Now minus a creative director—although one is expected to be named imminently—Azzaro finds itself in limbo once again. It’s in good company: A number of other once-illustrious houses are now desperately seeking a 21st-century identity. But that’s not a club anyone ever deliberately chooses to join.
Given this unenviable set of circumstances, you gotta hand it to the studio. It pulled together a coherent show, and a team of six took a bow together—three women and three men. Among them were three who knew and worked with Loris Azzaro. The living memory remains in-house.
True to form, the team was in a party mood: “Festive bohemian” was how one spokesperson put it, while the show notes evoked a woman fluent in “the subtle art of unveiling” and “boldly…revealing spark” without a hint of irony. Indeed, there was a lot of near “bare” here, from a handful of tributes to Mr. Azzaro’s defining, 1970s-era three-ring dress to a silver crystal cage dress worn with a whisper of a black cape. On-trend embellishments included dégradé in tie-dyed fabric, beading treatments, and shimmering fringe, as well as a certain notion of gender fluidity in elaborately studded men’s jackets and iridescent trenches, for example. This particular dance floor is already jam-packed, so one wonders how the house will be able to rise above the commotion.
Even so, in-house sources say that revenues have doubled since last year; they also say that they’re fielding requests from A-list stars in Hollywood—Vogue Runway promised not to jinx it by naming names, but if any one of those women actually shows up on the red carpet in Azzaro, that could prove a game changer. And if, as rumored, a beauty heavyweight steps in to burnish a label with fragrance franchises named Wanted and Chrome, there may be synergies and a new life yet on the fashion side. Those are some big ifs. Before all that, this house needs to really nail down who it’s talking to.
