For Maccapani’s spring collection, creative director Margherita Maccapani Missoni built upon the vocabulary she established with her debut collection earlier this summer. “The idea of the brand is to create a wardrobe of pieces able to take women throughout their activities of the day,” she said over a Zoom call from Miami where she was prepping for an Art Basel event. “So ideally from morning yoga to the office to a nice out, but”—and this is where it gets interesting—”without ever borrowing from men’s or sports. Always very feminine.” Whereas many designers thrive on working within, and talking about, the contrasts of hard and soft or traditional male and female aesthetics, Maccapani stands out for its unabashed femininity.
That means Maccapani Missoni leans strongly towards pink and lilac, and on saccharine floral prints which often include a daisy (margherita means daisy in Italian). One of the opening looks which features a shirred Pepto-pink dress worn over loose trousers in a hyper-pop digital floral print drives this idea home beautifully. Elsewhere, that same print is slightly modified, and used on a silver foil-printed slinky dress with a cowl back and a detachable multi-chain detail that is begging for a pop star-and-paparazzi moment.
The collection is full of jersey separates that can be layered many different ways, and though the pieces are all very body conscious, they’re put together with a vision for practicality; like a mini wrap skirt made from different panels of fabric (left over from last season), or the metallic copper turtleneck dress with a slit cut to there, which both come with built-in shorts underneath; or the black wrapped mini skirt/belt that comes as a set with a pair of matching trousers, but is also shown over a slinky pink skirt.
There is also an item the Maccapani team calls “the hood.” It’s an olive green piece of extra-long fabric which Maccapani Missoni describes as “an accessory that you can wear as a vest or as a top, and in the winter you can wrap it like a scarf around you or wear it as a wrap at the beach.” Its shape and utility recall a classic “baby wrap,” worn by women around the world throughout the ages to carry their babies while they work. “We play a lot around cliches about women and stereotypes and try to use them in an exaggerated way to make kind of caricatures, but at the same time to then make them real again,” she said.