Last night outside Ermenegildo Zegna, menswear confrere Tom Stubbs was talking about what he insisted was a trend for “dry handle”—fashionese for this-season menswear fabrics that are tactile, overtly analogue, rich in texture and variation both to the touch and the eye.
Well chapeau, Stubbs, for this morning Emporio Armani had all the dry handle you could handle. The tailoring silhouette today was about an eight-button, jauntily skirted single-vent jacket above a full, pleated pant. But the handle—or feel—was the focus, via velvet brocades that looked like topographical cross sections, in panels of shaved fur, zip-up hoodies decorated with fine-gauged tresselations of pattern, and reams of wool pants purposefully left apparently raw.
The backdrop was a silhouette of fire escapes, and there was a New York theme evinced by a hoodie inlaid with a shining relief of the Chrysler Building peak under moonlight. The accessories were sometimes strangely set forth: worn over a metal-finish biker, a chest-borne strap-on furry pocket featured the fingers of a single glove—where was the other hand in that handle? After an intervention—sleek snowboard-orientated sportswear—there came a series of his and hers looks. The atmosphere on planet Armani remains unique.
