Giorgio Armani was born in bucolic Piacenza, but it is in hardworking Milan that he has built his empire and home. A self-confessed homebody, this week he gave an interesting interview to his hometown fashion editor—the redoubtable Paola Pollo of Corriere della Sera—in which he said that, at 85, one of his fears is how “to disappear without damaging my work, the name I built, and those who helped and built it with me.” This, he told Pollo, is something he thinks about when he goes to sleep and when he rises. He also says, “I don’t control very much these days” (a statement Pollo rightly calls out as dubious); makes an arch point about Bernard Arnault’s reported interest in acquiring AC Milan; and adds: “And this is my life. Exclusively for work. I don’t go out in the evening. I missed many opportunities…but I prefer that the things I do are what speak for me.”
What this morning’s Emporio Armani collection articulated on behalf of its author is that those evenings spent holed up in solitude, exclusively for work, result in a profusion of ideas as bubbling as that of a designer a quarter of his vintage. Broken down, this show contained many collections wrapped up in one EA experience. In the middle there was an EA7 aside (sinister and at times bordering on kinky piumino-strafed military skiwear) and at the end, a new R-EA (recycled Emporio Armani) sub-collection in which he presented presumably all-renewed, all-navy pieces of attractive, tactical streetwear.
The Emporio collection that ran alongside these two side-stories contained several chapters in itself. The first two looks appeared greige but were a houndstooth impression of it, and in their mix of the multi-pocketed, wearable portage of the contemporary and the soft-shouldered silhouette of Armani signaled the hybrids ahead. Three peak-collar double-breasted jackets, two herringbone, one plaid, featured an internal strap fastening and were worn with silky, generous turtleneck shirts: sensual, sartorial, and sporty in one fell swoop. Oversized baseball jacket/parka hybrids in a scarlet herringbone wool were mixed with matching pants, oversized black-notch collar puffer jackets with buffalo-check pants, and a fine red irregular herringbone-notch collar dressing-gown coat with a soft-profile harness top and gray pants. Oversized insulated gilets provided volume over zigzag-patterned half-zip knits. It was a careful, casual mishmash, a slow-cooked stew of traditional pattern and sportswear profile given umami by tailoring motifs.
Then, shortly before the EA7 section kicked in, we saw a series of what looked like backpack gilet harnesses over similarly blended, mostly red and black, looks which, like some of the bags we’d seen before, had a label reading (at least from where I was sitting) “CLASSIC PRC”: this was not a bold pitch at one particular market, but a misread (via abstract typeset O) of “CLASSIC PRO,” the name of a collection now explicitly tilted at the inter-contamination of classic sartorialism and (pro) sportswear.
Once the EA7 section had seen its last long rainbow-tinted piumino scarf, the tone shifted to classic again in a section notable for two Prince of Wales check suits, double breasted, which were great. Some outerwear pieces that placed black nylon zigzag panels of piumino against the same pattern were pretty good too. Then following a series of ornamented but mean-looking sort of evening-biker looks (in pleather), there was a turn to expressively progressive formalwear: black jackets etched with silver beads and suits in silver-etched pinstripe. After that we progressed through the recycled workwear of the final R-EA chapter. To mark full stop of this season’s EA story, Mr. Armani emerged and raised his arms—another collection done, another statement made, and another one to come on Monday.
