A highly respected figure within the fashion industry, Achille Maramotti embodied both trailblazing entrepreneur and enlightened patron of the arts with a passion for literature, film and painting.
His son Luigi Maramotti, the usually press-shy and reserved chairman of Max Mara, embraced the opportunity to talk about his father. During an interview at the company’s Milan headquarters, Luigi defined his father as a multifaceted person with an “extremely complex personality. He was a man of culture, educated but not academic, and with a taste and curiosity for literature, cinema and all the arts in general, including painting. He had a strong curiosity about life and men.”
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Besides the powerhouse group he founded in 1951, upon his death at age 78 in January 2005, Achille left an expansive collection of more than 600 contemporary works of art. In 2008, the Maramotti family unveiled a 43-room gallery in the former Max Mara manufacturing plant in Reggio Emilia to display a selection by artists ranging from Jannis Kounellis, Francis Bacon and Julian Schnabel to Gerhard Richter, Tom Sachs and Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are also representatives of Italy’s most significant art movements, such as Italian Pop Art, Arte Povera and neo-Expressionism, including Michelangelo Pistoletto and Francesco Clemente.
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Achille, who also collected art from the 16th and 17th centuries, passed this passion to his children, Luigi, Ignazio and Maria Ludovica.
“He had a creative mind and great imagination, and he was always looking for this quality and fantasy in people,” said Luigi. “It was extremely easy for him to create relationships.
“He had many intellectual tools and the personality to take on different challenges, but a moral and intellectual rigor that is fundamental to stay true to oneself and not lose one’s way.”
Luigi Maramotti attributed his father’s success in carving a path for Max Mara to his capacity to be imaginative in an abstract sense, and his courage to approach projects in a different way. “His pleasure in taking action in ways that were not obvious is part of what made him a true entrepreneur,” said Luigi.
Achille Maramotti was part of the generation that had the opportunity to reinvent the country after World War II.
“You needed to be strong and brave, and commit,” he explained, adding that one of his father’s “fundamental intuitions” in the Sixties was to try and communicate with customers, creating a direct relationship with the end user.
“He worked with journalists and magazines to talk to customers and explain the concept of ready-to-wear, telling them they could find dresses in stores and that they were, well, ready to wear, and with a content of creativity,” said Luigi.
Achille also convinced owners of textiles stores to start making dresses available to customers. This was the first step in the group’s prodigious retail network, which he started developing in the Sixties with the opening of the first Max Mara store in Reggio Emilia in 1964. Today, the network totals 2,279 units in 105 countries. “His true intuition was to have continuous contact with the public to understand the relationship with the product for a scientific feedback. And he could watch any big anthropological changes,” said Luigi, also noting how his father was an “extraordinary product manager” and intuitive about market changes and new, innovative concepts.
Armando Branchini, deputy chairman of Milan consultancy InterCorporate, said Achille Maramotti was a pioneer in “tenaciously investing” in his own stores and praised his entrepreneurial talent. “He combined an extraordinary attention to the identity and style of the brand with superior financial organization while supporting an extraordinary expansion.”
Achille Maramotti fine-tuned the group’s offering with precise tailoring, clean silhouettes and lean proportions, building Max Mara’s fashion reputation with clothes that were as elegant as they were accessible and wearable.
Over the years, Max Mara worked with such marquee names as Karl Lagerfeld, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Narciso Rodriguez. But, true to its style, it was always a low-key affair for the company, with the clothes taking precedence over the designers’ names.
“My father helped bridge the concrete aspects of production, which he fully understood, with the creativity of designers,” said the executive.
While his passions were fashion and art, Achille Maramotti also had a knack for finance, and was a majority shareholder and deputy chairman in Credem, a publicly listed Italian bank; a board member of Mediobanca, Italy’s merchant bank, and a counselor in UniCredit Bank.