October 7, 2011 |
FROM THE VAULT (SUMMER 2011)
“We had a dream. In fact, it was on the night we saw Giorgio Armani. In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there wasn’t a spotlight trailing a model down a catwalk, bathing him in a blue glow, which symbolised Giorgio. And for the longest time, there was this feeling of emptiness, of zero desirable fashions. And all of a sudden, thousands of models dressed in unstructured laid-back suiting flooded the runway, blinding us with the blue spotlight of LOVE and FASHIONS. And it seemed that Mr Armani would make a difference, and he did. He reached out to save us. Saved us from a world of itchy polyester and shiny nylon.”
This is how we feel about Armani. He is light. He is love. He makes us look like together human beings, not like the gutter tramp we used to be, the kind people will only spit at (from a distance). He’s our only constant, the only person we can rely on to always be there and we’re gonna stick to him like glue. Quite simply, he is – and ergo us, by extension – suave. We’d like to say we were there from the beginning, from 1975, but that would be a lie. Our relationship began in the early 1980s, when he introduced the unstructured jacket. It changed our lives, freed us – literally, freed us – from the shackles of tailoring. It was akin to the abolition of the corset, but 70 years or so later. Finally, we could walk around unbuttoned, a little rumpled – we could eat! Do you know how long it had been since we’d placed a forkful of spaghetti in our mouths for fear of a tightly stitched seam bursting? It also made us look cool, something we are not really, so are grateful for any help we can get in this regard. This love affair has lasted through the years; we’ve never strayed, always remained as loyal as a labrador puppy. And for unfaltering love, we’ve been duly rewarded. His winter offerings, are, we like to think, a careful reworked edit of his classics. All in shades of grey. Belted coats, soft jackets worn over soft vests, over even softer cotton shirts. Trousers that were slightly pegged and, peeking out from beneath some of the upper layers, a dirty flash of black leather. All bathed in that blue spotlight of love.
by Natalie Dembinska
Photograph by Jason Lloyd-Evans – www.lloyd-evans.com
