Maje (Q1876)
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French women's fashion brand
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Maje |
French women's fashion brand |
Statements
Judith Milgrom’s Maje woman is a full-on party girl this season, trading the luxe relaxation of spring’s Slim Aarons holiday for an all-nighter at Le Palace. As such her minidresses are doused in paillettes and velvet, her T-shirts are fused with silk leopard-print skirts, and her coats are super warm and snuggly, only to be cast off for an evening of dancing. Milgrom, too young for Le Palace’s halcyon days, admits to her fair share of ’90s romps at Les Bains Douches; “Bien sûr!” she cheered.That’s why this party animal is transcending decades with her wardrobe, yearning for the bourgeois character of the ’70s and the haute vamps of the ’80s, even if she herself is more a part of the supersized tartans of the ’90s. All together, Milgrom’s epoch-flattening collection of herringbone suits, bias-ruched golden minis, and ditsy florals works nicely together in 2020. Blame it on her careful modernity; instead of dresses she’s made rompers—better for dancing!—and she’s pairing a smart suit with a highfalutin sequin turtleneck. In French, Milgrom explained, “There is a lot of eveningwear, but I imagined women wearing it during the day.” With the Maje customer always party-ready—even if the party in question is just a selfie shoot for social media—Milgrom’s instincts to blur the lines of time and of occasion are totally right.
3 March 2020
A collaboration with the Slim Aarons estate—suspiciously not pictured in the lookbook, but given prime display at a presentation at Maje HQ—gave Judith Milgrom her starting point for Maje’s Spring 2020 collection. The designer wondered what Aarons’s swans and dilettantes would be up to in 2019, crafting the high-low pieces the brand is known for with a decidedly elevated feel this season. Consider it a collection for the woman who has traded the Hotel Il Pellicano for the Standard Miami Beach. As such, Milgrom offered a number of safari suit separates that nodded to YSL’s ’70s original, some sorbet-color sundresses, and plenty of bubble-hem dresses and skirts that captured the insouciance of Aaron’s ladies through a 21st-century lens.Milgrom, through a translator, spoke about wanting to keep a femininity and sophistication to the collection. A number of tweed suits and dresses that evoked the mainstays of another haute Parisienne label played right into that hand, allowing every shopper—or at least those who can afford Maje’s advanced contemporary price point—the fantasy of a nouveau poshness. The prettiest pieces were the white eyelets and floating cotton dresses with their tent-like shapes that merit the statuesque poise of C. Z. Guest. Will women with blogbod stiffen their backs and unfurl their necks to give these frocks the posture they deserve? A logo’ed leather lipstick case worn as a necklace warned otherwise: It’s a risk to strive towards old-school, cigarette-smoke glamour while everyone else is Juuling.
27 September 2019
The star of this Maje presentation was unquestionably Gypsy, Judith Milgrom’s 7-year-old Spitz. For not only was Gypsy diffidently allowing certain guests to pet her—“she is très snob,” observed Milgrom—but she also featured on the clothes we were here to see. Her finely chiseled snout and its surrounding fur halo was depicted in stencil on hoodies and T-shirts under the wordsGypsy tour. As Milgrom explained, the four groups of clothes in her presentation reflected a back and forth between three Parisian womenswear subsets—faux-prissily bourgeois, paillette-spattered or ruched velvet disco-queen, and footloose and fringed boho-chic (the Gypsy section)—with one further foray to modern Anglomania reflected in fine off-white check suits, Aran knits, and oversize country coats.More mixed up for the lookbook here (although the delineations are loosely demarcated by the different backdrops), in the context of the presentation it was useful to see Milgrom’s ingredients laid out. As she explained of the collection, “It is about being feminine without being obvious”: Milgrom was offering her customers a range of layerable elements with which to construct their own personal bouillabaisse of French girl flavors. And the ultimate effect of this recipe would be . . .séductrice? “Séductrice!” concurred Milgrom with a satisfied emphasis on that word’s first, hardC: “Exactement!”
3 April 2019
Oh, Maje, I’m sorry to have snafued this review. Its way-too-lateness is entirely down to me. Yes, it’s true, you showed these clothes on October 1 on a Paris Fashion Week day when we were all rushing madly to file reviews due to go live, and you didn’t send your images (originally advertised for November) until shortly before the Christmas holiday. That gap was the crack through which this review slipped, but the keyboard-calloused fingers from which it slipped were mine.So, thinking back . . . The collection was shown at Maje’s new headquarters, a lovely space most recently a bank but originally a department of the Louvre. Judith Milgrom was not at the presentation. However, a friendly rep from her New York agency said that she had been inspired by the new office space and was seeing Paris through a tropical prism flavored by her Moroccan roots: a lot of yellows, a lot of florals, a Paris scene shirt print used on sports shorts inspired by activewear. A check mac, a wrap stripe-sectioned mixed cotton dress, a belted rose-print playsuit, a silver wide-hooded jacket, and the chic sunglasses range that will be released across Maje’s 100-ish outlets all stick in the memory, as do earrings featuring a below-lobe crescent of bearing-tipped prong-lets that brought to mind the earrings Casey Cadwallader has shown for three seasons at Mugler.This was a strong collection from a company whose HQ change signals its ongoing success: apologies, again.
21 December 2018
Maje’s founder Judith Milgrom has dined on the same takeout Japanese lunch every day at work for the last four years. She is currently rereading the books of Romain Gary. “I do think,” she observed, “there are some classics you can’t improve upon.”Taken from a recent interview, these insights into Milgrom’s mindset attest to an ease with the attractions of familiarity. As does the output of the label she started 20 years ago. Yet unlike Milgrom’s daily serving of miso soup, seaweed or avocado salad, salmon sashimi, and rice, the ingredients in her recipe for Maje evolve with the season. This time around her menu was notable for the inclusion of some freshly covetable ingredients; oversize, apparently technical outerwear, wide-leg track pants, and ugly sneakers. These were served within a mixed salad of French girl staples; ruffled leather midis, boho four-buckled ankle boots, oversize teddies, check coats, check tailoring, and trucker jackets in washed denim or PVC. The same attractively fringed bag was reheated in multiple sizes and colorways. An abundance of asymmetric hemlines implied imbalance, but this Maje offering was astutely assembled to offer the opposite: Milgrom serves a carefully proportioned mix of tweaked classics and tweaked novelties that—once mixed to taste—combine for fine, no-fuss French dressing.
28 February 2018
Next year Maje celebrates its 20th anniversary and will move into a new Paris HQ, location to be disclosed. So, understandably, Judith Milgrom looked back to the company’s rich archive of French-girl finery as she built a broad proposition of options for next year’s vintage.One past Maje motif was the miniskirt worn over shorts, shown here in fabrications including a sized-up Prince of Wales check against a wide-armed, striped, pie-crust cotton smock. A matching check blazer was presented above a drape-fronted, plissé-edged red mid-length skirt—ah, that always fruitfulmasculin-femininpendulum was swinging anew. Denim included a washed long shirtdress and a washed tank-trucker worn over a polka-dot crop top. An efficient LBD suite included examples that were ruched tight or constructed in cotton-embroidered sections with pearl details at the neckline.A reversible orange-beige trench; a sweet tomato shirt with epaulets, emphasized shoulder lines, and strapping at the wrists; plus a double-ruffle one-shouldered blouse in more shirting cotton were other easy-to-wear highlights here. Potential new-year portage options included a multiple-fabrication heart-shaped tote bag that doubled as a fanny pack (depending on whether you employed a chain or strap to carry it). There were some cute bijou options—chains with little enamel discs stamped with numbers to remind yourself of your date of birth (simply comb them to the right)—some niceM-flashed white sneakers and plenty of pointy-toe ankle-strap flats and sandals in fabrications designed to complement certain looks. Nothing here was majorly life-changing, but as a one-stop mid-price source of easy-to-wearpratique-yet-chic Gallic glamour, Maje is a go-to.
29 November 2017
When Maje was founded in 1998 by Judith Milgrom as an “anti-basic, anti-conventional” Parisian label, it was, she recalled, “very rare to have a single boutique contain such a wide collection—and at the time there were not so many labels that proposed something that was high quality, affordable, and accessible.” In the nearly two decades since, that formula has become not nearly so rare, yet Maje mostly holds its ground as a one-stop spot for French-inflected dressing. The collection as shot in this lookbook contains only a small selection of the garments that were crowded into its showroom, yet, represents a fair cross section of its day-to-night Gitane-fragranced womanly median.The check tailoring and outerwear, tartan-esque ruffle dresses, oversize quilted parka, and grommeted leather pieces reflected Milgrom’s British-flavored inspirations for the season: punk and country. Those dresses in ruffle-framed chiffon florals or florals cut against latticed panels of tulle were certainly “twisted Laura Ashley”—and a little twisted Balenciaga too. That closing selection of crunchily ruched semi-synthetic party dresses seemed no-brainer Betty Blue 2.0 buys. A paneled monochrome zigzag faux-shearling coat, the parka, and another two shades of brown real-shearling all shared a clunky chunkiness that, while not especially elegant, would certainly serve to emphasize the elegance of whomever lay within. Milgrom said she was among the first in Paris to propose eveningwear under biker jackets. This essential French Girl dialectic—the apparently tender wrapped in the apparently tough—remains majorly Maje.
3 April 2017