This brooding show was more country than town with its rustic colors and cozy textures, while cinched waists and full skirts added a romantic aspect.
“We’re steeped in literature,” Max Mara’s creative director Ian Griffiths said backstage, explaining how he re-read the Brontë sisters and listened to Mendelssohn, loud and on repeat, as he designed the fall 2025 collection.
“When the world seems so dark and dangerous, read about something dark and dangerous, but also escapist,” he shrugged, gesturing to a mood board depicting storm clouds, rugged landscapes and women dressed in hearty clothes for wily, windy moors.
Here was a brooding, but ultimately romantic Max Mara collection — more country than town with its rustic colors and cozy textures, but beckoning with its cinched waists and full skirts.
“That was my first thought — big skirts,” Griffiths said. “They give this romantic feel straight away.” Ditto his wide-legged pants, short jackets cut like a Spencer, and three-piece suits with a waistcoat.
(Incidentally, the eternally dapper Griffiths was wearing a brown, three-piece pinstriped suit by his Welsh tailor Timothy Everest, who operates under the name Grey Flannel.)
The show unfurled in color stories, opening with double-layer coats, wide-wale corduroys and ribbed knits in maroon, yielding to mossy greens and “cacha,” a cold beige Max Mara anointed so because of its likeness to pure cashmere in its natural state.
Griffiths said he initiated the collection in Yorkshire, where he visited the Brontë
Parsonage Museum in Haworth, and noticed that the overcast skies approximate the color of cascia.
It’s shaping up as another outerwear-focused Milan season, and Griffiths riffed on the redingote, enveloping clutch and bathrobe styles, military greatcoats and hooded capes knit with marled yarns.
Many of the coats nearly grazed the ground, and full, inventively draped or slit sleeves further heightened the romantic mood.
Fabrics skewed robust, including tweeds, herringbones and shearling, but with a soft, fuzzy aspect that was comforting. The show concluded with black velvet carved into full-legged, high-waist pants, and an off-the-shoulder maxi gown with cinematic airs, bringing to mind a pensive character strolling a garden at midnight, her shoulders aglow in the moonlight.
Max Mara noted that Brontë novels continue to fascinate, pointing to the release next year of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
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