Giorgio Armani has already proved he has the power to corral Oscar-winning directors. Paolo Sorrentino was the latest. Honored for his epic La Grande Bellezza, he dialed down to intimate for Armani with a short film that opened the show: two naked bodies entwined in rope on a beach, in a primal landscape like the Aeolian Islands off Italy's southern coast, a part of the world that Armani loves. Sabbia, the film was called—sand. Like the collection. But the darkly erotic scene set by Sorrentino was rapidly supplanted by Armani's abstract opalescence. Sand, yes, but expressed in a monochromatic world of python print, floral-embroidered diaphanousness, and the striated patterns created by wind on dunes.
Much of it was extremely beautiful. Layers of fabrics so supernally light that they were scarcely more than a shimmer had an almost alien quality. Armani added crystals and paillettes and spectacular bias draping. The show notes stoically resisted any suggestion of exoticism, but the sparkly-dress-over-diaphanous-pant proportion had an Orientalist quality so irresistible, it compelled some onlookers to Google Wiki the echo.
There was one, small, easily overlookable detail that lingered as a testament to Armani's extraordinary control at this point in a career that straddles contemporary fashion like an Italian colossus. It was the single toggle closing on a high-collared jacket. The rest of the jacket buttoned, but that toggle sat by the high collar. Precise and, in a peculiar way, kind of poignant.
