Hollywood has always held a special position in the heart of Italian fashion house Salvatore Ferragamo, and Maximilian Davis, the brand’s current creative director, is aware of this. That’s why he has decided to return there, to take inspiration and relate his Fall/Winter 2023 proposal to this place.
After seeing the collection unveiled, called “Cinema, we can only say: Long live the wardrobes of the stars and bless them, because Davis has found part of the influences he needed, specifically in the wardrobes that Ferragamo worked with throughout the 1950s.
“It’s how Ferragamo started, making shoes for films in the 1930s, and that grew into building relationships with movie stars like Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s,” explains the designer. “I was interested in using their glamour and beauty, and their way of dressing, as a reference, but looking at how we could make it feel modern for today.”
Task accomplished, and with flying colors, as Maximilian offered a line that exuded modern yet refined beauty, adopted by an alien future, in which mid-century volumes and silhouettes were clearly relegated and gave way to garments such as technical cropped bomber jackets and shirts. Double-sided tailoring was also not lacking, offering crisp, cinematic clarity or, shrunken and fitted at the waist, updating tradition through the ease of its stretch wool gabardine.
A new vocabulary of cuts has entered the house and altered the classic sensibility: sharply cut suits, or furs that open to reveal brushstrokes of color, speak as much to Davis’s exacting aesthetic as to the disruptive spirit of the greasers of the 1950s. Biker dress codes were intermingled, in flocked velvet or metallic-coated denim, white viscose T-shirts, and brogue shoes with bulging toecaps.
Exotic prints made the offer more attractive, which, having been scanned and treated before being screen-printed, flooded the accessories. The timeless touch to these items is given by the distorted effect to make them look like heritage pieces taken from the past but brought into the future, like the bag from the SS98 season, reworked in new proportions and with new appliqués; the “Wanda” bag appears in a myriad of new embodiments.
Maximilian Davis is definitely taking the Ferragamo fashion house in the right direction and even bringing it back to life.
Check out the collection below:
