When Maximilian Davis presented his debut Ferragamo show at this long-shuttered central Milan palazzo almost exactly three years ago, it was a work in progress. Its owners (the Ferragamo family) were redeveloping it as a hotel. Now named Portrait Milano, it has become a thriving, booked-out, jet-set hot spot that’s especially famed for its €26 pasta bianco.
Davis’s return to his starting point this morning saw his original damp red-sand runway replaced with a waterlogged black carpet: Both shows just missed the rain. His elevator pitch for the collection was “exploring Ferragamo’s connection to Africana in the 1920s.” That decade was when the company’s founder, an immigrant from Campania named Salvatore Ferragamo, built a thriving shoe shop in Los Angeles, making shoes for movie stars and movie productions. After a car accident, however, Salvatore returned to his homeland in 1927 in order to try to build a business that could produce handmade shoes at scale.
Davis’s creative eye settled on design prompts including a 1925 shot of silent-screen actress Lola Todd in head-to-toe leopard print, which linked to a Davis-cited Ferragamo shoe in leopard from the same period. He said he thought about the adoption of “exotic” codes in relation to the dawn of the Jazz Age, mentioning the Harlem Renaissance, Josephine Baker, and the (slightly later) space-taking proportions of the zoot suit.
Modernized flapper dresses plus skirts and slit blouses in silk georgette blended leopard and cuttlefish prints in lush color combinations. Slip dresses came in scalloped silk panels that framed sections of lace. Strapped mules knotted with satin bows delivered further boudoir touches reimagined for evening.
Davis also considered the liberation women enjoyed in that permissive age: “They were coming out of the Victorian era, where they were wearing corsets. And women were now wearing straight silhouettes and everything was a lot more relaxed.” This led him to the illustrations of John Held Jr., whose covers for Life magazine “were presenting women in speakeasies and dressing in flapper dresses and with the embroidery, the jewelry, and the Art Deco hand in all of the embellishments,” Davis explained.
To reflect the loosening of gender norms at the time, Davis worked in masculine codes for womenswear pieces. Some printed dresses incorporated cummerbund details, and some were developed as cummerbunds that had been blown up and recontextualized through design. Men’s ties were reworked into sashes and dress panels. Both menswear tailoring and women’s eveningwear were often punctuated by belts or sashes at the waist, a styling point that acted as a bridge allowing connection and creative contamination between the two.
Not all menswear was framed as a foil to womenswear. Davis’s exploration and modernization of zoot suit proportions was particularly successful in his deconstructed, soft-shouldered, long-skirted blazer-chore hybrids: In a brown striped herringbone or coral-touched red, these were easy to watch. Shoes, so foundationally significant here, included a “cage”-design leather pump that paid homage to a 1920s Ferragamo original first sold with three color combinations of inner sock-slippers. Satin mules with embroidered beadwork acted as beyond-the-boudoir flapper slippers to match with Davis’s lace slip dresses.
