There are only a handful of fashion houses still run as family businesses. Italian label Max Mara is one of them. Founded in 1951 by Achille Maramotti and now run by his three children, Luigi, Ignazio and Maria Ludovica, the brand celebrated its 55th anniversary in 2006 with the launch of a retrospective exhibition titled Coats! 55 years of Italian Fashion, paying homage to Achille's most iconic garment, one of the first pieces he ever created.
'Heritage is very important to our father,' says Luigi Maramotti, the brand's chairman. 'So we decided to bring this exhibition together to celebrate his legacy and to show people what the Max Mara brand is about.'
After stints in Berlin and Tokyo, the exhibition has landed in Beijing at the National Art Museum of China. Curated by Adelheid Rasche, director of Kunstbibliothek National Museums of Berlin, and designed by architecture firm Migliore+Servetto, the retrospective takes viewers chronologically through the design, production and cultural history of Max Mara's coats, from the brand's beginnings to the present day.
'One of Achille Maramotti's philosophies was appreciating one's own history and how imperative it is when looking forward,' says Rasche. 'Therefore, we thought that the brand's coats would be the perfect metaphor to illustrate its evolution, as well as that of women in the past few decades.'
'The coat was always important to my father because, one, he considered it one of the most technically difficult pieces to design and, two, because he thought it was symbolic of the emancipation of women, which is very much what the brand stands for,' says Maramotti. 'The way this exhibition was designed was to show how the design, style and cut of the coats evolved with both technical developments as well as with the evolving cultural progress of women.'
Covering more than 3,767 sq ft, the exhibition is spread across five rooms, each with a different theme. The first room takes viewers through the history of the brand during the 1950s and 1960s, showcasing the very first coats designed by Achille. An extensive selection of photographs, sketches and written texts from the era are on display.
