Milan Fashion Week: Giorgio Armani hails fashion's return to normality
Giorgio Armani, the legendary designer who built his career on what we would now define as 'quiet luxury', has hailed a return to 'normality and craft' at Milan Fashion Week.
The 89-year-old designer has for years has lamented a Milan fashion scene that tries too hard, focusing on novelty instead of what he sees as the essence of fashion: dressing women to express themselves.
The designer said he sensed a change in this season’s Fashion Week, which ended on Sunday, with less frivolity. “Finally, I saw collections, from the photos, with a lot of normality. There is also a little research, which has to be part of this craft,” Armani said.
He was speaking after the unveiling of his SS24 collection, which mirrored a sky’s shifting colours and light at dusk – an idea conveyed with changing colours on the back wall of the showroom in his historic, central Milan headquarters.
Armani employed translucent, diaphanous fabrics alongside silks and satin to create lightness and movement.
The palette captured the mood, moving from bronze on silvery grey to jewel blue, green and purples which bled together, and back to dusky shades of grey and silver which faded to white.
Armani SS24 (Luca Bruno/AP)
“No beige,” Armani joked after the show.
The collection conveyed elegance but also practicality: clothes that put the wearer at ease in any context and without prodding toward overt, revealing sexiness.
Satiny trousers anchored many of the looks — jackets, transparent blouson layers, shimmering tops and off-shoulder chiffon dresses.
“Vibrations, that means colours, that means movement, that means a structure that moves on the body,” Armani said.
To demonstrate his vision, a model in a shimmering long dress and a diaphanous cape danced down the runway.
Flat shoes finished all of the looks.
“Women should not be enslaved to height or to a feline nature, being sexy at all costs,” the designer said.
“There can be also a normal woman but who hopefully has a twinkle in the eye.”
His comments came at the end of a Milan Fashion Week where the most anticipated show had been the new look Gucci. For the previous seven years, Gucci had been under the creative direction of Alessandro Michele who was know for his quirky, geeky and maximalist designs that drew from references as diverse a hip hop culture to renaissance art.
Following Michele's departure from the brand almost a year ago, the fashion world has been waiting expectantly for its new vision, which was delivered by new chief designer Sabato de Sarno, formerly of Valentino.
Gucci SS24 (Luca Bruno/AP)
De Sarno delivered a volte face for Gucci dropping the geek for chic but not forgetting the glamour, with micro shorts and minis and beautifully embellished dresses. For day there were patent leather pencil skirts teamed with zip up sweats and baggy blue jeans.
Michele maximalists hated it, of course, but the mood chimed perfectly with today's more stealth approach to luxe and, while some critics felt it could have pushed more boundaries, it's highly like to drive more sales and it certainly marks a strong change of direction for fashion in Milan and beyond.
