CNN style Fashion | The club kid designer dressing the most powerful women in US politics

There are times in every successful designer’s career when they find something they created at the center of a viral sensation. For Max Mara’s creative director, Ian Griffiths, discovering that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had ignited a global frenzy by wearing his red “Fire Coat” for her infamous showdown with Donald Trump in 2018 was one of those moments. It was not, however, quite as he had imagined it.

“It was 7 in the evening and I got the phone call from our American communications office. I had just got home from work and was in the middle of getting changed with my trousers around my knees,” laughed Griffiths on the phone from his office in Reggio Emilia, northern Italy. “They needed urgent confirmation the coat was ours, then more and more calls came in to give quotes. I spent the whole evening shuffling around my apartment with my trousers around my ankles because I didn’t have time to take them off!  —read more—