75 Years Of Max Mara Comes To Life In Shanghai
Stripes, paillettes and seventy five years of archive came together for Max Mara’s Resort 2027 show in Shanghai…
Max Mara has marked its 75th anniversary with Resort 2027, a collection staged inside the soaring vaulted spaces of the Long Museum on Shanghai’s West Bund. Rather than building the show around a single muse, as past collections have done, the house brought together every Max Mara woman who has come before, each one folding into a single composite character. The question at the heart of it all was a simple one. What is Max Mara, really?
The Future as a Backdrop
The Long Museum, a brutalist building shaped by Chinese art collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, sits in a city that has long been associated with reinvention and forward motion. Showing 75 years of history in a setting built around the future was entirely deliberate. The brand wanted to honour its past while making clear that the past is not somewhere it intends to stay.
Kinetic Chic
Titled Kinetic Chic, the collection pulled directly from the Max Mara archive. Stripes and geometric cubic patterns returned with renewed energy across a palette of camel, cognac, khaki, champagne, black, white and the house’s own iconic red. Paillettes showed up in unexpected places, catching the light on the back of otherwise simple sweaters.
The outerwear told its own story, coats with a generous swagger, jackets cut short and boxy or sharply tailored, skirts that hovered above the knee with a little fullness at the waist or fell strict and calf length. Trousers were cropped just enough to show off a shoe with an ankle strap and a heel, every silhouette curated so that every Max Mara woman could find her own version of the look.
Subtle nods to Shanghai ran through the collection without ever overtaking it. A stretchy merino wool cheongsam. A quilted silk jacket. A crisp poplin shirt finished with a pankou fastening. Small details that grounded the collection in its host city while keeping the overall language international, which has always been the particular strength of Max Mara. Accessories carried the same restraint, bags and finishing touches that felt like quiet punctuation rather than statements competing with the clothes.
Alongside the show, The Max! opened at the Long Museum, an exhibition curated by Olivier Saillard with Gaël Mamine as associate curator, running from 17 to 28 June. Conceived as a living archive, it traces the brand’s history through garments, sketches, textiles and documents, giving Resort 2027 a context that few runway shows ever get to sit inside.
Harper’s Bazaar Arabia Saudi Summer 2026 cover star Tûba Büyüküstün sat alongside Katie Holmes, Balqees Fathi, Michelle Yeoh, Maude Apatow, Nicky Hilton Rothschild, Eileen Gu, Ming Xi and Karen Wazen, a guest list that moved easily between Hollywood, sport and the region.
Lead Image Courtesy of Max Mara