Max Mara Review | Fashion Week Fall 2013

Comfort and warmth seemed to be the bywords at Laura Lusuardi's Fall 2013 show for Max Mara, which opened on Thursday with a series of looks layered underneath voluminous, cuddly outerwear.

Lusuardi stuck to a well-edited color palette of camel, brown, mustard, gray, and black for this outing, and put extra focus on round-shouldered coats and jackets. Blazers and topcoats with pushed-up sleeves sat on top of oversize cardigans, wide-leg trousers, or silk windbreakers. (For added ease of movement, the models all wore sneakers made from suede and python.) Just a few pieces of knitwear, like a brown sweater with fur sleeves and a yellow-and-brown striped dress with leather accents on the shoulders, made it down the runway exposed to the open air, but by and large, the coat reigned supreme here. It's an emphasis that makes sense: Max Mara's outerwear is among its bestselling categories. But this show was as much about ease and pleasure as it was about commerce.