Even before they make it to passport control, anyone and everyone who lands at Linate—the airport closest to Milan’s center—is left in no doubt as to who is the biggest fashion designer in town. That’s thanks to the huge Emporio Armani sign and eagle logo that has adorned the roof of a 1930s hangar here since 1996. You see it as you take your bus from the plane. Sometimes you even see it before you land. At 30,000 feet, you can practically see it from Switzerland. By the time you get to the tiddly Prada poster behind immigration, you think, Meh. (If you land at Malpensa, BTW, all you get is endless booby Philipp Plein posters and a miserably long drive into town, so bad luck.)
Hence the venue for tonight’s show. For Spring 2017 Emporio showed in Paris. Last year it was London. This season, for the Milano homecoming, it made excellent thematic sense given that sign to show Emporio Armani in a place where no fashion show had ever happened before (I believe)—at the airport. It would be remiss not to report that some members of the international fashion press—for whom airports are but punctuation marks in the life sentence of labor—were less than enchanted at the prospect of this late-night EA soiree. Because yes, we did have to go through security, and show our passports, and we didn’t even get to pause at the awesome panini bar or pinch the papers from the BA lounge. But we were fast-tracked. Check-in was relatively smooth. My colleague (there’s always one, huh?) who forgot her vital wristband was cheerily ushered onto the EA jet bridge after only the briefest parlay with security officials. It wasn’t a casino.
On the other side, we descended stairs on to the tarmac illuminated by the glow of that huge, huge sign. We walked into the hangar within which was a purpose-built stadium that was a blend of the set of X Factor and Armani’s home fashion theater on Via Bergognone. It held around 2,500 people, a fair few of whom were in four pits in the middle of the shiny black runway area. There were suspended screens, including a huge back screen showing arrivals and departures (the Berlin flight was delayed, and the Seoul flight cancelled).
After all the work it must have taken to set up this show—remember planes from London, Paris, and Rome were still landing alongside us—fashion flight EASS19 was never going to be a brief hop. This was a strap-yourself-in long-haul Armani experience, spanning several time zones and crossing continents of Armani-carved fashion genre. Its 170-plus looks (Runway’s count doesn’t factor in the two-look images) put Burberry’s 135-look odyssey last Sunday squarely in the shade. So please fasten your seat belts. We took off with an amuse-bouche of EA7, Armani’s pretty excellent sports subline. Eight guys with six-packs carried paddleboards while dressed in loose, plasticized sportswear. There were six-pack-induced whoops from the floor.
We leveled out with a series of EA looks proper that took their cues from the sub-brand: boxing shorts, parka-dresses, and then gauzy technical organza tailoring over boxing boots. There were more whoops, and applause—a feature of Via Bergognone shows that often feels orchestrated, but which tonight seemed spontaneously sparked by the transparency of the shorts and the hotness of the hunks contained within them.
Then we hit full altitude with a classic Armani runway flourish: a double. Two girls in blue-tinted shades carrying stone-color outerwear walked out side by side in strapless jumpsuits in a textured technical knit material. It was so deeply Armanian that it was as if the man himself had announced taken to the PA and wished us a safe journey.
And on we went from there. This might read as if I dozed off mid-flight—which certainly was not the case—but the pictures accompanying this report are the truest testament to the route we followed. Personal observations included a relish for the high-top python loafers for women and an admiration for the long section of menswear tailoring articulated in ultralight technical materials, with a slight space-age sheen. Tailoring, a métier for which Armani has done so much, is currently on the wane—its potential for truly popular revival depends on radically different proposals like this.
The flight went on. There was a circumnavigation via color story of Planet Armani. Some looks were heaped with heavy metal jewelry and oversize glass crystal necklaces, or topped with sequined baseball caps. Others were unadorned soft-shouldered sculptural outlines in the kind of opaquely rich fabrics that Armani’s factories produce so well. I noted a series of about 20 looks under the heading “biscuit” over two pages.
By the time the color story shifted to blue—Armani’s key tone—and the soundtrack to a sacrilegiously saccharine cover of Nick Drake’s Cello Song—we had perhaps hit perfect cruising altitude. Classic Milan-man blue suiting was presented against beautiful wide jeans, textured bombers, and crushed pinstripe separates and denim overalls for women. The slow descent through a long bank of eveningwear—heavily green with violet undertones—rounded things out.
In this enormous undertaking of a show it would have been astonishing if there were no snafus: but where there was potential for plenty of them, only two were discernible. The first were the two guys in sweaters reading A and E who stood on the wrong side of each other. The second, far more consequently, was the fault of whoever failed to find a spotlight when Mr. Armani came out for his bow after this epic-est of epic shows. After he had taken it, the crowd surged out of their seats. We editors ran for the door and the airport buses that were waiting to take us back to the terminal. The vast majority stayed however, and as we trotted out of the hangar and under the sign, we understood why: Robbie Williams launched into “Let Me Entertain You.” It was a shame to go, but we had to fly.
