Max Mara has opened ‘The Max!’, an anniversary exhibition at the Long Museum in Shanghai, celebrating 75 years of the Italian house. Curated by Olivier Saillard, the showcase runs through June 28 and traces the brand’s evolution from a single Reggio Emilia coat factory to a global ready-to-wear power with an unmistakable outerwear vocabulary.
For those who cannot make it to Shanghai before June 28, the brand has produced a comprehensive monograph with Saillard’s curatorial notes and archival imagery, scheduled for global release this fall. ‘The Max!’ stands as both a retrospective and a directional statement—a reminder that luxury built on a single, perfected idea can sustain itself across generations without needing to reinvent its foundational logic.
The choice of Shanghai for this milestone exhibition reflects the brand’s strategic priorities in 2026. China has become Max Mara’s fastest-growing market, with a customer base that responds to the house’s particular register of luxury: visible quality without ostentatious branding, construction details that reward close looking. The exhibition draws heavily on the brand’s Chinese archives, including pieces originally made for the market’s early adopters in the 1990s.
The exhibition is organized around the garment that made Max Mara: the coat. From the iconic 101801 in camel hair—designed by Anne-Marie Beretta in 1981—to more recent explorations in double-faced cashmere and bonded technical fabrics, the show maps how a single silhouette family can mutate across decades while retaining its essential character. Saillard has arranged the pieces not chronologically but thematically, letting fabrics and construction techniques tell the story across eras.
Seven decades of design might read as a static display in less capable hands, but Saillard’s curatorial instinct leans into the tensions that define Max Mara: the interplay between masculine tailoring and feminine drape, between industrial precision and handcrafted irregularity, between the coat as shelter and the coat as statement. The Long Museum’s industrial concrete spaces provide an appropriate counterpoint to the softness of the materials on display.
