Couples strolled Armani's catwalk today, hardly a new thing for the designer, but he'd called his new collection Romance, which did rather put one in mind of woosome twosomes. Except that the romance in this collection was actually between Giorgio and menswear. He was looking for "the essence of male beauty," a noble fashion quest. And the measure of its success was that you could say in all honesty that the men looked just that: beautiful.
If luxury has a cloth and a color, it may well be the deep pile velvet in a shade of mushroom (is that better than greige?) from which Armani cut a jacket in his latest collection. There were crocodile and vicuña too, but Armani's velvets have a life of their own, speaking to a state of mind that cares nothing for utility and everything for indulgence. The extreme softness of these clothes—and of the Emporio Armani collection the other day—was about cosseting, not challenge. Paradoxical, really, when you think that Armani built his empire on a dismissal of fantasy, an embrace of the real. But you could allow him a reflective change of heart in this late-period collection (the man is 80 years old, after all, and the business is turning 40). Those velvets evoked the soft, sheeny Art Deco fantasias of the Hollywood he loved as a child. And there was something of that in the silhouettes too: the trousers tapering from pleated volume at the waist to a narrow ankle, the jackets fitted and three-buttoned.
After all this time, Armani is still experimenting with silhouette, like his hybrid of blazer and blouson. But equally, it is memory that sustains and shapes his design sensibility. This was a silver-screen glamorous collection. The eyes of the models were shaded like Valentino's (Rudolph, not Garavani). There were fur scarves, even a stole, to add texture to the luxe. Armani also made room for another romance: his love affair with his hometown. The gray of stone, the brown of brick, and the dark green of Milanese moss colored the clothes. And if they were melancholy, that was because beauty is melancholy too—something Armani has known from the day he first picked up a sketchbook.
