The fabulous queens on Ian Griffiths’s Max Mara moodboard included the late Elizabeth II and Griffiths himself, pictured quite some time ago. “I’m wearing the first outfit I ever made, in 1980. I made it on the living room floor using my mum’s sewing machine,” he said, Like Elizabeth in her portrait by Cecil Beaton, Griffiths was dressed to inspire awe (albeit on the dancefloor) in an outfit calibrated for impact and escapism. Which brought him, he said, to Rococo. Griffiths added that it was researching a talk he was asked to present at the Gainsborough House Museum in Suffolk that had led him to reconsider Rococo not only as 18th-century history but also something that had shaped his own 1980s New Romantic sensibility: “I realized how much I’d been inspired by it then, and how right it feels again now.”
The Rococo touches in this collection included the whorling volutes of gauze that burst from the shoulders of trenches and the hips of pencil skirts. Sèvres-inspired florals were printed on organza layered over cotton or silk in skirts, jackets, shorts and coats. Petals of floral printed-chiffon were arranged into flouncy layers on rah-rah adjacent, ro-coquette-ish miniskirts.
This froth framed the collection, but was far from its central substance. As Griffiths sagely observed: “you don’t want to let the theme wag the dog.” Today that dog was a mongrel bred mostly from a lineage of tailoring and trench jackets. Almost half the exits were suits, or feminine deconstructions of them cut in sharp and varying proportions. These included some lovely oversized pieces in a meshed, spongey fabrication. There were many variations on the trench, including versions with blown out sweetheart necklines and others deconstructed into crop tops and pencil skirts.
Which leads us to the middle. A great many of the looks were open at the midriff, a zone that was punctuated with narrow belts of black elastic. In theory, these acted as a genteel dash of kink and a hard line of restraint to counter the froufrou whimsy of that frothy Rococo excess. However, while they looked great on the Max Mara cast, you suspected they might prove a hard real-world sell. Still, these were show clothes. The final two looks encapsulated this season s Max Mara dialogue between restraint and excess; a knitted, fitted, flounce covered full length dress was followed by an open waisted outfit feathered in black silk petals.
