Cool AF in a wide lapeled, cuff-legged, off-white seersucker suit, Samuel L. Jackson said before this show: “I’ve been wearing Armani since about 2000— when I did the first Shaft movie. For years and years, having seen the name Giorgio Armani but being a poor actor in New York I hadn’t been able to afford it. And then all of a sudden, there you are, you are in it—the amazing realization of a style pinnacle.”
Jackson grew up with a sense of fashion thanks to his mother’s job as a buyer—“she dressed me in classic styles, so I was the odd kid”—but even for those with no fashion knowledge this designer’s three-syllable surname is a synonym for style. Today for the first time in nearly 20 years, Armani held his mainline menswear show on Via Borgonuovo in Brera, his headquarters for decades. This street is so much his that editors arriving for Tom Ford’s showroom presentation on the very far corner of it beforehand were regretfully informed by security and police that no cars were to be let through unless on Armani business.
The building we were in, Palazzo Orsini, was purchased by Armani to replace his original business HQ (now his home), a few palazzos down the road. It is only one of several he has purchased with the fruits of his 45-year-career. The collection was, as ever, built around the tailoring he once did so much to transform. Here it began with a series of blue-accented brown suits in linen or softly patterned jacquard, a color that he had reputedly never majored in before and whose introduction was inspired by an old photograph of Visconti.
Soon enough the collection relaxed into house blue but there were surprising jolts of gridding in loose shirting in blue and silver check or GA monogram with double rows of small round buttons. Patched-color sweaters mixed terry cotton with fine gauge knit, and there was a check pant in irregular rectangle patches of blue, pink, red, gray, and olive that was unusually color-intense for this label. A handsome high notch-collared, almost professorial jacket shape was revived from, oh, maybe a decade ago.
The women’s looks on show were taken from Armani’s Resort collection that was shown in Tokyo last month. Fronds of coral-beaded jewelry used as top-pocket ornament were also lifted from that collection. A new nautically themed capsule entitled Mains after both Armani’s yacht and—its ultimate origin—a childhood nickname given to his mother featured pleasant treated cotton work jackets and top stitched double-breasted suiting in white and blue. A near-the-end grouping of models wearing jaunty neckerchiefs, softly treated T-shirts, and rolled-leg printed silk shorts added to the bay-hopping vibe. At the finale Jackson was firing off pictures on his smartphone as Armani emerged to applaud his models and take our applause in return. At his usual fashion theater, he looms out of the dark only briefly before stepping back into it, but here he paused a while to enjoy this deservedly acclaimed homecoming.
