Models walk the runway at the Giorgio Armani fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2024-2025 on Feb. 25, 2024 in Milan, Italy.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
Giorgio Armani is not Donatella Versace. He doesn’t like politics. He doesn’t like controversy. He never gets out of line on current political events. He loves to talk only about fashion. Most of all, his own.
Donatella Versace, for her part, often takes a stand. Her speech on the stage of Milan’s La Scala Theater during the Fashion Awards last year was memorable. A harsh frontal attack on Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni for her discriminatory policies toward same-sex parents, it was heard around the world.
Although he might be sensitive to the topic, Giorgio Armani, on the other hand, for one of his show finales a few seasons ago, paraded five couples — each composed only of a man and a woman, couples ostensibly heterosexual and traditional — down the runway. “It’s a precise choice I wanted. To see an attractive, serious couple again,” the designer admitted at the time to those who pointed out to him that he himself did not have a traditional romantic situation and that society in the meantime was, fortunately, evolving.
On Feb. 25, on the sidelines of his fashion show at the closing of Milan Fashion Week, a British journalist asked him for his opinion on the “far-right government currently in place in Italy.”
Armani replied that “Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has two important elements in her body that are quite robust, she doesn’t have them but it’s as if she had them. On the politics and strategies that her government puts in place I am not so knowledgeable, it bothers me sometimes to see her so small and petite in Europe among so many statuesque and elegant gentlemen, she’s there in her little jacket, but she has a beautiful face,” the designer concluded with a smile.
The reporter’s decidedly political question received yet another aesthetic answer.
After all, from Armani you don’t expect a position; he only wants to be asked about his fashion and his newest creations for Fall Winter 2024/2025 that he has given the title “Winter Flowers.”
“There are no flowers in the winter, I invented them!” said Armani, referring to next winter’s collection, which moves between black velvets and colorful petals perfect for front row guests like Cate Blanchett. “When I create my designs I always think of women who can be encountered anywhere and not between intellectual and sexual excitements. I think of women who are coherent to their face. In the beginning there were the young people of Carnaby Street and I didn’t like that fashion, so I chose to go a step ahead and put men and women in my jackets. Kind of like what I do now, no more women going around town in their underwear!” continues the designer, who on the symbolic choice of flowers points out “they remind us of, or at least herald, a better season.”
His love of fashion and his love of nature, added the designer, “has always supported me in my choices. It is something transformed into fabric, color, attitude, suggesting an atmosphere. Nature is where we live and we want to continue to live without exasperations that — it is my belief — are absolutely unnecessary.”
This story originally ran on The Hollywood Reporter Roma.