True to form, Ian Griffiths points to the study of mathematics with a clean slate and pristinely made clothes for the modern woman.
SOMETHING Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia said about the troubled order of our world while yearning for a vein of polish got Max Mara’s Ian Griffiths thinking about what attaches women to their wardrobes. What makes a shape a perfect shape?
That’s where he started for the spring-summer 2025 collection. So why, one might wonder, was his collection so insistent about a silhouette that was so essentially a minute detail?
“These three-dimensional shapes derive from folding a little triangle out of fabric and are magical,” said Griffiths backstage post-show, explaining his fascination for them and his creative direction to take the humble dart and make it into SS25’s core leitmotif.
“I wanted to make the dart to appear not a decorative feature, but an inherent design feature of the garment and to construct darts upon darts, that make almost origami draped pieces, which was all very good fun,” he continues. “It was an experimental approach that I hadn’t taken before…”
Sticking to its quintessential essence and modern elegance, the feature of the dart is present in looks one and three. “The jacket has this great deep dart in it that makes it look like a real motif,” adds Griffiths, describing how he had to add extra fabric in to fold it out again. “All the jackets have those as a sartorial element, and in look nine the darts start to be used asymmetrically to create the shape of that dress and the drape that happens.”
These are dresses that will become wardrobe staples, far from clumsy and with a matter-of-fact tone. “Cracking my brains at night, I asked myself what can I tie onto a jacket to make it new and this time, the drape is given by this construction of origami darts. In look 18, you can see around the neckline darts that gather into it, creating a kind of shape.” The best in trade? The creasing sits on the opposite side of the impeccable smoothness.
“When I think about the Max Mara woman, she’s a composite in my head of so many women that I’ve met over the course of my career, which is a very long one,” said Griffiths. “Starting with my mother, who was the first kind of Max Mara woman that I knew, and adding into that every other woman who’s got some characteristic that I think of as being in some way Max Mara.”
You can’t pinpoint her down to a particular woman or anywhere. She’s a broad, suede woman. But they all share certain characteristics, like the desire to be cool and elegant, and looking completely in control. “She kind of loves to shock, almost, by her degree of precision,” opined Griffiths, “and by her look, how thought through she is. Everything is perfectly thought through. And she does that in addition to all the things that she’s required to do in her life.”
This season’s collection masters the art of conceal and reveal—which made for a pleasing yet streamlined take on technical construction and interesting proportions. “There’s an interesting interplay between covering and revealing only what you want to show,” he concludes.
by Chidozie Obasi