Celebrating Ten Years Of The Max Mara Teddy Bear Coat on the Streets of Paris

The luxurious staple has its roots in the 1980s but a decade on its proved to be timeless.

Ian Griffiths, designer of the beloved Max Mara Teddy Bear Coat, spent his salad days in love with nightlife. It was the dawn of the 1980s in Manchester, England, and all youthful energy swirled around the clubs where people could show off their increasingly flashy clothes while sweating it out to the music of the day: Roxy Music, David Bowie, Ultravox, The Durutti Column. “The days were spent but waiting for the nights, it was all about nights,” Griffiths once said.

The soft and versatile Teddy Bear Coat made its runway debut ten years ago, but the garment’s history dates back to this exuberant heyday; a Max Mara archival piece from the ’80s provided Griffiths with the blueprint for the coat.The idea of day transitioning into night, how an outfit can transform from casual to formal as dusk falls—that’s at the core of the SSENSE fascination with the Teddy Bear Coat. On the one hand, the coat is pure comfort and ease in crisp daylight. But at night, its luxuriant softness and length becomes a statement of elegance and sophistication. You could spend the day waiting for that transformation, as Griffiths did when he was a young man. These photos capture the Teddy Bear Coat’s adaptability on the streets of Paris, as the sun slips behind the horizon. Then, it’s all about the night.