This season, we are breaking down the spring/summer 2024 collections with a new franchise, The Fashion Week Cheat Sheet. After speaking to the designers about their inspiration, their hero pieces, the faces on the catwalk and the names on the front row, we present everything you need to know about SS24.
“It seems weird, but in 37 years that I’ve been at the company, we’ve never used inspiration which is English,” Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths told us ahead of the brand’s spring/summer 2024 show of his theme for this season, which directly referenced the British Women’s Land Army of the 1940s.
Entitled ‘An Army of Women’, the collection was an ode to this time period, presenting Max Mara’s ‘land girl look’, complete with military-inspired rompers and utilitarian jackets .
Read on for more on the beautiful, star-studded show.
Theme and inspiration
“This season’s collection is inspired, or perhaps provoked, by an old adage which says that we should ‘Beat swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks’, meaning that we should take warlike objects and use them for peaceful purposes,” explains Griffiths.
The collection was directly influenced by this idea, and specifically by the Women’s Land Army in 1940s England, which saw thousands of women join forces to work the land and nourish the nation while so many of the country’s men were off fighting in the war. “The Land Army believed in cultivating its troops. Many got their first taste of learning in its ranks. And their education was not simply to train them for work. The land girls were encouraged to engage in creative pursuits.”
He directly referenced Vita Sackville-West (who wrote a famous book on the topic). “She brings a touch of dark-edged sardonic eccentricity to the Max Mara moodboard. Images of her garden at Sissinghurst inspire chintzy prints with full blown blooms realised in sophisticated black on beige.”
More broadly, the Women’s Land Army style of jodhpurs, siren suits and other workwear classics served as the inspiration for Max Mara’s utility glamour, featuring “pockets and pouches capacious enough for a potting trowel” and “tough reinforced stitching and sturdy suspenders”. There was a cottage green palette, alongside sandy neutrals, trench coats, military-style rompers and jackets, backless sundresses, inspired by gardeners’ aprons.
Setting
“At first glance, you wouldn’t think that a 17th Century Baroque church was a great place to present a collection that’s inspired by the English countryside but we brought in all these trees and plants, and have really made it feel very much like the great country estates with their gardens in England. Suddenly, you don’t feel like you’re in the middle of Milan.”
Hero pieces
“I really struggle with these questions, especially so soon after the show. Picking your favourite pieces is like choosing between your children. Which one do I love the most? Well, obviously, the first look and the last look are really important. But so is everything that comes in between. If I have to highlight certain pieces, I would say the hot pants, the pencil skirts and heels. We showed everything with big heel, they’re good big heels – they give this whole new attitude and make you want to strut. That’s what this season’s mood is all about.”
Who was there?
Yara Shahid and Olivia Palermo were among those to sit on the front row.
For more straight from the Milan Fashion Week catwalks, head this way.
