MAXIME: CARVED
Tellingly emblemised by a cartoonesque, Monopoly-like pentagon-shaped red house logo, MAXIME has one simple aim: to make people feel at home and well cared for in their clothes. Named after and run by French-born, London-based designer Maxime Fruit, the label, now a year old, finds solace in the things that make up a home. The designer picked glass, for example, has a central inspiration to one of his past collections, reinterpreting it through scissor-sharp and semi see-through tailoring. This time around, Wood has been selected as the central focus of MAXIME’s latest edition, which is titled CARVED. We caught up with Maxime himself to talk about it as well as the brand’s journey thus far /
Tell us a little about your background in fashion, and how you began designing.
I started studying fashion management about ten years ago in Paris and then, once I graduated, I went on working as a product developer and also in production, first for Damir Doma and then at VETEMENTS, Yang Li, and A-COLD-WALL, whom I still work for. I’ve always worked for tight-knit companies and so have always been close to the design team in some way or another. And besides, I’ve always been interested in how things are made, not just fashion but objects in general and buildings. I sort of always knew in the back of my mind that I’d do my own thing when the time comes.
Outside of the fashion realm, where do you draw inspiration for your designs?
To be fair, I’d say fashion takes 10, maybe 20 percent of our mood board. The rest consists of pictures of architecture, household objects, nature, and abstract images of texture and materials. I prefer to start designing from a raw idea and try to shape what’s in my head. Ultimately with the brand, I try to explore the relationship between the worlds of fashion and interior design either through the garments themselves or by collaborating with other creative types.
Concretely, how does that lead the designs?
Well, there’s always a theme and more specifically, an element, that leads the collection. For example, the collection CARVED is inspired by wood. We haven’t made a tee out of wood, obviously not, but the texture, the color palette, and the shapes are reminiscent of wood. In the collection, there’s one T-shirt that has a panel that goes along the back of the spine, which was inspired from the wooden beams that supported some church I visited. There’s also a jacket made from an Italian wool that features a jacquard knit pattern that imitates slats of reclaimed wooden floor, with contrasting shades of beige and deep brown. We also included orange accents to represent burning wood and ashes.
Is there a feeling that you get when being outside in the woods that you wanted to recreate through your clothes?
When Covid hit I went to my parents' house in the Parisian suburbs and found solace in the surrounding woods. I remember going out for a walk and zoning out, feeling refreshed when I’d come back home. I wanted to recreate this comforting feeling through relaxed silhouettes and sumptuous materials such as alpaca wool or cashmere.
Among other companies you’ve twice been part of Giorgia Cantarini’s showcase event on sustainability at Pitti Uomo. How’s the brand sustainable?
Except for when I try to create a very unique aesthetic such as the wooden-like jacquard knit which required us to make our own fabric, most of our fabrics if not all are repurposed from deadstock and other brands’ surplus fabric rolls. We also keep the production Europe-based, with everything made in either Italy, France, or Portugal.
What message or emotion are you trying to convey?
With MAXIME, I want people to feel home wherever they go. Working in fashion, I had the chance to travel around, yet even though I’ve been to great places and enjoyed it, being back home is a feeling like no other. This is an attachment we all have, and it’s this very feeling I want to recreate through the clothes I make—for people to feel as comfortable as when they’re home in them.
