How a 27-Year-Old Designer Is Reviving Your Grandma’s Favourite Shoe Brand – For Rihanna Fans, the Super Bowl Is Just One Big Comeback Concert – The coolest clothes right now
Dear Reader,
Today the Editorial Team of TextileFuture’s Newsletter has selected three items for your personal reading.
The first feature is entitled “How a 27-Year-Old Designer Is Reviving Your Grandma’s Favourite Shoe Brand”. It is the portrait of the new designer for Italian Ferrogama.
The second item bears the title “For Rihanna Fans, the Super Bowl Is Just One Big Comeback Concert”. It will introduce you to certain aspects of Rihanna’s life.
The third feature “The coolest clothes right now” is showing you, well illustrated with captions, insight in the world of fashion.
Again, these items were firstly published in the Wall Street Magasin.
We do hope that the selection of reading will be pleasant for you.
Please don’t forget to return to the next edition of the Newsletter of TextileFuture, and why not subscribe to News and Newsletter completely free of cost and you will find the items directly in the inbox of your email.
Our best wishes will accompany you during the ongoing week.
With kindest regards,
The Editorial Team of TextileFuture.
Here beginns the first feature:
How a 27-Year-Old Designer Is Reviving Your Grandma’s Favourite Shoe Brand
When Italian heritage brand Ferragamo, led by CEO Marco Gobbetti, selected British designer Maximilian Davis, it was making a big statement. Davis aims to prove he was the right choice.
It was a lot to take in on the first day,” says Maximilian Davis, 27, remembering the late-winter morning in 2022 when he flew from London to Florence to begin his job as the creative director of Italian fashion brand Ferragamo. When he was driven to the nearly 100-year-old company’s headquarters—which he describes as the size of “six large IKEAs”—he noticed founder Salvatore Ferragamo‘s distinctive signature on the on the building and thought, Wow, it’s actually happening.
“Honestly, it’s a huge machine,” Davis continues, referring to the company that Ferragamo launched in 1927. Ferragamo had six children with his wife, Wanda, a powerful matriarch who oversaw the company after her husband’s death in 1960. The Ferragamo family is still involved, owning about 65 percent of the publicly traded company’s shares, with the couple’s son Leonardo serving as chairman of the board. On that first day, Davis met his new assistant, who showed him around and introduced him to the different teams he’d be working with. “Obviously, I had trouble remembering everyone’s names because I think it’s 17 designers, but it was exciting,” he says.
Today Davis splits his time between a hotel in Florence and an apartment in Milan. Ferragamo has offices and design studios in both cities. Florence is still the heart of the company, where they cobbled the shoes that garnered Hollywood fans like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and created innovations including the wedge heel. Upon arriving, Davis got to work immediately on the spring 2023 collection, which was shown in Milan in September 2022. He presented a parade of androgynous tailoring, head-to-toe leather looks, heat-sensitive garments, fluid eveningwear, bedazzled looks inspired by a pair of sparkly shoes worn by Monroe and, most declaratively, a new signature shade of red.
The striking colour is a specific scarlet chosen by Davis to replace the brand’s previous bourgeois burgundy. “It’s something that we were discussing before I physically joined Ferragamo,” says the designer. “The red has always been there,” he says, “it just needed tweaking…. Making it a very bright and shocking red really gave it energy and excitement.” The adjustment is a case study of how he wanted to approach the rebranding, which also included chopping the Salvatore off the brand name (as Hedi Slimane did when he removed the Yves from Saint Laurent in 2012) and hiring renowned art director Peter Saville to create a new, all-uppercase logo in a custom typeface.
“It’s not trying to disregard what Ferragamo has been in the past, it’s about just taking it and making it feel new and modern,” says Davis.
The designer first saw the original curvy-signature logo as a kid in Manchester, England, where his father made clothing that his mother modeled. “My mum’s a huge fan of shoes,” says Davis, so he began noticing the logo on the brand’s packaging. The classic Gancini curved-metal buckle belt too was part of his fashion lexicon from an early age, the kind of upright thing the men in his family would wear. His father, an entrepreneur from Jamaica, and his mother, a model from Trinidad, emigrated to England as children in the 1970s and met during secondary school.
“His work is a portal to the personal story that is unique to him,” says Davis’s friend Rafael Pavarotti, a Brazilian photographer who shot Davis’s debut Ferragamo collection for the brand’s ad campaign.
Davis says his father’s work did influence him: “It’s clean in the same way that I design as well. His taste for tailoring has always been there, and I think this heavily influenced my design aesthetic.”
Davis’s extended family’s approach to dressing—strict tailoring, the propriety of their Sunday best—is always present in his designs. His restrained touch was developed over the two years he ran his own brand, Maximilian. After graduating from the London College of Fashion and a stint under menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner, Davis launched his line in 2020 with help from design incubator Fashion East. By the time Rihanna wore a cream Maximilian miniskirt suit to accept a national hero of Barbados award in 2021, a star was born. (He shuttered the line to focus full-time on Ferragamo.)
It was Davis’s right-now relevance, along with a respect for tailoring and tradition, that caught the attention of Ferragamo’s newly appointed CEO, Marco Gobbetti, in early 2022. Gobbetti, a heritage-brand whisperer who had previously worked at Burberry, Celine and Givenchy, has refined creative-director hunts into a process he describes as combining “a bit of science along with instinct and emotional components.” The search always begins with the question of who the brand is, he says. That choice of pronoun is not accidental: “I refer to the brand as a who because I think it’s a living organism.”
Creatively Ferragamo had been in a bit of a coma in recent years. It wasn’t churning out the kind of dresses, heels and bags that Hollywood stylists and “it girls” were reaching for. In Davis, Gobbetti found someone who could be excited by the richness of the history and the archive but also connect with the next generation, he says.
Davis says his vision is inclusive. “I think especially doing this in Italy, it’s very powerful.” For a Black man to take the helm of an Italian fashion brand is still a strong statement. Davis says he hopes that his appointment will show the younger generation, and people of color, that this is just the starting point of change. He’s already received messages from people on Instagram telling him how thankful they are for him. “I hope I can be someone that people can follow,” he says.
Although there are just two Davis-designed collections to peruse, new Ferragamo pieces have already been worn by actor Zendaya, model Naomi Campbell, rapper Chaeyoung, singer Dua Lipa and Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton. When I May Destroy You creator Michaela Coel wore a hooded, crystal-embellished Ferragamo gown on the red carpet, it was a big moment for a brand that had been relatively quiet in Hollywood.
“Glamour has been missing” from the company of late, says Dana Thomas, the author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, who also wrote last year’s film on Ferragamo, Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, directed by Luca Guadagnino. In recent years, the company was “so busy being conservative [and] bourgeois.” Then, she says, comes Dua Lipa at an October 2022 Vogue Forces of Fashion event, in a sleek black strapless top and pants from Davis’s first collection for Ferragamo. Bam! Glam.
“I’ve been a fan since the very beginning of his [Maximilian] collections at Fashion East,” writes Lipa in an email. “He represents the new generation of designers coming out of London…. I think what inspires me the most is his honoring of his roots.”
Ferragamo’s connection to Hollywood runs deep. After Salvatore Ferragamo emigrated to Southern California from Italy in 1915, he began creating shoes for movie stars, including Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, and working on films like Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Later, after he had established his headquarters back in Italy in 1927, celebrities such as Hepburn and Greta Garbo made the pilgrimage to his shoe store in a Florentine palazzo.
Early on in his tenure, Davis studied this history via Guadagnino’s documentary and delved into the archives. He spent two days going through all the shoes, all the ready-to-wear pieces and all the bags, pulling out pieces that he felt were modern. In Davis’s first bags for the house, that process of re-evaluation is evident, with the Gancini hardware going from clunky to streamlined and a general lightening and flattening of shapes.
While ready-to-wear is fundamental to defining Davis’s aesthetic, Gobbetti says, ultimately, “This brand is built on leather goods and shoes. So clearly those will be somehow the economic engine and the volume engine of the company.”
Leather goods and shoes are currently responsible for 80 % of the brand’s sales, which totalled USD 1,27 billion in 2021, up 29.5 % from the year before. Gobbetti says he thinks the company can double its size, to over USD 2 billion, in four or five years.
Ferragamo’s new designer, 27-year-old Manchester, England, native Maximilian Davis.
When Davis got the big job, his one splurge was on a leather jacket (designed by a competitor he is loath to name). He wears it at least three times a week. He says, “I’ve never been able to buy a jacket like this before, so I thought if I get this job I will, and then I did. So I’m going to get my money’s worth.”
His daily routine is simple and focused. In Milan, he wakes up at 6 a.m. and walks the 20 to 30 minutes to work while listening to music (his current rotation includes Kelela and Chaka Khan). Then, his days at the office pass by in a blur of meetings and fittings. He finishes by 8 p.m. and is usually in bed by 10 p.m. He sings the gospel of eight hours of sleep, saying it helps him stay calm.
Sometimes he goes out for dinner with friends—Milan’s Giacomo Bistrot and the seafood at Langosteria are favorites—but more often than not he cooks for himself. He often makes Japanese or Vietnamese food, delighting in distilling a complex recipe into one portion. He mentions the scene in Bridesmaids where Kristen Wiig’s character bakes one exquisite cupcake, for herself.
“I love the flavours and the different ingredients that take part in creating this one amazing taste,” he says, adding, “I guess it’s the same way with designing or making a product: Small elements can have an amazing outcome. And if it’s really good, people want it even more.”
Here is the beginning of the second item
For Rihanna Fans, the Super Bowl Is Just One Big Comeback Concert
The superstar has remained largely silent on record and on the stage for seven years, fuelling intense anticipation for her halftime show performance
Rihanna gen Rihanna’s tour behind ‘Anti,’ her most recent record, ended in 2016. Her fans have been clamoring for her return to the concert stage ever since. Photo: Elena Di Vincenzo/Getty Images.
By guest author Neil Shah from the Wall Street Journal Magazine.
Jennifer Olney doesn’t care who wins the Super Bowl—as long as it’s Rihanna.
The longtime superfan is having friends over on Sunday to sip Bloody Marys and watch this year’s game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. But the real touchdown she’s waiting for is Rihanna hitting the field for her 13-minute halftime performance.
“To me, it’s a concert,” says Ms. Olney, 37 years old, a psychology student and mother of two in Vancouver, Wash. “The entire Sunday is all just about—what is Rihanna going to do?”
For non-sports fans, the Super Bowl halftime show is always the main event. But this year the rivalry between the three-hour-or-so game and its midway musical performance is arguably bigger than ever. That is because of Rihanna’s unusually long absence from pop music, which has fueled intense anticipation for her next moves. Compared with past Super Bowls, Rihanna’s comeback during the halftime show at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., has the ability to break the internet in a way that the game itself isn’t likely to do.
Fan hysteria over Rihanna is brewing. Adele captured headlines recently for saying she was going to Sunday’s game just to see Rihanna. Rumors are swirling about a potential tour announcement, with some fans hoping for a post-halftime show ad breaking the news. Rihanna herself has winked playfully at the outsize fervour by selling USD 59.95 T-shirts that read: “Rihanna Concert Interrupted by a Football Game, Weird But Whatever.”
One of the most consistent chart-toppers of the 21st century, Rihanna has racked up 14 No. 1 hits in her career. Her most recent record, 2016’s “Anti,” is the longest-charting R&B album by a female artist in the history of the Billboard 200 chart. Like Beyoncé, Kanye West and Frank Ocean, Rihanna’s music fueled a new renaissance in hip-hop and R&B in the 2010s, with the proudly idiosyncratic “Anti” inspiring other artists to push boundaries in the R&B genre.
But for years now, she has been the music business’s sleeping giant. The Barbadian pop star has focused entirely on her lucrative fashion and beauty businesses, which, according to Forbes, have made her a billionaire. The 34-year-old Robyn Rihanna Fenty is also building a family, having her first child last year with the rapper AUSDAP Rocky. Aside from a few guest appearances on others’ tracks and two recent songs for the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” soundtrack, including the Oscar-nominated “Lift Me Up,” Rihanna has been silent, teasing fans about makeup, not music. Her tour behind “Anti” ended in 2016. Her long-yearned-for ninth studio album, dubbed “R9” by her most ardent fans, who are called the Navy, has achieved mythic proportions in pop culture—akin to past cultural obsessions over Dr. Dre’s “Detox” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy.”
So far, details about Rihanna’s halftime show have been kept under tight wraps.
“It’s going to be something that people haven’t seen before in a halftime show,” says Jesse Collins, the show’s executive producer alongside Jay-Z and Roc Nation. “The fact that she has not performed in a while is just going to really reignite her as a music icon,” he says. Asked about the effects of the unusually high expectations, Mr. Collins says he’s tried to keep his head down and just focus on perfecting the 13 minutes. “I want people to go, ‘S—, it should have been an hour.’”
Rihanna’s Navy, for their part, are readying themselves for a celebration of her legacy—one that includes her biggest hits (“Umbrella,” “We Found Love,” “Diamonds”) and a guest or two—possibly Jay-Z, who signed her when she was a teenager. Jay-Z and Roc Nation, which manages Rihanna, partnered with the NFL in 2019, giving Roc Nation influence over the halftime show. Superfans say Rihanna announcing a brief tour or a string of mini-residencies makes sense given her family and business obligations; but few expect an album to suddenly arrive, at least not yet. A spokeswoman for Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment conglomerate, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Even Rihanna fans who love sports are joking about Rihanna vs. the Super Bowl.
Rachel Peralta, a 22-year-old college student in Orange County, Calif., comes from a big sports family and is a Cincinnati Bengals fan—but when the Bengals lost to the Chiefs she took to Twitter and called the Super Bowl “Rihanna’s concert with [a] special appearance by the Chiefs and the Eagles.” Once the dust settles next week on the big game, “I think she will be talked about more,” Ms. Peralta says.
Then there’s Wissam Melhem, 24, who runs a Rihanna social-media fan page and says he and Rihanna have direct-messaged a few times, as she does with such accounts. A communications specialist who moved to the U.S. from Lebanon six years ago, Mr. Melhem bought the “Rihanna Concert Interrupted by a Football Game” T-shirt immediately, along with other merch, for a total of USD200—but he has never seen her perform live.
He invited other superfans with fan accounts who he’d met online to watch the Super Bowl at his apartment in Phoenix. The plan was for people to fly in on Friday—from Florida, New York, California, Massachusetts, Illinois. After a weekend sleepover and plenty of Rihanna-related ruminating, they’d gather around the TV for Sunday’s game.
But then they got lucky.
According to Mr. Melhem, one of the seven friends flying in had responded to a Fenty Instagram post on Jan. 26 that had asked fans: “Navy, who’s pulling up to Arizona?” A few days later, they received an invitation to watch the halftime show from the field, courtesy of Roc Nation, Apple Music (the halftime show’s sponsor) and Fenty. The only catch is that it’s just for the halftime show—they can’t see the game itself.
But that’s fine by Mr. Melhem, who says he isn’t a football fan.
“That’s more than enough,” he says. Rihanna “was why I was excited for the Super Bowl anyways.”
This is the start of the last feature:
The coolest clothes ever
Go against convention in strong styles that don’t shy away from playing tough, like a punk-rock choker or a leather jacket–inspired ballgown.
Pin timeless chic on a mix of the traditional and the unexpected. Anna Juvander in a Dior dress, price upon request, Dior boutiques nationwide, necklace courtesy of Trust Judy Blame Archive, more information at info@trustjudyblame.com
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