Giorgio Armani 2015 S/S MILAN Fashion Week Collection

Giorgio Armani has already proved he has the power to corral Oscar-winning directors. Paolo Sorrentino was the latest. Honored for his epic La Grande Bellezza, he dialed down to intimate for Armani with a short film that opened the show: two naked bodies entwined in rope on a beach, in a primal landscape like the Aeolian Islands off Italy‘s southern coast, a part of the world that Armani loves. Sabbia, the film was called-sand. Like the collection. But the darkly erotic scene set by Sorrentino was rapidly supplanted by Armani’s abstract opalescence. Sand, yes, but expressed in a monochromatic world of python print, floral-embroidered diaphanousness, and the striated patterns created by wind on dunes.

Much of it was extremely beautiful. Layers of fabrics so supernally light that they were scarcely more than a shimmer had an almost alien quality. Armani added crystals and paillettes and spectacular bias draping. The show notes stoically resisted any suggestion of exoticism, but the sparkly-dress-over-diaphanous-pant proportion had an Orientalist quality so irresistible, it compelled some onlookers to Google Wiki the echo.

There was one, small, easily overlookable detail that lingered as a testament to Armani‘s extraordinary control at this point in a career that straddles contemporary fashion like an Italian colossus. It was the single toggle closing on a high-collared jacket. The rest of the jacket buttoned, but that toggle sat by the high collar. Precise and, in a peculiar way, kind of poignant.