On Tuesday evening, the Italian house presented its cruise collection at the Galust Gulbenkian Foundation Gardens in Lisbon, featuring gorgeous heroines with curves and proudly sexy looks.
A country where even black is a color and where? saudade fado, this Portuguese blues, gives you a sense of sweet emotion and wonder that can only inspire. At least, that’s what Ian Griffiths, the understated and talented British creative director Max Mara, who has worked for the Italian brand for thirty years, tells himself.
For her 2023 cruise, she chose to pack her bags in Lisbon. “When I’m looking for locations for our cruise shows, I always think of a destination that everyone has an idea of without actually being there. When I say Lisbon, an image comes to mind. It is a city full of romance, charm, character, where the new and the old blend harmoniously, where heritage and tradition interact with modernity and creativity. And he has so much to say. I was particularly inspired by a woman, a poet, politician and intellectual, who for me represents the heart, soul, passion and spirit of this great capital city. Her name was Natalia Correia.”
Lisbon culture and fado legends
The collection’s starting point is Natalya Correa, thus an important figure in 20th-century Portuguese literature and a tireless activist against fascism in her country. It was on Nikias Skapinakis’ pop art painting that Ian Griffiths discovered the image of this exceptional woman; she is represented there with two other women seated at her feet: the novelist Fernanda Botelho and the pianist Maria-Joao Pires. “I read everything I could on Natalia,” explains Ian Griffiths. Her intelligence, her unique vision of erotic liberal feminism, and her celebratory spirit are the traits that struck me most about her. A strong woman of Lisbon culture, like Amalia Rodríguez, the legend of Portuguese fado, whose long black pleated taffeta dress, deliberately dramatic and powerfully romantic, is also in the mood of Ian Griffiths.
Another muse of the collection, which combines the history of the country with the present. very beautiful Carminho, a representative of the young generation of fado singers, a real star in Spain and Portugal.
Claire Danes in the front row
On Tuesday, at 8:00 p.m., the guests were seated in the garden of the Galust Külpenkean Foundation, a museum with brutalist architecture that houses an extraordinary collection of works of art and paintings spanning four millennia, from ancient Egyptian figurines to paintings by Renoir or Manet. .
Stars in the front row (Claire Danes), actresses of fashionable series (Ashley Park, the Mindy of). Emily in Paris), Portuguese personalities and students from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon, with whom Max Mara created a creative collaboration.
Luxurious and sensual
The first piece, a girl in all black with fishnet stockings and a playsuit embroidered with black rhinestone flowers, revealing her shapely legs under a long coat with a raised hood, immediately announces the color. Natalia Correia’s energy and sensuality are reinterpreted here with a refined modernity. Her wardrobe in 2023? Pencil skirts paired with puffy sleeve tops or very sensual and low-cut mesh tops. But also long pleated dresses that leave the shoulders bare and high-waisted white trousers worn with bustier tops.
This is Max Mara’s declaration of love for Lisbon
Ian Griffiths
Carminho, whose fado is played in the pulpit, also walks by in a little black dress that follows the lines of her body. Long cashmere coats or the brand’s iconic Teddy Bear warm the bare legs and shoulders of these elegant and fiery heroines.
Colors of passion
In the evening, they step out in long, belted, pleated taffeta dresses, whose intense monochrome colors—purple, ultramarine blue, bottle green, orange-red, saffron yellow—illuminate the lush greenery surrounding the Gulbenkian Museum.
The collection is also inspiredlenços dos namorados:“, these handkerchiefs of love, on which young Portuguese women sewed hearts, flowers and colorful doves in a naive and elegant style. Little poems meant for their groom, whose soul Max Mara captured in prints and crystal broaches that adorn the dresses, as well as the front panels of the white shirts, which are hand-embroidered by local artisans.
“It’s Max Mara’s declaration of love for Lisbon,” concludes Ian Griffiths, who developed many projects with the country during this cruise, including financing the restoration of parts of the Gulbenkian Museum.
Source: Le Figaro
