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Max Mara has always excelled at discipline, its house codes built on clarity and polish. But while last season called upon the brooding poetry of the Brontë sisters, for Spring/Summer 2026, the brand has allowed itself a lighter flirtation with fantasy.
Creative director Ian Griffiths mined Marie Antoinette, the Rococo Queen, not for the excess one might expect, but in a clever push-pull between order and ornament.
The trench coat—Max Mara’s perennial signature—arrived this season with shoulders unfurling into petal-like coronas, more Versailles garden than city sidewalk. Pencil skirts were neat and trim, sprouting gauzy crests at the hip like aquatic fins, while frothy organza skirts fluttered with hundreds of hand-folded fronds. The result was far from costume, but a considered layering of frivolity and foundation.
Colour was gentle. Whispery pastels recalling the famed royal’s porcelain palette, yet tempered by belts, harness straps, and sleek accessories that grounded the collection with a contemporary edge. Griffiths seemed to be saying: yes, elegance can be playful, but it must still earn its place in a modern wardrobe.
There was, too, a spirit of subversion in the mix. Rococo, Griffiths reminds us, was never just decoration.
“Prizing elegance, sweet emotions, and fantasy more than morals and truth; […] ignoring virtue and conventions to cherish only the pleasures you are definitely experiencing now.” This is how the author Novala Takemoto describes Rococo, and what the Maison included in its show notes, asserting that Rococo “embodies the spirit of punk rock and anarchism more than any philosophy.”
Beyond the historical scandal, Antoinette was a woman of ideas and influence—a devout hostess to the creative and studious minds of the Enlightenment period, a patron, and a tastemaker whose salon doubled as a stage for philosophy and art. To see her evoked at Max Mara in this refined way is to appreciate how the frivolous and the intellectual can coexist.
Like a loosened corset, this season, Max Mara offers a wardrobe for women who understand that whimsy, like wit, can hold great power.
