“I would not overdo it with easy emotions at all costs [when] creating a spectacle. One can do whatever if he wants. But if I put a head under the arm—severed—on the runway, we have reached the limit.”
Following Giorgio Armani’s comments after his first line’s show here on Friday, it was perhaps surprising to see an Emporio collection today that featured so much radical surgery. Okay, there were no severed heads. Third eyes were thin on the ground. And if there were cyborgs among us, they were hidden in plain sight.
Yet this Emporio collection saw Armani splicing and grafting with gusto.
The patient on his gurney was the clothing. And the chief procedure to which it was subjected was this: twinkling, lush fabrications usually reserved for eveningwear were transplanted into daywear.
Suits and short suits in pinstripe or check came with the enhancement of micro-rhinestones embedded within the fabric. A great mid-height cowboy boot that ran through the collection was sometimes a rhinestone cowboy boot, sometimes a silver cowboy boot. It was effectively teamed with a green jumpsuit in patched jersey and velvet, and a beautifully cut black double-breasted coat-dress with twisted gather in its arms.
Right now, the streets around Armani’s fashion theater are plastered with posters for the brand’s current Everyone Wears campaign and, although not strictly true, traveling between shows this week I’ve noticed clusters of Milan teens who really do mix Emporio’s logos with more recently minted obsessions like Off-White, Stone Island, and County of Milan. Like many collections this season, the house logo was expressed every which way: EA, or its eagle, or the full name of the label popped up as belt buckles, on the waistband of black satin sports shorts, and in bold size on the front of mohair knitwear.
Performative decapitation might be off the menu for Milan’s original fashion sensation, but his head remains very much in the game.
