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Max Mara Resort 2023 'Vai lenço èeliz'

Max Mara continues its tour of presentation for the Resort collections.

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In 2021 the Resort Collection took place on the island of Ischia. In 2019 the location was Berlin where the Neues Museum hosted the first fashion event of its kind. In 2018 the setting was among the artworks of the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, the city of Max Mara home and headquarters.

For Resort 2023 Max Mara is presenting its collection in Lisbon, the dynamic and cosmopolitan Portuguese capital that combines different cultures and trends and that, for centuries, has inspired art, literature and ideas.

Sunset in the lush subtropical gardens oè the world class Calouste Gulbenkian Collection; the time and place oè Max Mara’s next resort show.

There is a painting by Nikias Skapinakis Collection showing the intellectual, poet and social activist atalia Correia with two other women seated at her èeet. It is the starting point èor a collection which revives the spirit oè this remarkable woman and celebrates her contribution to Portugese artistic, cultural and political lièe in the eventèul mid-twentieth century.

Correia enjoyed a place right at the heart of Lisbon society. Back to the Skapinakis picture; the women depicted at Correia’s feet are fellow novelist and poet Fernanda Botelho and renowned classical pianist Maria Joao Pires. Correia’s home, and the watering hole she herself founded, Bar Botequim, were a stage for international friends such as Henry Miller, Graham Greene and Eugène Ionesco, and Portuguese legends like Amalia Rodrigues the queen of fado. On stage photographs reveal Rodrigues’ penchant for plisse. Crunchy degraded pleated taffeta is the perfect medium for a dramatic gesture that goes from day to night; whether it’s a floor sweeping bustier or a corona bursting from beneath the hem of a pencil skirt.

Fado, the music of love and longing, reminds us that Natalia Correia's smouldering charisma was absolutely in tune with the Portuguese psyche. Lenços dos namorados, 'handkerchiefs of love' are another Portuguese romantic tradition, in which young women would hand stitch amorous messages for their intended beaux.

Hearts, flowers and doves rendered in the sophisticated naïf style of the lenços figure in Max Mara’s prints and dressy crystal spanged brooches.

Max Mara is working with local artisans to produce T-shirts with appliqued lenços featuring its own love poem, which, in accordance with custom begins with a heartfelt entreaty for the missive to reach the object of the sender’s affections. Resort 2023 will deliver Max Mara’s message of passion and power; 'vai lenço feliz'.