Surprise! Emporio Armani showed in Paris this season. After the opening of a new store in the heart of the city, Giorgio Armani tacked the Spring show onto the end of the day’s long schedule. Armani is nothing if not a perfectionist. With the mirrored runway and the stadium bleachers he built, he gave his audience the nearest thing possible to his Milanese experience.
He opened with a boyish blue-gray seersucker pantsuit edged with white piping that had an English schoolboy air about it, setting the tone for a first section that played with some of the current trends around masculine-feminine pajama dressing. There were soft silk trouser suits in tie prints and, then, with a dusty red jacket and pants in a micro-print of elephants, a shift to an Indian theme. Still, he wisely avoided overdoing that excursion, which made it easier to focus on a strong lineup of items, particularly a broad spectrum of pants, from tailored boy pants to silk sweatpants and fluid drawstring pajama derivatives. Quite enough to make Emporio Armani’s store a go-to resource for light urban summer dressing in Paris and beyond.
