34902902954

MAXIMUM
EXPOSURE
On the heels of a contemporary art revolution in China, Max Mara
brings classic Italian tailoring to an avid Shanghai following.
Molly Langmuir hits the city’s experimental, cash-infused gallery
scene and discovers four boundary-breaking new talents.
Photographed by Jason Schmidt Styled by Morly Guo
When I arrived in Shanghai one night
last December, the city was glitteringly
bright and bracingly cold. In one of the
world’s most sophisticated urban centers,
an international technology hub with a
fluorescent-lit skyline, many buildings still
don’t have central heating—just one of the
place’s unlikely juxtapositions. Another is
that despite the government’s history of censorship,
over the last few years an art scene
has developed in Shanghai that’s so dynamic
and fresh the city has, practically overnight,
become a global cultural destination.
“It’s an underground art and music explosion!”
says Max Mara Creative Director
Ian Griffiths the next morning, sitting in a
(frigid) barren room off the cavernous great
hall of the Shanghai Exhibition Center,
where the brand was preparing to reveal its
prefall 2017 collection, titled “Monopolis!”
“Everywhere you go here, people are talking
about art or making art or showing art.” Not
only was Max Mara staging its first show in
China, it had tapped Beijing-based multidisciplinary
artist Liu Wei—whose sculptures,
paintings, videos, and photographs explore
what it means to live in a rapidly shifting
urban environment—to collaborate on an
11-piece capsule collection. Liu also designed
the set, which, by the following evening,
had transformed the hall into a runway
with mirrored columns, planetlike globes,
and wire sculptures that towered over the
models and evoked, like much of the artist’s
work, an environment both slightly dystopian
and sleekly futuristic.
Griffiths joined Max Mara in 1987, right
after graduating from London’s Royal College
of Art, and rose through the ranks until
he was named creative director in 2013.
Roughly two years later, he began to speak
to the press on behalf of the brand—an
unprecedented move for the 66-year-old
family-run Italian business, which (despite
having hired, from the ’70s on, luminaries
such as Karl Lagerfeld and the duos behind
Dolce & Gabbana and Proenza Schouler
to work in its atelier) had never put
a designer front and center. “Over the
years, Ian just absorbed the DNA of
the brand,” says Giorgio Guidotti, the
company’s long-standing president of
worldwide communications and public
relations. As for what that DNA entails,
Max Mara remains “geared toward a
woman who wants to put her personality
forward, and also wants beautiful
clothes that last over time,” Guidotti
says. Both he and Griffiths stress that,
in an ever more globalized world, this
woman exists anywhere from America
to China, where the group (which
includes Sportmax and Max&Co.)
opened its first store on the mainland in
1993 and now has 414 shops across the
country. Despite Asia’s recent economic
slowdown, Max Mara’s Chinese market
remains roughly the same size as that of
Europe or the U.S.
Alongside his work at Max Mara,
Griffiths also teaches fashion design at
London’s Kingston University. His fluency
in everything from fine art to indie
rock plays out in “Monopolis!,” which
was inspired by ’80s neo-noir film Blade
Runner, the Chinese electro-pop band
Nova Heart, and the general creative
ferment of Shanghai. The designer likens
the city’s “great love of fashion and
great love of art” to that of ’70s New
York and London.
The fascination with art, at least, is
fairly recent. Contemporary art only
really began to be produced in China
in the ’80s, after the Cultural Revolution,
and even through the ’90s,
“there was an assumption that young