While quiet luxury has been the stand on which fashion brands have raced to hang their hats over the past two years, Max Mara’s creative director, Ian Griffiths, took a defiantly celebratory stance with the collection he unveiled in Venice on Tuesday evening. “Quiet luxury has reached [such] epidemic proportions it’s a total silence, no one’s saying anything,” said Griffiths before the show. “I’ve always slightly objected to the idea of quiet luxury anyway because I don’t know how quiet it is.
How quiet is it to walk into a room wearing head to toe total camel?” Presented in the porticos of the Palazzo Ducale overlooking St Mark’s Square, the resort collection was rich in Max Mara’s signature shade of camel but in a departure from simplicity came sequins, embellished with brocades and in shimmering Jacquard silks, evoking the lavish Fortuny fabrics famous in the lagoon, which Griffiths called “the birthplace of luxury”. Inspired by Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who documented accounts of his travels in Mongolia, China, India and Africa, Griffiths staged the show on the 700th anniversary of his death to celebrate the city as “the creator of this gigantic global empire of trade [and] the beauty of cross-cultural contaminations between cultures you find here”. View image in fullscreen A model on the catwalk of the Max Mara show in Venice.
Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock While referencing the gilded history, a costume drama it was not, according to .
