Giorgio Armani today revived one of his original ’80s logos, a softly contoured overlaid GA rather than the more assertively angled iteration we’re used to, and returned to the seminal soft-shouldered, broad-beamed, double-breasted silhouette that put him on the map back in the same decade. Looking back? Sure, but only to chart a course forward.
The double-breasted jacket was used as a piece of casual outerwear, a loosely comfortable garment that displayed the fossilized skeleton of its formal origins. A gray pinstripe version worn over no shirt at all and some abstract-print pants was a typical context shift, designed to switch an emblem of old, hard masculinity into a garment that remains relevant in a tilted new world.
Those Japanese-inspired wide pants at the beginning in moleskin (teamed with a ranger-style workwear vest that ran through the show in different fabrications) were evidence that Armani is aware of menswear’s nano-trends—it was a shape that transferred with more fluidity into cupro tuxedos. There were strong sections in indigo (including some jeans with a gather just above the back of the calf that made for a new pant silhouette, plus a great minimal parka startlingly worn with Mary Janes) and a sort of abstractedly striped greige seersucker.
Some of team Armani’s styling decisions can distract. Once you’ve seen a pair of backwardly worn suspenders, for instance, it’s hard to unsee. And this, in turn, can detract from the impact of the clothes. Sticking with suspenders, there was a pair whose line of fit was integrated into the pattern of the pants worn below them, which was a genuinely fresh way of sketching the wearer’s contours: eccentrico for a reason.
The pale silk printed blousons, shirts, and pants near the close were especially beautiful movements in a collection whose strength was in its softness. A black backpack came stitched with Armani’s portrait, shortly before its subject emerged in person from behind the show space curtain.
