Say it ain’t so. This was the final time we would ever see newly designed clothes conceived by Giorgo Armani on the runway. Although in many ways, of course, they weren’t new at all. For as the 50th-anniversary exhibition installed upstairs in Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera so beautifully demonstrated, Mr. Armani’s aesthetic might have been subject to constant seasonal variation, but it was also unwaveringly consistent and true. The Yves Saint Laurent coined-phrase “fashions fade, style is eternal” might have been invented for him. Tonight’s collection could be directly traced back to the first show he ever presented, in October 1975, about ten minutes walk away on Corso Venezia.
Mr. Armani died, aged 91, at the beginning of this month. That meant watching a collection which you could see had been conceived as both a seasonal commercial offer and a gently celebratory retrospective of many of his key fashion gestures suddenly felt like watching a poignantly posthumous montage. The cast included a sprinkling of models whose associations with Armani sometimes went back to the early 1980s, among them Olga Serova, Veronika Pospisilova, Veronica Ruck, Olga Sherer, Lavinia Birladeanu, Laura Reiff, Gina Di Bernardo, Anna Ry, Andrea Krakhecke, Mark Vanderloo, Daniela Peštová, and Nadège Dubospertus. Some of them, you could see, were tearful.
The woven leather blue sweater vest jacket hybrid in this gallery’s image 43 was reminiscent of that earliest Armani collection. The global influences, the greige, the navy, the deconstruction, the fluidity, the softened masculine proportion both for men and women, the imperial purple, the sparkle, the depth of pattern, the material richness… Armani, Armani, Armani. Look 34 was to me close to the platonic ideal of a single menswear look. The greatest shock tonight was that for perhaps the first time I can ever recall, there was not a single hat in the show.
These had been doffed by Silvana Armani and Leo dell’Orco, Mr. Armani’s design successors, who came out to warm applause after the last look—a blue skirt and top, both crystal spun. The top bore the famous portrait of Giorgo in his pomp, chin cradled in one hand, looking intently into the lens and onwards into the future. As Lauren Hutton observed after this show: “He will live pretty much forever, or as long as we’re going to be here.” Because how could we ever forget?
