“I was trying to strike a balance between Jane Eyre’s iron-willed restraint and Catherine Earnshaw’s untamed, wind-swept ferocity—to find a woman who exists somewhere between these two emotional extremes.” That was Ian Griffiths’s pre-show thesis for a Max Mara collection that sought to bottle the stormy, windswept romance of the Brontëan heroines—high drama, but make it wearable.

Yorkshire’s moors had set the mood, their slate-gray skies and time-worn dry stone walls mirroring, in Griffiths’s view, the moody tonal shifts of cashmere. At Max Mara, the in-house term for processed cashmere is Casha—a cold, flinty, steely shade of gray. But before sinking into monochrome melancholy, the show opened with a flash of heat: fire-hued teddy coats, a structured field jacket, and a perfectly cut, floor-sweeping cashmere coat in a deep, almost arterial madder red. Then, gradually, the palette dimmed, funneling toward Casha—and with it, a deepening sense of Brontëan brooding. High-waisted corduroy trousers, their vertical ribs mimicking the linearity of a split-fronted, form-fitting ribbed knit skirt, hinted at the restraint of Eyre. A flecked charcoal cashmere wool cape thrown over the same ensemble brought in full Wuthering Heights energy—moody, dramatic, unshakably English.

Griffiths played with the tension between Georgian-era romance and contemporary pragmatism. Full, swooshing skirts—cut in wool or cashmere—were hemmed with bomber-jacket ribbing, a clever structural tweak that added a touch of cinch. Wide-legged trousers, in wool or leather, featured articulated knee seams—more commonly seen on utilitarian rambler’s pants—merging 19th-century drama with 21st-century ease. Then there were the outdoorsy flourishes: weighty cotton backpacks with leather straps, a magnificent poacher’s jacket in dark flecked tweed, and, in a particularly eccentric twist, knit bloomers peeking from beneath it all.

Double-wound leather belts snatched the waist, emphasizing the voluminous sweep of Griffiths’s never-quite-trailing skirts and amplifying that poetic, windswept silhouette. In terms of palette, it was mostly a shadowy, near-nocturnal affair—so much so that some of the finer details were lost against the inky black backdrop. But the Max Mara faithful won’t mind. This was high-literary heroine dressing at its finest—ready to be swept away, into the mist, onto the moors, and straight into the pages of a Brontë novel.