Considering that Giorgio Armani is a designer for whom, more than any other, consistency both in manner and output has for decades been an unambiguously fixed point—a creative center of gravity—the signs of change there this season seemed a hint of something seismic. Monday evening’s mainline collection presentation was moved to his headquarters at Via Borgonuovo, which last hosted a show 18 years ago. And while this morning’s Emporio show was held, as ever, at the venue built to replace Borgonuovo, the alterations inside the Armani theater were relatively radical: Instead of maybe 10 rows of seating down the two long sides of the room, the furniture was today rearranged to mirror a presentation given for Armani Casa at April’s Salone del Mobile. This meant reducing the seating to four rows, but around all four sides of the room. Suspended from its formerly un-interfered with roof were four levels of 4x3 gridded semi-sheer panels. And rather than walking from one side of the room to the other, this time the models walked around it and back again. To Armani-ologists, these subtle alterations added up.
Maybe the most telling declaration of a new spirit abroad in this company came in a stop-motion sentence of three successive looks around two thirds of the way through this—some things never change—very long show. The first saw the debut appearance in this collection of a tie, knotted smartly and tight under a collared shirt and above a fitted gray-to-white garment-dyed double-breasted jacket and loose, creased pants in a stiffened fabric. In the next look, the tie above a flecked-check white on blue linen jacket and some crinkled loose black viscose pants was fair wrenched from its collar, as if the model had emerged the worse from a passionate debate with his stylist. In the third the tie, above another linen check jacket, was pulled still lower. The forcibly removed tie reflected an Emporio collection in which—although there was a five-look core of fitted formal business suiting worn with some of the very few non-sneakers on view in this show—the majority of looks were either rooted in sport and performance wear or displayed echoes of sartorial motif on a canvas of radical future-facing fabrication.
The opening section felt powerfully EA7, Armani’s pure-sport line, in its plethora of Velcro attached webbing pochettes, tracksuits, and parkas. “GENERATION EA” declared the branding on the arms of technical blousons worn under harnesses. Four looks on the trot featured harnesses attached to loosely billowing white silk parachutes, perhaps another nod to the leap this collection was looking to make. Later there was a long series of looks that clashed the informal and formal on a color palette of iridescent gelateria hues: apricot, lemon, lime, and pistachio. The fabrics were often treated to reflect the already piercingly unnatural light of the space to refract and shimmer with movement.
Towards the end were a series of evening jackets, with leather shoes reinstated, upon which were patterned various jacquard pixelated meltings, suiting equivalents of Neo’s existentially suggesting screen collapse in The Matrix. A not-quite-final look was a suede bomber, with a similarly dotted mantel of mirrored decoration at the shoulder and chest.
That look was not-quite-final because the last section of this show saw a sudden sidestep from the business of Emporio Armani to mark the company’s long-term position fitting Italy’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes. The national insalata caprese-hued tricolor was projected on the floor and John Paul Young’s Love Is In The Air blared loud as perhaps 30 athletes came out in their EA7 Italy tracksuits, some waving gymnast’s ribbons and silver hoops. It was a warm, feel-good moment that rose to a climax as the racing driver and double-amputee Gold medal winning paracyclist Alessandro Zanardi completed the final lap of the show by wheelchair. Mr. Armani came out, waved and half-bowed, then returned backstage.
