• 50 YEARS OF SPORTMAX IN THE BOOK PUBLISHED BY ASSOULINE
• #SPORTMAXANNIVERSARY

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, February 12, 2020:   SPORTMAX looks back over 50 years with an exclusive book published by the luxury publisher Assouline as part of its Legends collection, edited by Olivier Saillard with a critical text by Luke Leitch. With a rich collection of images, the volume documents the history of the brand launched in 1969 on a precise intuition of Achille Maramotti. In the midst of the epoch-making social and cultural revolutions, looking at the young people in Swinging London, Maramotti decided to launch SPORTMAX, the first Italian example of a coordinated wardrobe offering trend-setting style collections without ever losing sight of Italian high quality and savoir faire. In 50 years, many creative style and image professionals have moulded the brand history. Its success is the result of team work, rather than that of individual stylists. This is why the collaborations have never been explicitly stated, despite including key names of the calibre of Nanni Strada, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Odile Lançon and Guy Paulin, who have contributed to defining the brand’s aesthetics and international vision.

In his essay, Luke Leitch comments: “Founded by Achille Maramotti and later defined by a changing chorus of creative talents who have worked to develop his entrepreneurial intuition, for 50 year SPORTMAX has been acting as a prism and a mirror of social change and the change in women’s tastes, anticipating trends and the times”.

Comments Olivier Saillard: “Over fifty splendid years, Sportmax has infused daily life with poetry. Its verses are embroidered with the everday, and land nobility to the ordinary. They are recited everywhere where women seek clothes that eschew ostentatious excess in the favor of timelessness”.

The book – divided into five decades, from the Seventies to today – narrates the work of major fashion photographers, from Sarah Moon to Peter Lindbergh, who in the mid-Eighties immortalised top models and new faces, including the very young and as-then unknown Yasmine
 
Le Bon, and an unfledged Carla Bruni. And again, Albert Watson, Marc Hom, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Mert & Marcus, Craig McDean, Roe Ethridge, up to David Sims, whose strong, timeless images interpreted the SPORTMAX collections for several seasons. And it is precisely one of Sims’s images, with its energy and dynamism, that was chosen for the book cover. This precious coffee table book includes some previously unpublished documentation, with drawings, backstage photos, editorials and campaigns, as well as a series of special images in which the French photographer Grégoire Alexandre interprets a selection of iconic garments from the Seventies to today.

Luigi Maramotti writes in his preface: “Olivier Saillard was right in saying that there is an everyday poetry that flees from extravagance and eccentricity. Holding true to this fine dividing line for 50 years, working with many different creative talents, doing research that was not an end in itself has truly been an achievement we are proud of”.