Fashionable Retrospective

Max Mara’s 60th Anniversary: Coats Exhibition in Moscow

MaxMara will open Coats!, an exhibition in Moscow on October 11. See pictures from the show.

To celebrate its 60^th Anniversary, MaxMara will open an expansive exhibition, “Coats! MaxMara, 60 Years of Italian Fashion,” on October 11^th at the State Historical Museum in Moscow. The exhibition includes work from several well known-artists—from William Wegman to Francois Berthoud—who all created works inspired by Max Mara’s classic overcoat.

But it also includes a new piece by Russian artist Valery Katsuba, entitled ALBATROSS (When memories are awoken by birds). In it, Katsuba captures the ballet dancer Anna Nakhapetova during a rehearsal in Moscow’s Spiridonov Palace, (adjacent to the Bolshoi Ballet) in, of course, the classic MaxMara overcoat. The concept for the piece centers around a heroine who comes into an abandoned home where she family once lived—and finds her mother’s old overcoat inside. Once she puts it on, childhood memories flood into her mind—which she visualizes in the form of beautiful male dancers.

Katsuba says he was inspired by everything from Russian classical literature and Brazilian folk art in the creation of ALBATROSS. “For me it was the turn of the 20^th century—Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Anatoly Mariengof,” he explains of his inspiration. “In the novels and plays of that time a coat was a very important part of a wordbook, for Anna Karenina and Three Sisters.” He continues: “It was a time when writers analyzed the complicity of love. And the complicity we have invented was love of two young men towards one beautiful girl in MaxMara coat.”

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