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Giorgio Armani: Go East, Young Man
By: Godfrey Deeny
Photos by Gruber-FWD
Milan, Jun 29, 2002/FWD/ --- Though he's Italy's most identifiably Italian designer,
Giorgio Armani had southern Asia very much on his mind in the collection he presented
Thursday in Milan.
With Dylan McDermott in a ecru suit and atlas high white collar shirt, and Jennifer Love
Hewitt and fellow designer Neil Barrett sitting front row, Milan blended Indian and southeast
Asian influences with his own personal style in the final show of the Italian spring-summer
2003 season.
"Western styles and eastern shapes," explained a beaming Armani after the show in his massive
south Milan "theatre," radically reconfigured into a more intimate setting this season.
Armani's other big news for a fresh approach to the suit, the driving force of his
billion-dollar-plus business.
For next spring his suit is sucked in at the waist, super-high in the armpit and broad in
the collar, while his double-breasted looks have scalloped edges.
Proposed in Armani's usual no-colors of mud, cement or beaten gray in cotton and coarse
linens, they looked just different enough to lure in armies of customers.
But the real novelty was how Giorgio paired western tailoring with eastern spirit -- a
Nehru-collared shirt under a double-breasted jacket or a kimono shirt under a fluid suit.
Also impressive were Armani's bulky, multi-stripe sandals, which were wearable from beach
to board meeting, abstract fern leaf sweaters, and some great, almost silky leather
jackets-one, in particular, a pocketed shirt-jacket tied around the waist, was this
critic's favorite leather look of the season.
The show and staging, however, did drag, especially the latter stages when the collections
got a mite repetitive.
Giorgio himself is famed for his avoidance of stylists, a pity, as working with a top-notch
editor might aid his presentations.
Not that this seemed to matter to the audience, which greeted the master with heavy applause.
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