REGGIO EMILIA, Italy — “Can a coat make us feel more confident, stronger, more ready to leave our mark on the world? At Max Mara, we believe it can,” contended Maria Giulia Prezioso Maramotti, board member of the Max Mara Fashion Group and granddaughter of the late founder Achille Maramotti. “We help women believe in themselves, recognize their own remarkable nature: out of the ordinary, exceptional, because they are capable of innovating, growing, and making an impact, without striving after an impossible pursuit of perfection.”

To be sure, Max Mara is often associated with its perfectly cut coats in luxurious fabrics, and celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, in June the milestone was marked by the unveiling of the resort 2027 collection in Shanghai and the exhibition “The Max!” at that city’s Long Museum West Bund, displaying several of the brand’s signature coats.

“It was an exciting experience. Resort always is, and we work so hard when we do these itinerant shows, but there’s a certain sense of a festival, like a celebration of Max Mara, unlike a fashion week, where you have five or six important shows squeezed into one day,” said Ian Griffiths, the brand’s creative director. “In particular, this year it really felt like a birthday party for Max Mara.”

Over the years Max Mara has worked with such marquee names as Karl Lagerfeld, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Narciso Rodriguez. However, in line with Max Mara’s understated style, the brand always took center stage and the designers’ names never appeared — until Griffiths, who joined the company in 1987, fresh out of the Royal College of Art, and a winner of a Max Mara contest in 1985. In 2005, with the blessing of Max Mara’s owners, the Maramotti family, Griffiths began to emerge as the lead designer of the brand.

“Brand is a very cold word for what’s a very warm situation, because the company is family- owned, but the company is also a family, and the relationships that we have forged so long ago is so deep that we can have true discussions that go far beyond corporate discussions, which is quite unique in companies of this kind of size,” the British designer said at the headquarters in Reggio Emilia, a two-hour drive from Milan.

Indeed, the Max Mara Fashion Group — which in addition to Max Mara includes Sportmax, Weekend Max Mara, Max&Co, Pennyblack, iBlues, Marella, Emme, and Marina Rinaldi, to name a few — reported sales of 1.99 billion euros in 2025. Exports accounted for 56 percent of revenue. It counts around 6,000 employees worldwide and around 2,300 stores globally in more than 100 countries. The group is chaired by Luigi Maramotti, son of the founder.

“Guiding and fostering the growth of an industrial enterprise founded on creativity entails assuming a responsibility that transcends the mere economic and social objectives typically associated with business activity,” said Maramotti. “For us, this has always been a profound cultural mission. It is the awareness of having built, together with our clients — the women who choose Max Mara — a vast community bonded by a shared value system and the vision of an evolving world. A world where women are fully free to express their talent and personality, playing the role they deserve without giving in to prejudice or compromise. After 75 years of history, we look back at our past with the certainty of having honored this moral commitment, and of possessing all the resources necessary to carry it forward into the future.”

Max Mara’s Identity

Griffiths is not one to seek the limelight and characterized his job as “preserving the identity” of Max Mara and its style. Sometimes, elsewhere, he said “you don’t see so much the brand, you see the designer, and with Max Mara, I hope that its identity prevails, although there are seasonal inspirations and overarching architecture. I think that makes it quite unique in the world now.”

He argued that designers in new posts are often asked “to effect a change within one or two seasons,” but that he had years to map out his ideas for the Max Mara woman and “therefore I feel I have a kind of respect for the brand, its tradition and its heritage that shows through, and because we are a family-owned company, we have the luxury of developing ideas over time at our own pace.”

While mindful of the brand’s history and leveraging its archives, Griffiths is always keen to look ahead. “I think that’s how we achieve this feeling of consistency and building on the brand’s identity from season to season, hopefully strengthening it as we go.”

Max Mara’s fashion coordinator Laura Lusuardi traces back this forward-thinking attitude to the founder, “who anticipated the change in women’s lifestyle.”

She joined the house in the ’60s, and helped build the expansive and impressive fashion archives in Reggio Emilia, which include not only designs from the group, but also memorabilia, sketches, fashion magazines and books and even looks from other brands ranging from Chanel and Madame Grès to Courrèges and Yves Saint Laurent.

Mindful of the value of the brand, “we must be a gatekeeper, working with creatives, and aligned with trends but loyal to our codes. We always say ‘do what you can do and not what others do.’”  

Griffiths also underscored the progression of women over the years. At the time of founder Achille Maramotti,  “she was the wife of the local doctor or the local lawyer and now a doctor or a lawyer herself, or possibly the chair of the health trust or the minister for health and welfare or a high court judge. She has grown and developed, and now she expects more choice and variety, and more opportunities for self-expression.”

He believes “the best and most successful ideas for Max Mara are the simplest ideas. Sometimes I’m looking at the work of young designers within our design team, or sometimes in various schools, and they’re laboring to do something simply for the sake of it being new. I always think, if a product should be easy to wear, it should be easily conceived too. I’m not saying it should be lazy in any way at all, but you shouldn’t take a difficult path just for the sake of it.”

When he joined Max Mara, Griffiths was given a “brief that was really to find alternatives and diversify the offering, giving women more choice and more variety, making it easier for them by editing those choices to make things as simple as possible for a woman who just wants to be perfect in every situation, and to express who she is and not feel like she’s wearing a uniform, and that’s the big difference between then and now, I think,” said the designer referring to the first power dressing styles of the 1980s.

Dressing real women was always a goal for Max Mara, which counts the likes of Nancy Pelosi, whose fire-red coat made news; Catherine, Princess of Wales; Kate Winslet; Angelina Jolie; Julia Roberts, and Taylor Swift among its fans — but Griffiths was quick to point out these were not examples of product placement.

“We avoid unreal situations. We don’t do so much red carpet dressing because it doesn’t reflect a reality. Celebrities wear our clothes, but they wear them in very real situations, which correspond to the kind of situations that Max Mara women will find themselves in. Real clothes for real women continues to be a winning formula.”

Prezioso Maramotti chimed in, saying that Max Mara “has never been nostalgic” and that her “dream is to stay the course with these values for the next 75 years.”

Likewise, Lusuardi said “we always look ahead of us and we are self-critical to improve and we must have a clear objective, remaining consistent.” She added that “the confrontation with the market is fundamental,” praising Griffiths as “part of the last generation of creatives, with his own individual creativity that very much fits with Max Mara.”

Griffiths never complains about the pace of fashion, on the contrary, smiling, he admitted “if I could do a show every week, I would.”

Making History With Coats

Max Mara over the years has launched several coats that made history. The Teddy marked its 10th anniversary in 2013, when the company revealed it had sold 90,000 of the coats, which contributed to increasing its relevance on social media and attracting a younger clientele while retaining its loyal customers.

Griffiths continues to marvel at the success of the Teddy coat, shyly saying “you can never predict what is going to become an icon.” But Max Mara has built its reputation with the likes of the 101801 design, introduced in 1981, designed by Anne-Marie Beretta and still produced today, or the robe-like Manuela coat launched in the ’90s. The camel coat has become a brand staple, appearing on display at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, at the Fashion Museum of Paris and in Copenhagen’s Industry Museum. Griffiths on his own Instagram account often uses the hashtag #camelandia to complement the images.

In Shanghai, the brand unveiled the Ready, a wrap coat, unlined and belted. Griffiths said the iconic coats “don’t overlap or compete with each other. You could actually buy all of them.” The Ready on the catwalk was shown on both a male and female model, reflecting its versatility. While underscoring that Max Mara will never have menswear collections, having three male models in the show was a way “just to reflect what’s happening in fashion.  Women have always borrowed from the men’s wardrobe, but now when we go to various cities around the world, but particularly in Asian cities, we see more and more boys or young men that are wearing Max Mara coats, so I wanted to reflect that.”

Celebrating its 75th anniversary, Max Mara reissued a limited-edition of three archival coats. Produced in a number of only 200 pieces per style, they are numbered and accompanied by a custom tag that tells the garment’s story and reproduces the original sketch. The styles — called the Max Mara Meridian, Millenia and Metric coats — remain faithful to their original proportions and forms but are lighter in pure cashmere.

The Max Mara Meridian coat, presented for the first time in 1994, is a cape-style coat with ample proportions, in a leather hue of the fabric contrasting with the red lining inside.

The Max Mara Millenia coat, from 1998, is one of the brand’s most recognizable pieces and made famous by the campaign picture shot by Richard Avedon. The yellow lining illuminates the camel-colored cashmere.

The Max Mara Metric coat, dated 2015, reinterprets the proportions of the classic wrap coat in a more compact and measured way. The coat is crafted in “cacha” color, or cool beige, paired with a blue lining.

The three original archival coats were on display at “The Max!” exhibition.