MFW: Max Mara's back-to-basics Fall 2009 collection

MILAN -- Sometimes basic is the best a design house can do. Such is the case at Max Mara, the outerwear company turned fashion brand that, over the last few seasons, has had some disastrous flirtations with dropped-crotch dodi pants and sequined jumpsuits.

For fall, the collection turned back to tailoring, beginning with the perfect, belted camel coat worn with a fur bonnet. Pencil skirts, pea coats with cuffed short sleeves and classic vented blazers followed. Not the kind of thing that gets the heart pumping, but the kind of thing everyone needs a little of in their closets.

-- Booth Moore

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Photo: Luca Bruno / Associated Press

Comments

[Randall]

They seemed to be in a bit of an identity crisis these last few seasons didn't they? In the big picture MaxMara brand lexicon, this move seems reassuring. With their R&D abilities, continuously refined basics is all I'd want MaxMara to excel at in the first place. We know their coat story, the time is right to plant their flag on another of the principles & elements of wardrobing architecture. (I know they've tried but, this kind of beautiful editing may now help us see what's really there). Taking a step back, viewing the game of brands and consumers, it's simply tragicomic how basics sounded so sleepy until this season? I digress..., But basics we now crave and done rightly and lightly, the sequined hammeresque trouser divertissements can still play their accompanying harmony without claiming complete center stage with this brand (in this climate at least). Hopefully the clients reward them this time around. Full disclosure - I was invited to visit one of the MaxMara workshops in the Veneto a dozen years ago and have been fascinated ever since. It was such a sophisticated facility, the employees seemed to just burst with pride, I was dazzled.