Seeking Vintage Armani? Your Search Ends Here | Vanity Fair
The work of Giorgio Armani has become an indelible part of pop culture. There’s Richard Gere in Armani tailoring in American Gigolo, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne famously wore Armani pinstripes. Mr. Big, Carrie Bradshaw’s star-crossed lover in Sex and the City? He famously wore “Armani on Sunday,” as Sarah Jessica Parker’s character once said as one of TV’s most famous, and most fashionable New Yorkers.
As new generations have discovered simply how good and how influential the work of the late designer has been, the house he built has decided to act on the public interest. Last year, Giorgio Armani launched Armani/Archivio. The new project, which coincided with the brand’s 50th anniversary, offered casual fans and true aficionados the opportunity to discover the Armani archives with an interactive online platform that collated and organized its collections. No need to scroll through Pinterest and Instagram for vintage references and never-before-seen images posted by fashion creators—Armani gave it all a home, right at home.
Armani/Archivio
Today, Armani is going one step further by kicking off the second chapter of Archivio. Coinciding with Milan Design Week, Giorgio Armani has “faithfully reproduced,” according to a press release, 13 men’s and women’s looks from early collections spanning from 1979 to 1994. The capsule features the kinds of stuff fanatics have been trolling eBay and other resale platforms for as long as they’ve existed: the perfect Armani jacket, 1980s shoulder and all; a proper ’90s button-down; the bomber jacket of your dreams (or that you tried to take from your grandfather’s closet).
“Armani/Archivio does not merely preserve, it puts things back into circulation,” says Leo Dell’Orco, Armani’s partner and head of the men’s style office for the Armani brands. “When a garment is reedited, the challenge lies in reintroducing it into the present without altering its essence,” he says. “In this new chapter, the selection focuses on the jacket—the starting point of Armani fashion—which embodies balance, versatility and character: qualities that allow it to transcend time and remain perpetually relevant.”
Armani/Archivio
Armani has tapped Eli Russell Linnetz, the photographer and founder of ERL, the label beloved by the Los Angeles celebrity set that includes Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian, to style and photograph the project’s launch campaign. Linnetz’s work, both as a photographer and as a designer and stylist, often harkens back to image-making before the new millennium. This reads like a clear effort from Armani in bridging the gap between a today’s market and the original context of these garments.
Most interesting, however, is not merely how faithful these reproductions are—any fashion fan will argue that most archival reissues tend to mimic the look, but seldom the quality—but that these items feel as contemporary today as they did then. Chalk that up to our collective nostalgia—I’ll argue that too many men today are trying to look like JFK Jr., on top of the amount of women cosplaying as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—and, perhaps, to the power of Armani.
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