With ‘Echoes of Armani’

2014 June 25. | Szerző: shannon |

When performers start titling their efforts “whispers,” “memories” or “echoes” — like the “Echoes of Armani” show Tuesday — you can usually expect the farewell tour.

Giorgio Armani, on the other hand, isn’t going anywhere. As he has said many times in the press, Mr. Armani, who turns 80 in two weeks, probably will work until he drops. And he will continue to comb through his fertile back pages for ideas, motifs and gestures that have kept him in the game since the 1980 film “American Gigolo” and the body-hugging power suit.

One reason Mr. Armani remains by far the most successful designer ever to come out of Italy is his conviction that his original design note was pitched correctly. And he clearly was onto something because reverberations have rippled outward ever since.

Though the soft suiting we all now take for granted didn’t start with him, it was Mr. Armani who adapted core elements of traditional Neapolitan tailoring — natural shoulders, form-fitting suits, the use of half-linings and pliable, rather than rigid, woolens — and sold them to the world.

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That he can still put it across was made clear by both Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani this week, where, in shows spaced several days apart, Mr. Armani and his team gave evidence of having appraised a design brief in need of invigoration and then provided a jolt.

They did it with monochrome graphics. In an Emporio show emptily titled “Avant Garde,” and enough prolonged to give Marina Abramovic a run for her money in terms of duration (more than 100 looks), Mr. Armani sent out peacoats, snug bombers, mackintoshes, shiny shirts with short sleeves and shoulders that were fused rather than stitched. Hatches, slashes, windowpane checks, fishnet patterns and lane-divider stripes covered almost everything.

The full, pleated trousers the designer prefers had been tapered to follow the now nearly universal fashion for a narrow leg. On the best style, a single skinny line of contrasting color traced the crease of the pants. Happily, the thick-soled white sneakers and paddock boots — more appealing than any footwear Mr. Armani has offered in some time — were free of hectic patterns. A man needs some place to rest his eye when he crosses his legs.

Mr. Armani’s main show, presented for an audience that included the singer Joe Jonas and the actor (and Armani Code poster boy) Chris Pine, was emotionally and tonally muted, opening with two slouchy belted trenches reminiscent of Italy in the postwar years.

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The classic Armani proportions remained in place: a visually constricted chest, flowing trousers, outerwear shapes either boxy or voluminously draped. And with the exception of several brightly striped tunic jackets that looked as though they’d been swiped from a gondolier’s closet, the palette was muted.

No trends were set and none were really expected. That is only half true. Following a practice increasingly common on runways here, Mr. Armani showed his men’s wear in two dominant and divergent sets of proportion. This likely indicates less about any design inspiration than it does about the importance of penetrating emerging markets. Lest anyone miss the message, roughly a fifth of the models were Asian.

DSquared2, always shown on an early morning at the end of fashion week, can usually be counted on to gin up something to rouse the spirits of a fashion flock that, at this point on a long circuit, is generally in the grip of some type of hangover. One time it was Rihanna, in the early “Umbrella” days. Once it was a troupe of semi-drag acrobat rockers.

The clothes seldom vary much — jeans, jeans jackets, khakis, bumfreezer blazers — and, according to the mood of the twin designers Dean and Dan Caten, are either laboriously distressed or ostentatiously schoolboy proper.

There are always semi-naked hunks and expanses of hairless flesh. There is reliably a theme, and this one had something vaguely to do with artists and models. If anything about the clothes was different from whatever was the last thing DSquared2 showed, it was probably the appliqué patterns and prints that lazily alluded to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol.

A group of neon get-ups with Stephen Sprouse-for-Louis Vuitton graffiti scrawled across them was shown on long-haired models who bore a vague resemblance to the designer. Reminded by this dim attempt at wit how exciting things are when real ideas by gifted designers such as Mr. Sprouse are in play, this reporter closed his notebook, laid down the pen and sprinted for the exit.