There’s nothing like a Max Mara group catwalk strut to get the blood flowing at Milan Fashion Week. Doutzen Kroes, Candice Swanepoel and Gigi Hadid opened the spring/summer 2020 show to gun barrel sequence music wearing gun metal grey. The inspo was writ large: Modesty Blaise, Killing Eve’s Villanelle and a possible female James Bond were all on creative director Ian Griffiths’s moodboard. “I’ve been watching a lot of television,” he laughed, backstage, citing a burgeoning obsession with female assassins by way of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. “Thrillers are a way that we explore what might be dark and dangerous through a prism that makes them glamorous and exciting – that’s what we all need.”
According to Max Mara, assassins – emphasis on the sass – wear pocket-strewn utility shirts, crisp pleated shorts, sheer knee-high socks and clippy court shoes (sometimes in fruity gelato pastels). They wear sharp-shouldered trench coats and high-waisted khaki cigarette trousers. Occasionally, they throw in some ruffled polka dot numbers and carry giant leather weekend bags – there’s that license to thrill, after all, and you always need something roomy in which to transport the wads of cash you are inevitably delivering to one dodgy geezer or another in exchange for intel. And don’t forget the sinuous bias cut evening dresses in body-skimming silks. To borrow the tag line from the 1966 film starring Monica Viti: “I specialise in espionage techniques designed to render men helpless.” Let’s hope the next-season shoppers feel the same.
Photos are courtesy of ALESSANDRO LUCIONI / GORUNWAY.COM
