Armani Privé: Show of the season

Now that’s what we call a bona fide great haute-couture show. Giorgio Armani inaugurated his new Paris mansion HQ on Tuesday with his most path-breaking couture show, and the best fashion moment of the French season.

Presented inside a Grand Empire cut-stone building on rue François Premier, this spring/summer 2025 collection also celebrated Armani’s 20th anniversary in Paris couture. The result: easily the most beautiful clothes in this week’s couture.
 
Winning Giorgio a standing ovation from a front row that included Demi Moore, Jessica Biel, Marisa Berenson and Poppy Delevingne. A key element in any January couture show is spotting the looks that nominees will wear to the Oscars on March 4. No show in Paris this season will have as many beautiful and beguiling options.

Starting with the feather-light tailoring in silk gazars and metallic satins, paired with fluid silken dhotis. Worn by models with Malay hats and skullcaps encrusted with crystals. Every exactly draped jacket with peplums reeking of luxury and elegance.
 
Armani’s cast toured through several rooms on a Perspex covered mock alabaster runway driven on by his preferred galactic funk, led by “Waiting” from Maratus & Just Emma. 
 
The show went into overdrive twice. First with a series of magnificent columns or singlet dresses in micro plissé metallic silks, their bodices embroidered in bugle beads, sequins and micro strass.
 
Asia, a huge influence on Armani’s oeuvre, then played a huge role in a series of chiffon pants suits and more columns in Giorgio’s non-colors of cement, steam or pale clouds, magically finished with images of bamboo, chrysanthemums and palm trees. Talk about a wow factor.

Backed up orchestra sounds – “From Nothing” by Generdyn – suggesting another stylistic universe, the show felt triumphant. Before a beaming Giorgio took a full tour of the gilded rooms, arm in arm with a couture bride.
 
In a sense, it’s been a long struggle for Armani to win over the toughest judges in the world of style – the Paris fashion elite. Twenty years ago, when he staged his debut Privé collection Armani got off to a bizarre start by staging it inside a banal modernist building on a side street. Throughout the aughties, he garnered respect, but critics were more wowed by the theatrics of John Galliano at Dior, the monumental staging of Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel or the grandeur of Valentino.
 
Today, however, in his 90th year, as he opened his Paris mansion, it is clear that this couture season belongs to Giorgio Armani, the Italian maestro della mode. Roll on the Academy Awards.
 
As the Italians like to say: Dieci e lode! Or ten out of ten!