Maximilian Davis: “Carnival Brought My Family Together”

This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine:

“Carnival brought my family together. We used to go to Trinidad for it every year until I was 13 or 14. It’s a celebration of freedom – particularly of enslaved people being set free. I have one memory of my auntie going to play J’ouvert, the opening-day festival where you dress up and dance from sunrise. She was in her sixties and I remember saying, ‘Aren’t you too old for that?’ She was like, ‘No, how dare you!’ I look at photos of her and her siblings performing it from a young age way into their sixties and seventies – that heritage has stuck with me. My grandparents wore sailor outfits, my parents wore silk shirts and trousers, and my sisters wore bikinis, little shorts and big T-shirts, which they’d take off when my parents left. This all inspires my collections – that mix of sexy clubwear or beachwear with something very conservative.”

A personal order from Rihanna and a show with Fashion East are Maximilian Davis’s career highlights to date – not bad, since his mononymous brand is barely a year old and he’s just turned 26. Born and raised in Manchester, Davis trained at the London College of Fashion and worked under Grace Wales Bonner before launching his own label, which, drawing on Caribbean styles, melds clubwear with luxury. That translates to elegant eveningwear, slick tailoring and clothes sliced to uncover erogenous zones. After showing his first two collections via lookbook, Davis made his London Fashion Week catwalk debut last September. There he brought together references to sailors, scuba divers, Bond girl Ursula Andress and the scarlet-plumed ibis, which is native to Trinidad.

This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale here.

Grooming: Roxy Attard at Future Rep using DAVINES. Photographic assistant: Federico Covarelli