Ian Griffiths got thinking about the cultural marginalization of science in favor of the arts after reading—and, okay, watching—Lessons in Chemistry. Backstage he pondered: “Why do people dismiss science and math so much when there is such a strong parallel between what a scientist does and what we in design do: imposing order on chaos? What’s the difference between E equals MC squared and a Marcel Breuer armchair? In some ways there is no difference.”
And with that eureka moment this excellent designer—whose employment at Max Mara since 1987 is something many houses stuck on the creative director carousel must envy—got cooking. Griffiths’s process tends to take in a female protagonist, and this time he struck upon Hypatia, the overlooked (of course) Alexandrian polymath. “People complained that there s not enough time to experiment anymore,” said Griffiths, relishing his words. “But I don t think this is true: we took a completely new approach to developing this collection.”
That approach was to take the parabolas of Hypatia and the geometry of Pythagoras, and then develop a formula of design that enabled their addition to Max Mara. The results were multiple and marvelous. A few examples included the brown knit dress, one-shouldered, whose ribs arced in a strict but languid parabola across the body, framing a circular cut-out at the waist. A later gray knit companion piece included two shallow oval cut-outs above the hip bone: as their wearer moved these blinked as if delivering a message in code.
Darting was promoted from behind-the-scenes to center stage: these angled planes worked to define the silhouette of the garments and echo the geometry of the women within them. On a gabardine work jacket the storm flap was buttoned back on the collar to form a perfect equilateral ornament. A nice contrast to these precision pieces were the pants and jackets in silks as crumpled as the scrunched up papers in a physicist’s wastebasket.
At first sight this was a typical Max Mara collection; there was camel, there was cashmere, there was tailoring. Every piece overlapped via a median of exceptional neutrality, outstanding garments that never strived to stand out. But Griffiths’s empirical conceit was a plus.
