On Sunday evening, on the way to the Emporio Armani fashion show here, I did what I always do with … oh, six free minutes of my day: I checked eBay.
Perhaps to get in the Armani spirit, I searched “vintage Armani” (a search I’ve had saved in my account for a couple of years now) and prowled through the hundreds of Armani jackets, shirts and knits that have washed up on the site.
Half an hour later, watching the Emporio show, I began to feel as if my eBay search had sprung to life.
There, in front of me, were sandy-hued chevron sweaters, ripply cigar-brown leather blazers, waist-length insulated jackets with paperback-scaled pockets tacked on the front and suits buttoned, for maximum drama, at the collar: all cousins, if not brothers, of items I’d seen on eBay.
The 120-look buffet (Armani does not skimp on its model budget) was a reminder that Giorgio Armani, the Italian titan who, at 90, continues to look hale in his unwavering navy T-shirts, long ago found his design language — and he’s sticking to it. To start speaking a new dialect now would be illogical and, for Armani’s legion of consumers, destabilizing.
This was on display again on Monday at a very in-the-pocket Giorgio Armani show.
Much of that collection, with its crushed velvet suits in eggplant, band-collar blazers and boat-neck knits with crosshatched motifs, looked as if it could have leaped out of “Giorgio Armani: Images of Man,” the oft-cited 1990 catalog of Mr. Armani’s early designs. What do you do once you’ve done it all? If you’re Giorgio Armani, you do it all over.
Well before this men’s fashion week, the stage was set for an Armani renaissance. A generation that wasn’t born in the 1980s, when Mr. Armani put Milan on the fashion map, has keyed into the wonders of “archive Armani,” plumbing the past for Emporio and Giorgio hits. Close-watched resale shops like the Archivist Store in Paris, Lara Koleji in New York and La Nauseé in London are repackaging aged Armani pieces as contemporary grails. (They come cheaper than today’s runway stuff — but sometimes not by much. La Nauseé recently sold a double-breasted leather Emporio overcoat from the ’90s for 1,500 pounds, roughly $1,800.)
Armani isn’t taking a back seat in this game plan. In recent years, the company has thrust itself in front of younger shoppers by collaborating with Kith, the “Wait, they sell more than sneakers?” streetwear boutique, and Our Legacy, the men’s wear bro-brand of the moment. When I visited the Our Legacy showroom on Saturday (about two minutes from Armani’s headquarters here), members of the Emporio Armani team were sitting with Our Legacy’s brain trust. Buyers at the showroom broke out in smirks as the news leaked that a second collaborative collection between the two brands was on the way.
Not that Mr. Armani is sitting back and spinning his wheels. In both collections, there were flashes of ingenuity and risk.
The high notes at the Emporio show included a very “Sunset Boulevard” corduroy zip-up with a fur collar the size of a well-fed Jack Russell and a Zsa Zsa Gabor-meets-gorpcore fleecy jacket in a cheetah print. At a decade shy of a century, Mr. Armani still has zest left in him. (Not everything worked: A clutch of three-piece velour suits read a bit too much like formal wear by Juicy Couture.)
At the Giorgio show, an almost-falling-off-the-shoulder leather jacket in a newspapery gray and a cropped peacoat with a flapping leather collar left a strong impression. So did a tawny suit with kicky pleated pants made in a material that fell somewhere between jersey and tweed. Can’t say I’d seen that before.
Do yourself a favor: Set a reminder now to search for those pieces on eBay in 25 years or so.
