This postscript of an Emporio Armani collection—the last to be overseen by Leo Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani before Dario Vitale assumes the deconstructed mantle next season—was presented in a chic chromatic sweep. It was also no show, but a presentation that ran down the concrete entryway and into the atrium of Armani/Teatro, the Tadao Ando-designed showspace Giorgio Armani opened on Via Bergognone in 2001.
That sweep ran from white to black, via shades of green, gray and greige. And while the collection was entitled “Traces of Time,” the material evidence of time’s passage applied to the clothes seemed more concerned with accrual than decline.
The looks were shown one by one, except for the first two, which were placed side by side. These were two peaked-lapel suits in light, white, crushed fabric. The man’s was matched with a flattened rope-woven shoe, shirt and cravat; the woman’s with an origami-uppered sandal and blouse. Together they pretty clearly gestured towards the longstanding roles of Dell’Orco and Armani, and the creative succession this collection was prefiguring.
Moving onwards, we saw an attractively loose progression of pale suiting played against oversized trenches and cropped shorts. A bomber was stitched with irregular horizontal lines akin to the time-marking concentric rings of a tree; beneath them ran what looked like a monochromatic view of the Alps stretching across the horizon as seen from the plains of Lombardy. The surface pattern on an acid-washed trench and suit resembled a roughly split seam of marble. Felted-wool ikat and fern jacquards vaguely recalled fossils.
Treated salt crystals were embedded across the shoulders, collar and cuffs of a roomy black denim jacket, or liberally seasoned over the entire surface of a denim popover and wide-legged pant. A jacket and pant in crushed, textured brown fabric were as dense to the eye as a darkened forest floor. Mesh necklaces held crystal amulets. The final look in this chapter of Emporio Armani starred a black waistcoat decorated with raised, bead-topped ridges that ran in parallel lines from the top before morphing into a crazy-lace cluster of mineralized pattern. Time marches on.
