Pausing to tie a bootlace at the streetcar stop opposite The Armani Hotel this morning, I glanced up to see Adrien Brody and Joe Alwyn stride out of the building then onwards down Via Manzoni. The co-stars of The Brutalist were beginning the five minute walk to the second Giorgio Armani show of the day (I’d just come from the first). Apart from the jolt of their hyper-recognizability transferred from screen to street, what was striking was how seamlessly their (obviously) all-Armani outfits —a navy blouson and pants for Brody, and what seemed a treated velvet, tweed-effect suit for Alwyn—looked so credibly contemporary against the backdrop of the city that has been the set of Armani’s menswear for more than half a century.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Armani had taken his bow in white sneakers, dark blue pants, and a black double breasted velvet jacket. “Mr Armani’s really feeling velvet this year,” observed Edward Buchanan on our way out: he was right, as per usual. Just as at Emporio on Saturday night, velvet played a significant role in this Giorgio collection. Yet it was only one element amongst many that Armani used in a broader project to subtly yet strikingly rearrange and refresh his broader architecture of menswear design.
This saw him take multiple pillar-categories of the form—tailoring, evening wear, tailored outerwear, semi-formal wear and more rugged, military-inspired pragmatic outerwear—and then lean them in together. The signifying motif of this broader rearrangement were the unconventionally placed pockets on his overwhelmingly wide and flowing pants. There was also a section of Neve line skiwear featuring reflective panels that gleamed under the spotlights like the moonlit ocean (here to anticipate next year’s Winter Olympic Games in Milan and Cortina).
Gilets and knitwear were worn underneath lushly textured suits north of velvet sneakers or Vibram soled moccasins. Color accents were divided into sections—gray, green, red, blue, greige—and there were a lot of harmonically competing patterns to reflect the gentle genre clash at play within the outfits. Some gorgeously weathered leather jackets looked as if they could have been adapted straight from Armani’s archive on display in his Silos space, worn here against ruby velvet shirting and roomy gray trousers in loden-thick wool. At the close Armani presented seven his-and-hers evening wear duets, which countered inky black velvet with light-catching crystal insert and stone embellishments. Armani came out to take that bow and begin the restart before Brody, Alwyn, and the rest of his starry second show audience—which included Luca Marinelli, star of the extraordinary Sky Italia series Mussolini: Son of the Century—arrived.
