “I always have, because what is so quiet about turning up in a room full of people dressed head to toe in camel? That’s why we talk about ‘the quiet wow’, because the Max Mara woman does not want to be unobserved. She wants to be noticed, for the right reasons, when she walks into that room. It’s a kind of overstatement of the minimal; it is a quantity of quietness that adds up to quite a big sound.”
Arithmetic was on his mind for spring/summer ’25. In a palette-cleansing parade of clean bone whites, coppers, deep espresso and a Max Mara arsenal of buffs (almond, bisque), he set to work “experimenting” with mathematical equations. On his mood board? Hypatia, fourth-century Alexandrian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, whose work built on that of Pythagoras. The result was an exercise in new kinds of precision cuts. An arc of darts at the waist of a blazer in triangular shapes was informed by geometry, echoing dressmakers’ folds, putting the construction on display. Instead of rigidity, however, Griffiths used it to loosen up: a parabola, mapped via mathematical coordinates, was spliced, like Hypatia’s slicing of cone shapes, to reveal curves of skin on shoulders, backs and torsos in column dresses. It was chaos theory controlled and made appealing in an effortless manner. “There was a beauty and mystery to it that really appealed to me,” he says of studying maths in school.
The Max Mara woman, as likely to be a CEO or entrepreneur as a creative type, will see the romance of numbers. If not, it will be the appeal of undone ease Griffiths breathed into the tailored signatures. He worked hard to physically make pieces lighter than ever: “So very often that means using new technology to remove the need for very, very heavy stiff constructions we once used.” Poplin shirts, cuffs open and flipped up, with bikini tops visible underneath, had a city-summer freedom.
“Easiness is the most important quality in clothes,” he says. “You don’t look powerful if you look conscious of what you’re wearing. I die a thousand deaths inside when I’m with someone who’s clearly put something on that they love, but they feel self-conscious in it.”
A tenet of approachability goes back to the brand’s roots in 1951 when, in post-war Italy, founder Achille Maramotti, son of tailoring teacher Giulia Fontanesi Maramotti, seized on the industrialisation he saw in the US and Switzerland. A belief he could produce high-quality clothing – haut de gamme – at scale, saw a growing upper middle class invest in the new idea of ready-to-wear. Griffiths’s instincts align. “I don’t want to tantalise people with images that are out of their reach, like dangling some image in front of them saying, ‘Oh, you’d love to be this, wouldn’t you? But you can’t.’ I want to be holding a mirror and say, ‘Well, you could be like this.’”
Empowering women is one of his sincerest endeavours. Behind him is an evolving mood board with pictures of his own mother, Kamala Harris, Margaret Atwood, Eileen Gray, Lee Miller, Dorothy Parker, Siouxsie Sioux, Selma Lagerlöf and Patti Smith. “It’s an inexhaustible amount of courageous women who have changed the sphere they found themselves [in],” he explains.
Griffiths, who took a job at Max Mara after studying architecture then fashion at the London’s Royal College of Art, has always drifted with the social currents. He grew up in a hot bed of them, in Manchester’s post-punk scene in the 1980s, frequenting the likes of PSV, which became the Hacienda.
“We used to make these outfits to go clubbing in. We’d be lucky if they made it to the end of the evening, let alone at the end of the week or end of the season,” he jokes. He’s collaborated with as many names today as a streetwear label in the aughts: Judy Chicago, Martine Barrat, New York DJ Johnny Dynell, who worked with Warhol and Malcolm McLaren, and Renzo Piano, who designed the Whitney Bag, which turns 10 this year, inspired by its namesake New York gallery. “It’s strange because I feel like the same person. I’ve just found a difference of expression.”
He’s often asked how he reconciles this anti-establishment culture with a grown-up Italian modernity. “They’re not conservative clothes,” he says, citing the fact the women who wear them are changemakers and agitators. “My own lifestyle journey from club kid to Savile Row-wearing English gent illustrates you can change your image, but don’t judge a book by its cover. My maestro was Bowie, who taught us you could change your image drastically and you could wear a suit, but it didn’t mean to say you’d abandoned your revolutionary ideas. They’re still there. And how does a person dress if they want to change the world or be taken seriously? They wear serious clothes.”
Like a woman in considered Italian craftsmanship or a perfect white cotton shirt. “I hope I’m not just kidding myself when I say there’s always something in what I do that wants to provoke, always make you think in some way,” says Griffiths. “There’s always some hint that the woman that you’re looking at dressed in Max Mara, she may be wearing classics, but she could be quite radical. Watch out for her because she could shake your world.”
This story is from the April issue of Vogue Australia. On sale now.
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