Milan: Emporio Armani Out of India
September 28, 2004 - Milan
Get thee to Ganges is the big message coming out of Milan, where Giorgio Armani led a charge to colonial India on Monday, the first day of major shows in the Italian fashion calendar.
Armani, who showed his junior Emporio spring summer 2005 collection in his custom-built south Milan theatre, evoked Rajasthan palaces, Maharani magic and polo playing ladies in a slickly presented show. And he was not the only designer to look east: Rifat Ozbek at Pollini showed a modernist Goa meets the sophisticated west collection also on Monday and Just Cavalli had haute hippie chic in its show attended by white rapper Eamon.
But Armani stood out with his take on India. Neither hippie nor ethnic, the Armani vision of the Asian sub-continent was a sparkling blend of high-tech fabrics, early 1900s silhouette and his own famous tailoring. So we got body-hugging jackets ideal for taking tiffin at a lakeside palace in Udaipour, but made in amazingly soft leather with a faux-sequin surface, or jodhpur pants cut in the lightest chiffon.
Armani, who last year acquired a state-of-the-art shoe factory near Venice, also put a lot of effort into his accessories, showing excellent suede slippers, wedges with snazzy raffia trim, fantastic rope hunting belts and beautifully patterned leather handbags.
You could just imagine the Emporio front row gals – the lovely Mandy Moore, or the devine looking French actress Eva Green, the new face in the Emporio fall campaign – at ease and gorgeous in most these looks.
The Milan season has barely begun and already Armani has made it his own. He also found time to open a high-tech new Armani Jeans store on Corso Porta Ticinese, the Lower East Side of Milan, and stage a press conference with Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter for the launch of the magazine’s new Oscar Night, 75 years of Hollywood, photo book.
And this weekend, back in Paris, he unveiled his first take on modern autos. In its showroom on the Champs Elysees, Mercedes presented an Armani convertible, created in a great new color scheme – sanded metal. Mercedes, which has limited the Armani sports car to just 100 models, sold four on the first 48 hours and has been inundated by requests from major Armani clients in Japan desperate to complete their total look.
A tiny pity Giorgio did not have the soft-top fours years ago, when he toured Rajasthan in a small fleet of white Mercedes. Ironically, post-show on Monday Armani lamented how many cars there are in Milan. “I wish they would built more metro lines. It would the city far more beautiful,” said the designer. More beautiful, and with more space for his fleet of sports cars.
He could've come up with something better.
