“Subtle shifts in perception: nuanced gestures that renew the collection with both ease and intention.” This was how Leo Dell’Orco characterized the Giorgio Armani manufacturing alchemy that produced shirts and loose unconstructed jackets that hit the eye like denim but had the touch, substance, and material reality of shantung silk. However, it applied just as well to the fact that there was also plenty of real denim in this collection: Look 99 was the killer example, but there were more jeans today than I can ever recall seeing at a Giorgio Armani collection. Armani is shifting its own perception.
Jeans are reputedly named after the Italian port city of Genoa, which segued nicely with the Mediterranean theme and set of this joint show by Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani, who was showing womenswear cruise. The courtyard of Palazzo Orsini was set up as an al fresco midsummer lounge, floored with rugs of rattan, sisal, and jute, all in different weaves. They gave off a pleasantly vegetal smell. Their patterned intersections were often reflected in the surfaces of the garments that were walked around the courtyard: light washed shirts with barely visible softened blocks of color, Look 3’s fantastic long-skirted and unvented academic’s jacket in a micro-herringbone, and a silky womenswear blouse and pant in blue herringbone.
There was a great deal of wash and crumple to the garments, as if they had been sun-bleached and salt-soaked. That appearance of exposure felt very appropriate on a day whose heat left all of us feeling pretty sun-bleached, salt-soaked, crumpled, and in need of a wash. Also reflected in the staging was the grainy nuttiness—also possibly sandiness—of the garments’ colorways during the first half of this very long show. The little reflective flecks of material in the courtyard’s granite columns were echoed by the soft sparkle of transparent sequins from within the fabric of some early womenswear jackets. Linen field jackets had a textured, slubby finish. There were sometimes woven rope details or woven rattan uppers in the loafers and slippers in which the men mostly walked. The oversized canvas bags with leather reinforcements looked as if they had already seen adventure.
Dell’Orco gently unsettled the usual hierarchies and groupings of his menswear ingredients, showing a tailored jacket above combat pants and a brace of utility vests with bellows pockets—classic Mediterranean menswear—over tailored pants and cotton shirting. For evening, he reduced the tuxedo to black pants and shirt, with the shirts sometimes collarless or covered-placket. We finished with a few true evening jackets worn with pins representing Scorpio (Dell’Orco’s zodiac sign) or Cancer (that of the late Giorgio Armani).
In his note, Dell’Orco said: “I envisioned a collection that is very Armani: fluid lines, this time closer to the body, and fabrics with a lived-in appearance—vibrant, sun-scorched, and full of character. I believe that in menswear it is essential to return to researching and innovating materials.” That approach led to an Armani collection that felt subtly modernized and finely harmonized with the womenswear against which it was presented.