Classic Armani

Even at 81- 40 years into a career that has made him one of the world’s best-known designers- Giorgio Armani remains a tireless innovator. Over the decades, he has designed plenty of iconic pieces—Richard Gere’s American Gigolo suits, perhaps most famously, and also any number of Academy Award winners’ outfits from Cate Blanchett to Jodie Foster- but you don’t see him looking back at those styles on his current runways. Even if other designers are obsessed with the past, Armani is determined to experiment: with silhouette, with fabric, with embellishment. But classics become classics for a reason. So this week  in Paris- where he showed his Armani Privé couture collection- the Italian designer  unveiled a campaign for a spring/summer 2016 collection dubbed New Normal that revolves around his signature trouser suits, including one with pleated pants that recalls Gere’s gigolo kit.

Befitting a lineup of classics- there’s also an exemplary black velvet trench and bags and shoes in crocodile dyed rich shades of cognac and bottle green- the campaign was shot by Peter Lindbergh and stars four women truly worthy of the title supermodel: Nadja Auermann, Stella Tennant, Eva Herzigova, and Yasmin Le Bon. For this campaign, Armani explained in a release, “I wanted four iconic women with strong personalities to show that feminine beauty is ageless. I chose Peter Lindbergh, with whom I have collaborated several times, because his photographs are timeless and are true to real life. I wanted to convey a sense of reality, of clothes that offer natural elegance and the normality of everyday life.”