Represented, interpreted and reinvented in different ways, model 101801 has become the poster child for experimentation, seasons and trends in art, through a succession of extraordinary events, installation projects and exhibitions, conceived in diverse years and places.
 

In 2001, for the fiftieth anniversary of the company, Max Mara commissioned three pictures from artist William Wegman.
Inevitably, the New York artist put coat 101801 on one of his Weimaraner dogs, unmistakable subjects that have featured in his surreal and playful photographic creations for over thirty years.

Dressing by Sarah Rein.
The work is part of an exposition project carried out in London in 1999, involving Max Mara and Goldsmith College.
Dressing is a photographic sequence centred on the relationship between the familiar and the mundane, inspired by the children's game of dress-ups.
Children's use of things in the wrong way, their free interpretation of form and function constitutes the starting point for this fascinating articulation of imagination.
 

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 of the minimalist space of the flagship store. These represented the store's vertical rectangle and porthole circle as a window open to the future, and introduced a scenario metaphysically populated by female figures and families of coats in camel cashmere, abandoned here and there in an endless structure of steel and shelves.

Project commissioned from Martine Barrat to celebrate the opening of the Max Mara flagship store on Madison Avenue, New York in 1994.
The coat becomes a playful object, a protective cover and an entertaining hiding place. Barrat's images have occupied the city, mounted on billboards, and affixed and silkscreened on the buses of Manhattan.
 

Deo Gratias by Roger Albero
The work was born from a collaboration between Max Mara and the Escola Superior de Disseny Elisava, Barcelona, and was then displayed in 1993 at the collective exhibition “Montaggi effimeri”.
“Deo Gratis” prompts the viewer to reflect on the protagonism and omnipresence of certain messages on power, legacy and influence of information in diverse epochs and cultures. It is no co-coincidence that fashion and religion figure in the work on the same level.
 

In 2001, for the fiftieth anniversary of Max Mara, Francois Berthoud created a homage to the pop nature of coat 101801, superimposing the different parts of the sewing pattern on a repertoire of female types.
In the work, the fragments of the coat are transformed into abstract strokes that interact, like in a Warhol painting, with silk-screen reproductions of faces.

 

In 2001, for the fiftieth anniversary of Max Mara, Francois Berthoud created a homage to the pop nature of coat 101801, superimposing the different parts of the sewing pattern on a repertoire of female types.
In the work, the fragments of the coat are transformed into abstract strokes that interact, like in a Warhol painting, with silk-screen reproductions of faces.

 

Kevin Gray's work is the result of a collaboration between Max Mara and Goldsmith College, London, in 1999.
The work starts with the question "What would happen if the IRA military wore Max Mara on their combat missions?” and proposes model 101801as a victim of the context in which it is placed.
Worn by masked gunmen, while they perform violent acts, the coat assumes diverse identities in Gray's images. The elegance and rationality of the fashion world interacts with something else, that appears unknown and disturbing: the familiar coat appears alien in this new context.