Giorgio Armani closes Milan Fashion Week with good vibes, familiar guests

Giorgio Armani closed Milan Fashion Week on Sunday with good vibes and a front row that included frequent guests such as Cate Blanchett and Juliette Binoche.

Armani's Spring-Summer 2024 collection mirrored a sky's shifting colors and light at dusk, an idea conveyed with changing colors on the back wall of the showroom in his historic, central Milan headquarters.

The 89-year-old designer employed translucent, diaphanous fabrics alongside silks and satin to create lightness and movement. The palette captured the mood, moving from bronze on silvery gray to jewel blue, green and purples that bled together, and back to dusky shades of gray and silver that faded to white.

"No beige," Armani joked after the show.

The collection conveyed elegance but also practicality: clothes that put the wearer at ease in any context and without prodding toward overt, revealing sexiness. Satiny trousers anchored many of the looks — jackets, transparent blouson layers, shimmering tops and off-shoulder chiffon dresses.

"Vibrations, that means colors, that means movement, that means a structure that moves on the body," Armani said. To demonstrate his vision, a model in a shimmering long dress and a diaphanous cape danced down the runway.

Flat shoes finished all of the looks.

"Women should not be enslaved to height or to a feline nature, being sexy at all costs,'' the designer said. "There can be also a normal woman, but who hopefully has a twinkle in the eye."

Armani for years has lamented a Milan fashion scene that tries too hard, focusing on novelty instead of what he sees as the essence of fashion: dressing women to express themselves. The designer said he sensed a change in this season's Fashion Week, with less frivolity.

"Finally, I saw collections, from the photos, with a lot of normality. There is also a little research, which has to be part of this craft,'' Armani said.