Fresh from Thursday night’s Emporio Armani epic around-the-world-in-a-hundred-grays (and many more house shades, besides) show, Giorgio Armani returned home to Via Bergognone today. This collection was like that familiar whoosh when you sink gratefully into your favorite armchair after a long trip away: utterly recognizable and enveloping.
The collection felt subaquatic. In the darkened Armani theater, the opening section of spotlighted silver semi-transparent pieces—sometimes softly strafed with whorls of smokily muted color—seemed to flit down the runway. A coat of woven strips of leather had a sharkish toughness. A pink-edged, coral-like wide-brimmed hat and a pink-edged encrustation of ruffle on the chest of a dress signaled the dive into this collection’s central exploration of color and texture.
Layered metal and plastic jewelry plus the net-like bags and shoes with slick and shiny uppers of scrunched PVC added an undersea otherworldliness in tandem with the models’ bunched, salty Pre-Raphaelite hair. A balloon-hemmed vest top teamed with pants of reflective, liquid-like organza was patterned with circular multicolored sequins that resembled a rainbow of raindrops on water. The model in a pink bomber decorated with oyster-shell gray and pink embellishment and a triple-layered, ruffle-detail gray skirt handily caught an anemone-esque pinned earring as it fell loose from her left ear.
By the end, we were voyaging in mermaid territory: The opaquely multicolored sheen, reef-like banks of ruffle, and silver fish-skin shine of Armani’s often multilayered fabrications combined beguilingly. This was a collection to dive into.
