Emporio Armani Spring 2023 Ready-to-Wear Collection

In the permanent display at Armani/Silos—the exhibition space across the Via Bergognone from today’s Emporio show venue—the oeuvre of the great man is displayed and contextualized under three categories: Androgynous, Ethnicities, and Stars. To a greater or lesser extent, this evening’s show displayed elements of each. You could certainly see stars (and the influencer-packed audience) wearing many of the pieces here, especially the glittering sheer mesh dresses in the finale. And there was plenty of soft, pastel-hued androgyny presented against a decent dose of the soft-shouldered tailoring upon which Giorgio Armani has built his immense success. However, today’s most-emphasized Armani chord was arguably, as the Silos puts it: “The strong influence of non-Western cultures…he uses elements inspired by faraway ethnicities and interprets them with his signature style. Africa, China, Japan, Persia, Arabia, Syria, and Polynesia are some of the places that have inspired the designer.”

This transcultural approach seemed to be signaled by the calligraphic archway projected at the back of the runway and the dappled sea surface on its floor. Down it, sometimes singly and sometimes in the groups that are such a runway motif here, the models walked in a myriad of pieces that appeared to be carefully and respectfully fused from a wide-reaching itinerary of inspirational locales and traditions. This reflected both Armani’s global reach and peripatetic eye—as well as his own long-established tradition—and made for a collection that transcended borders.