MaxMara's designers read the memo about this season's
trends—Japanese influences, deconstructed tailoring, jumpsuits,
and pajama suits—then went off and did their own thing with
them. What emerged took an early-eighties street-style turn:
something from the moment when Comme des Garçons was new, Jean
Paul Gaultier was emerging, and London's Buffalo Girls were
dressing in an androgynous-rocker kind of way. It fits MaxMara's
agenda to find a new raison d'être for a jacket, coat, and suit,
of course—and this time the team worked it out by cutting
jackets with volume in the back; making a gray pinstripe suit
with a forties shoulder, nipped waist, and calf-length skirt;
and paring back the neckline of a narrow belted trench. All this
made sense, but the dippy-hemlined skirts à la Comme circa 1985
were a reference too clunky to look convincing.  As for the
jumpsuits, well, MaxMara can claim to have been vindicated on
that one. The house has been doing them for a couple of seasons
already, and now, as so many others