A Hard Line

How the artist Liu Wei pushed the Italian luxury brand Max Mara beyond its comfort zone.

- Alix Browne

On a sunny morning in mid-April, a small team from Max Mara is seated around a low table piled with fabric swatches in the library of the PuLi Hotel, in Shanghai. Most of the group is already on a second or third strong coffee, having arrived from Milan the day before, but Ian Griffiths, the creative director of the Italian brand since 2013, is on point. He is about to present his preliminary ideas for the Max Mara pre-fall 2017 collection to the artist Liu Wei. “It’s a complete step in the dark,” Griffiths says. “Like coming to a college tutorial to see what the master thinks.”

As is the case with many Western luxury brands, Max Mara has gone into China in a big way, with 400 stores for all of its various labels (including Sportmax and Max & Co.) across the country, and four for its marquee Max Mara label in Shanghai alone. In December, it will present a runway show here featuring a special capsule collection designed in collaboration with Liu, who has also agreed to create the set. And in what is now becoming a routine practice in the fashion industry, many of those runway looks will be displayed in the store windows around the world—and be available for purchase—the very same day as the show.

“The view out my window looks like one of your works,” Griffiths says to Liu, referring to the artist’s gridlike paintings, as he pulls up a photo he took through the blinds of his hotel room this morning on his iPhone. An initial meeting took place earlier in the year, in Paris, where Liu had been part of an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Today, Griffiths begins to unfurl the fabrics his design team has been developing in the interim, mostly the rich alpacas and double-face cashmeres for which Max Mara is known, in urban shades you might call sandstone and concrete.