Mangano to Loren: Italy's Icons of Cinema Inspire Max Mara Show

Max Mara is known for its deep-pile camel coats and conservative northern Italian style. But in tune with the times, this season's show at the baroque palace of Caserta outside Naples opened with a pair of very short shorts.

- Morwenna Ferrier

Tight and high-waisted, the vibe was Vogue, but the inspiration was the 1949 Italian neorealist film Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice) and a 19-year-old Italian actor, Silvana Mangano, wearing damp shorts and stockings in a paddy field – her image as seen on global billboards at the time.

"Cinema was the thing that took Italian style into people's lives, and where Italian style was effectively invented," said Ian Griffiths, Max Mara's designer. "But Silvana said she didn't know her image would be so sexualised, and she wasn't entirely comfortable with it.

"I wanted to take this image, and look at how the position of women, real women, had changed. The idea is to give [women] something they want to wear, or at least aspire to."

After the shorts came models in Bardot tops, full skirts and silk hair scarves, echoing that other Neapolitan icon, Sophia Loren.

"Think how many women saw her in