Backstage after the Prada show, someone asked Miuccia Prada if the four loose black dresses with which it began were a comment on fashion’s obsession with the Little Black Dress.
On his moodboard, an image of a woman looking out of a plane window was pinned next to a portrait of the Brontë sisters, “because I never forget that the woman I’m designing for is more likely to be getting on a plane to New York or marching through the corridors of power than marching across the moors.
Prada’s roomy dresses are an answer to restrictive women’s fashion, while Max Mara presents outfits for ‘the corridors of power’.
We all have our dramas going on inside, so our clothes should, too.” A weekend in Yorkshire led him to the Brontë heroines Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre, and a collection of rustling greatcoats, hardy layers with bellow pockets, chunky boots, stiff tweeds and grand velvets.
Ian Griffiths, the British creative director of Max Mara, starts with what real women wear and builds fashion out from there, rather than the other way around.
