As part of its 60th Anniversary, Max Mara commissioned Russian artist Valery Katsuba to create a series of photographs titled, “ALBATROSS (When memories are awoken by birds)”. The idea behind this project centered on the idea of using coat 101801 as a work of art. While doing his research, Katsuba fell ‘artistically’ in love with Anna Nakhapetova, a ballet dancer for the Bolshoi Theatre. She, together with two male dancers also from the Bolshoi Theatre, became the focus of his new work.
Katsuba chose Spiridonov’s Palace, a nineteenth century stone building, as the location for the shoot. The storyboard tells of a heroine who comes into a cold, abandoned house where her family once lived. In one of the bedrooms, the main character finds a coat that once belonged to her mother or perhaps an ancestor. She puts it on, recalling her childhood, her friendships, and her first love.
The images depict the heroine’s memories coming and going like flashes of conscience and materializing in the image of beautiful dancers. Katsuba commented, “It was a really demanding task, physically speaking, to succeed in obtaining a high impact result and a perfect aesthetic balance, for instance during the shoot, the dancers had to repeat each movement more than 50 times to achieve the perfect balanced shot.”
Represented, interpreted and reinvented in different ways, model 101801 has become the poster child for experimentation and trends in art through a succession of extraordinary events, installation projects and exhibitions conceived throughout the years. In 2001, for the 50th Anniversary of the company, Max Mara commissioned three photos to artist William Wegman. The New York artist put Coat 101801 on one of his Weimaraner dogs, his unmistakable subjects that have been featured in his surreal and playful creations for over thirty years.
In 1998, when the new store opened in Aoyama, Tokyo, a young artist, Miwa Yanagi, was asked to transform the identity of Coat 101801 into a work of art. The result: two large framed photographs portraying the minimalist space of the flagship store, symbolizing an open window to the future. It showed a scenario of populated female figures in metaphysical poses alongside a myriad of camel cashmere coats, abandoned throughout an endless structure of steel and shelves.
This project commissioned to Martine Barrat was in celebration of the opening of the Max Mara flagship store on Madison Avenue, New York, in 1994. The coat is used as a playful object, a protective cover and an entertaining hiding place. Barrat's images were found throughout the city - on billboards and affixed on the buses in Manhattan.
In 2001, for the 50th Anniversary of Max Mara, Francois Berthoud paid homage to the craftsmanship of Coat 101801 by superimposing different parts of the sewing pattern on a multitude of female faces. In this piece, the fragments of the coat are transformed into abstract strokes and like a Warhol painting, are silk-screened repetitions of faces.
Kevin Gray's piece results from a collaboration between Max Mara and Goldsmith College in 1999. The work stems from the question, "What would happen if the Irish Republican Army (IRA) wore Max Mara on their combat missions?” and utilizes model 101801 as a victim. Worn by masked gunmen in the midst of violent acts, the coat assumes a different identity in these images. The elegance of the fashion world interacts with something else that appears unknown and disturbing and the familiar coat appears alien when placed in this new context.
