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“What I love most about New York is its speed, its constant reinvention, and its ability to remain both itself and entirely different,” Giorgio Armani told Vogue before his show tonight. He might as well have been describing himself. The 90 year-old showed 90 looks that gave us a dizzyingly broad overview of the many territories Armani has explored during his 49 years in business, yet which also felt fresh: this was more than some reverent retrospective.
The ostensible reason Armani was in New York for his first-ever mainline show outside of Milan— and his first show here since 2013’s One Night Only—was to herald the reopening of his store (and restaurant, and apartments) on Madison Avenue. At the pre-show schmooze the news was that this store has been taking north of $1 million a day in its first three days so far. But beyond that reason, this show was long overdue: between 1975 and 1982 Armani’s ascent from obscure start-up to become the world’s hottest fashion designers was inextricably linked to the passion he inspired here. Second only to Milan, New York was the key launchpad for his global success. As he said of his earliest visits: “Experiencing it for the first time in the late 1970s after only having seen it on the screen was stimulating. It was an exciting time for both the city and America, and I felt like I was part of it.”
Mid-schmooze, it was the arrival of two steam trains projected onto the walls of the Park Avenue Armory that signaled this evening’s show was ready to go. A curtain dropped to reveal a huge showspace set with semi-circle banquette seating. We gradually settled into Armani’s fantasy waiting room to watch a show that unfolded a little like the Grand Central Station scene in North by Northwest.
The first passenger to stride past wore a cropped trench and full pleated pants tucked into mid-calf boots. She was shadowed by a luggage-lugging porter but also carried a greige leather pochette clipped to her belt and a clutch tucked under her arm. After her appeared several other characters who were precisely delineated by props or styling: these included the flustered hero in greige tailoring whose knitted tie had blown over his unstructured right shoulder, and the uptown princess in blush silk bloomers and jacket dress, also in blush, that nicely complemented the handsome labradoodle-meets-cockapoo dog she held in the crook of one arm.
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