Max Mara Spring 2023 Collection with Adut, Annemary, Dara by Ethan James Green

Max Mara’s Spring-Summer 2023 campaign has sophisticated swagger. Models trio Adut Akech, Annemary Aderibigbe and Dara Allen step it up to remind us that they are far more than muses or mannequins. Fashion editor Tonne Goodman styles the shoot — a collection of sophisticated essentials with discreet details that she herself would wear — in images photographed by Ethan James Green [IG].

Women and Swagger

Looking at the images immediately took me back to December 2018, when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi exited a tough meeting with then president Donald Trump.

Pelosi was wearing the 2013 Max Mara ‘Fire Coat’ in red, and I thought ‘Beale Street’ director Barry Jenkins was about to lose his mind. The coat was recycled for the occasion, after Pelosi wore it for the first time at the second inauguration of Barack Obama as America’s president in January 2013.

The shot of Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leaving a hard-as-nails meeting with Trump went viral, generating such digital heat that Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths responded that the coat would be reissued.

After reliving this great American woman moment just now [and boy did we progressives need it], I still could not let go of a deep conviction that something else was going on these images.

So off I went to Vogue Runway to read Luke Leitch’s review of the Spring 2023 Max Mara show. AOC struck paydirt.

To Ian Griffiths credit and Leitch being will to write about it, there’s some very serious feminist thinking going on in the roots of the spring 2023 show. I encourage you to read the entire Max Mara review.

Ian Griffiths is becoming the patron saint of overlooked and underestimated historical “muses.” Following his resort reassessment of fabulous-’50s Lisbon radical Natália Correia, Griffiths today turned his restorative eye two decades earlier. It focused on Renée Perle, a lover and much-snapped subject of early alpha-photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue. “But she also painted all these self-portraits that were absolutely panned by the critics,” said Griffiths. Then there was Eileen Gray, who designed her own feminocratic ideal of the modernist house, the Villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, in 1929. This was much coveted by Le Corbusier, who painted murals in its interior while staying there and was sometimes even wrongly credited with its wonderful design. As Griffiths suggested, both women were cast as muses—objects of masculine inspiration—rather than artists who were themselves inspired. Said Griffiths, “Germaine Greer writes about this: Calling a woman a muse is a way of putting them in a box.”

“Germaine Greer writes about this [accomplished women inspiring men to high levels of performance]: Calling a woman a muse is a way of putting them in a box.”

AOC has always liked Ian Griffiths because he’s a male designer willing to explore his own contradictions. He does just that in speaking about the 2023 campaign inspired by the French Riviera. Griffiths has not been caught up in trying to make women ‘its’ or ‘theys’, degendering us in such a way that the very concept of women’s rights is no longer necessary. We’re all humans, no need to discuss the failure of mostly — but not exclusively — men to acknowledge women’s inequality.

Griffiths realized that those same women — Natália Correia, Renée Perle and Elizabeth Grey — were nailed to his own inspiration boards. Once again the focus was not on the achievements of the women themselves but how they served as his muses for the Spring 2023 collection and these very ads.

Not very many men achieve this level of clarity on this uber-complex set of contradictions between the roles of men and the roles of women. And AOC is distrustful of men who make the attempt, but Griffiths won me over in 2018. We should note that he has long grappled with this topic and he can always be counted on to support women artists. But this time it seems that he not only dove into the waters of the Mediterranean sea — which are filled with ancient women’s history — but Griffiths decided to speak about the experience and his own collaboration in it.

My initial thought as we close was Coco Chanel promoting trousers and her deep connection to the French Riviera. But now the secrets of the Mediterranean and buried treasures of women’s history are on my mind. ~ Anne