There’s a model who always does a twirl on the Armani Privé runway. It’s not the fashion thing to do, but it’s hers and she runs with it. In pre-pandemic seasons it might have caused a few eye rolls—we do, after all, have our stone-faced exteriors to preserve—but on the second evening of the live shows’ big return, she got smiles all around. The effect of the lockdowns hasn’t seemed as cataclysmic to Giorgio Armani as many other designers. At 87, he’s been through worse. But the terrible fall he took recently, which required stitches and days in hospital, inevitably changed his perspective. His haute couture collection was called “Shine,” and you didn’t need any further explanation.
True to form, Armani—handsome as ever, roaming the gardens of the Italian Embassy in Paris pre-show, tanned and in all-navy—brushed off his recent accident: “It was simply something that happened, and it has not affected my work.” But he did confess to a certain post-pandemic awareness: “I do not feel more emotional about my work after the pandemic, but now I want my work to show emotions in a clearer way. I think that, during this period, we have discovered a feeling of something true, something powerful, something enriching, something energizing, and I want all this to come true, also through my work.” Adapting the colors of the rainbow (and often, rainbow ice cream), his Privé show was founded in materials that did just that.
Mercurial silk organza so fluid and shiny it moved like a hologram shaped the collection. Armani worked it into trousers and dresses, adding his signature filtrage—layers of transparent fabric, that is—to create sensory overloads so vibrant and effervescent they went straight to the head. He referred to the technique as “halos around the body,” an IRL apparition you certainly wouldn’t have picked up on a livestream. When he added shimmery floral embroideries and watery sequins to those illusions, the effect was virtually giddy. And all this on a fresh-pastel palette, mind you.
Armani bent those colors and textures into jaunty, rigidly tiered dresses and grand gestures like a pink, encrusted, feathered silk organza cape, or a lilac plume jacket with embroidered edges. The latter could have been inspired by Commedia dell’Arte, and spirits were certainly as high. “I am happy that we will be presenting this in front of a live audience, because I think that all the impalpable and floating shapes need to be seen in a real environment and on a moving body to be fully appreciated,” Armani said. When the volumes and beading of his skirts rustled past your knees in the tapestry-clad salons of the Embassy, you knew exactly what he was talking about.
This show wasn’t, however, Armani closing his eyes to the events of the last year-and-a-half. Wishing to put the lessons learned in lockdown into practice, he filtered into the collection some 15 garments from his audience-less Privé show in January, because he wanted people to see them up close, and because haute couture is a paragon of the permanence everybody has been calling for in fashion. “Timelessness is a central idea in all my collections,” Armani said, “no clothes are meant to be over in one season.”
