There was a box of chocolates on every seat in the house, and that made a suitable introduction to Fancy Girl, the muse for Giorgio Armani s latest Emporio show. She was most certainly all that and more, in her shiny jacket and leggy tube skirt. This last item, in stretch tulle, was the show s foundation stone. Everything else—the tiered voiles, the little flared skirt with the center zip, the one-shouldered trapeze cocktail dress—sat over it. It was a typical Armani move, to take one item and play it out through the entire collection. In the past, he s attached himself to a particular hat or a pair of pants, among other polarizing flourishes, with all the attendant risks. What if it doesn t work? It s inevitably a win-some-lose-some situation, and that s exactly what happened this time.
Where it worked best was with what could be construed as daywear, like the opening jackets, cutaway with a slight sheen. They were made from something called rubberized raffia, which was instantly a valuable reminder that Armani s fabrics are always much more than they seem. Seconds later, we were confronted with jackets and shorts covered with what looked like big, square paillettes. "Thermo-welded leather tiles" is what they actually were.
The shorts were the show s key alternative to the tulle tubes, but eventually even they seemed to surrender to a kind of ruffled nebulousness, which is where the lose-some moment kicked in. Toward the end of a presentation that covered a head-spinning number of bases, there were several indistinctly layered or hard-edged outfits that were probably the wrong kind of fancy for Armani s girl.
