Max Mara

Max Mara was founded in 1951 in Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy, by Achille Maramotti. He started with a single coat and a suit. His aim was to offer well-made manufactured clothes at a time when many Italian women still went to dressmakers or, if they could afford it, to the Roman couturiers, and his most far-sighted idea was a brand that did not depend on a designer's personality but stood for Italian craftsmanship, with a name that could be pronounced in any language. The business he built, combining tailoring tradition with factory methods, made him one of the fathers of Italian ready-to-wear.

The company deliberately kept its designers anonymous. From the 1960s onwards Maramotti hired outside talent to design collections without credit, among them Karl Lagerfeld, Emmanuelle Khanh, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Guy Paulin, Narciso Rodriguez and Anne-Marie Beretta, whose 101801 coat of 1981, a double-breasted wrap in camel wool and cashmere with kimono sleeves, became the house's emblem and has stayed in production ever since. Sportmax, a younger and more fashion-forward line, launched in 1969, and the group added Weekend Max Mara, Marina Rinaldi, Max&Co. and many others, eventually counting dozens of labels.

The British designer Ian Griffiths joined in 1987 and became the house's lead designer, later with the title of creative director, a role he says did not previously exist at Max Mara. Under his direction the label's coat programme has become its calling card: the 101801 and its many variations and, from 2013, the fluffy alpaca-and-silk Teddy Bear coat, which became one of the most copied garments of the 2010s. Runway shows in Milan have given the label a far stronger public profile than in its anonymous years.

The house has long linked fashion and art. Achille Maramotti, who bought his first important work of contemporary art, by Alberto Burri, in his twenties, built a significant collection, with works by Giorgio Morandi, Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel among others, opened to the public as the Collezione Maramotti in the company's former factory in 2007, and since 2005 Max Mara has supported the Max Mara Art Prize for Women with the Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2015 it worked with Renzo Piano's studio on the Whitney bag for the new Whitney Museum in New York.

Achille Maramotti, who also became deputy chairman of the bank Credito Emiliano, died in January 2005 aged 78, and his children, Luigi, Ignazio and Ludovica, own and run the group, which remains private and headquartered in Reggio Emilia. More than seventy years after that first camel coat, the house is still defined by it.