A tailored suit is designed to frame and showcase the body within in its own cast-in-cloth Vitruvian harmony. At Giorgio Armani, the garment the designer once so radically recast to alter the popular perception of that harmony is often used as the frame of his runway shows. Armani might be a man—and a brand—of many, many categories, but tailoring is the touchstone.
Today, though, Armani turned things inside out. Most notably, apart from a mid-show section of six or so gray-to-silver abstracted check jacquard jackets—cut long and loose with comfortable dimpling at the soft shoulder line and complemented by some fluidly tailored menswear pieces to telegraph the provenance—suiting was a lightly drawn brushstroke.
Instead, Armani emphasized dressmaking that displayed its guiding hand, combining prints that echoed the aesthetics of canonical artists with fabrications that played the technologically advanced against the handmade. The gilet of the first look and the shoulder piece and waist of the second imposed an aesthetic and literal tension between the horizontal pull of the black elasticated ridges and the release of the layered white floral-printed silk ruffles. The jackets in Looks 7 and 8 were cut by laser in black double-bonded treated silk. The layer beneath the silk was a floral print, excavated in floral sections by more laser cutting and then surrounded by even more precise lasered etchings that shaved only halfway into the black top layer. The print of the silk pants in Look 7 and rope-belted shirt in Look 8 (the model wore fine-whale silk corduroy pants) looked to be an homage to the work of Joan Miró. The popper-fastened jacket in Look 10 imposed a hand-applied leather lattice over the same print. Two skirts worn under strapless horizontal-neck black bodice tops were hand-pieced together in strips of contrast-colored leather plissé. Three looks—two dresses and a jacket—featured large petaled red blooms on a soft pink backdrop that referenced Miró’s sizable sculptures. In the first dress, a patch of this jacquard at the right thigh was semi-furled and folded to add volume to an otherwise surgically unadorned mid-length garment.
First in a necklace, then on the shoulder piece of a black mid-length, hand-patchworked, double-face silk tent dress, stripes of red, black, printed, and sheer fabrics were a 3-D and color-injected cousin to the iridescent 2-D mosaic intensity of Klimt. Later—after the silver and gray jacketed section—came the lightest menswear asides: A one-shoulder mid-length dress and another full-length dress immediately afterward were cut in strips of leather that were interjected with metallic pinstripes. They were embellished with floral blotches applied with Pollock-esque apparent lack of design. Toward the end, Armani drilled down into a nocturne suite of little black dresses, whose net-veiled beaded headpieces heralded the arrival of a final outré flourish: a pastel top comprised of angular panels that came garlanded down the right shoulder with an assemblage of wattle-like nubs in pistachio and violet.
