Massimo Dutti chooses Villa Cavrois as the site of its Limited Edition Fall-Winter 2023 Collection campaign. The expansive modernist mansion was built in 1932 by the French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for textile industrialist Paul Cavrois. The massive house was designed in the style of a futurist museum to house his wife and seven children in close proximity to his modern factories for spinning, weaving and dyeing cotton and wool.

Rejecting the styles of architecture popular in the region, Cavrois aligned himself with Mallet-Stevens, who rivaled Le Corbusier as the most influential figure in French architecture.

AOC isn’t prepared to make the case for the influence of Italian futurism in the campaign. But the film supporting the Massimo Dutti campaign with models Rebecca Leigh Longendyke, Ji Shun, Ylang Messenguiral, and Cyrielle Lalande has — on the surface — a strong Miu Miu vibe in terms of its intellectualism.

In AOC’s opinion, the self-absorbed dialogue about the architecture of the models’ minds is much more aloof than Miu Miu. There’s also a total absence of wit — which is not a criticism. The film fascinates me, frankly, prompting a reread of my own 2009 posts about Filippo Tommaso Marinett’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism’.

A key plank of the platform was a hatred of women — softened to mean the traditional ways of women and a rejection of what we would call the nurturing Gaia principle. Many were considered early feminists and supported the idea of birthing babies in the laboratory, to keep women free to work and — ideally — maximize their intellectual skills.

The futurist movement did have a place for women who rejected traditional roles and didn’t weep about any loss — like our models exploring their inner brain architecture, with few or NO doors to an outside world that takes them into experiences larger than themselves. Especially with all our technology, many people are living in brain architecture in sync with this film.

The modern lines and neutral colors of the Massimo Dutti Limited Edition Fall 2023 collection play so well against the backstory of Villa Cavrois.

I can hear a Massimo Dutti podcast discussing not the long coats, wide-legs trousers and lack of ornamentation, styled by Elodie David Touboul, but the intersection of the clothes, the architecture, the film — then and now.

Colin Dodgson [IG] is the photographer, with film direction by MartinSalvador Studio [IG]./ Makeup by Petros Petrohilos; hair by Kalle Eklund

This campaign is fascinatingly well done in AOC’s opinion. I’ll be thinking about it. ~ Anne