The REBIRTH of COOL FERRAGAMO designer MAXIMILIAN DAVIS is reinvigorating the ITALIAN HOUSE by drawing on the EXPERIMENTAL SPIRIT of LONDON CLUB CULTURE, his own CARIBBEAN HERITAGE, and a bold NEW PERSPECTIVE on ELEGANCE

Maximilian Davis was in a music video. I learned this while talking to the singer Kelela, a friend of his, about the period when they first met several years ago outside of an East London club night called PDA, which was a gathering place for kids from fashion and art school looking to let loose in a sea of their own.

- TARA GONZALEZ

It was 2017, and at the time, Davis, who is now creative director at Ferragamo, was one of them. He had just graduated from the London College of Fashion and had a job as a junior designer with Grace Wales Bonner, whom he’d gotten to know while they both worked at Selfridges department store. He’d moved to London four years earlier from Manchester, where he grew up in a close-knit family with Trinidadian and Jamaican roots. Fashion played a big role in his life early on: His mother had been a model, his father and one of his older sisters had studied fashion design, and his grandmother taught him to sew.

The video in question was for Kelela’s song “LMK” and was set in a trippy club. “It was a party theme,” Kelela explains.

It took me two watches to catch Davis at the 1:33 mark. There he is off to Kelela’s right, dressed in a black tank and a cropped yellow leather jacket tie-dyed like a heat map. He’s leaning against a wall illuminated with neon lights. With its arched ceiling and insulated walls, the room they’re in looks more like a spaceship than a club, but Davis appears right at home.

“When I was younger and I moved to London, I wasreally into clubbing and I really enjoyed music as a sense of freedom,”  Davis tells me on a call from Ferragamo’s headquarters in Florence, Italy. “Clubbing really got people together. It was where we would experience music and feel music, but it was also an area where we could see how people were dressing and what the trends were. That was a starting point for me. That is how I really started to create my team of people around me—just from going out.”