Emporio Armani’s Travel-Inspired S/S'23 Show

Vogue fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen reports the key takeaways from Emporio Armani’s spring/summer 2023 collection, which nods to the Far East and mixes soft silhouettes with a metropolitan attitude.

Emporio Armani looked to the East

Giorgio Armani’s love for the Orient has followed him throughout a career that’s lasted half a century, and the visual language of the Far East is a bottomless well of inspiration for the designer legend. This season, he imagined his Emporio Armani collection as a wardrobe put together on a trip to “a hypothetical and unspecified destination somewhere to the East […] pulling objects picked up and fallen in love with along the way,” as his press material explained.

It paid homage to a cross-cultural wardrobe

“This collection reflects the evolution of Emporio Armani in the sign of continuity,” Armani wrote in an email before the show. “It is a further chapter of my vision of style that mixes soft silhouettes with a metropolitan attitude, underlined by a tendency for contamination with other cultures that has always been a distinctive feature of my aesthetic.” It materialised in a collection that urbanised and contemporised garments like sarongs and sarouel trousers with the ever-light and elegant touch of Armani.

Armani kept it light

Taking his point of departure in a softly tailored, chic workwear silhouette, Armani introduced elements like kimono trousers, knotting constructions on tops, and skirt shapes that loosely evoked the hanbok. Cuts expanded in size, like big boxy trousers created in lightweight, buoyant fabrics to keep the elegance and lightness proposed throughout the collection.

It came with a reassuring message

“My message is one of calm and serenity. We are living in very hard, very harsh times so I thought it was important to show something soothing and reassuring. Always with elegance and comfort in mind,” Armani said.

It was a refined Emporio Armani

If Emporio Armani has sometimes made a strong proposition for the sportswear generations, this was a different take on the younger market the brand has traditionally catered to: a little more formal, a little more poised. For Armani, it was about embracing a broad spectrum of people. “I know I have said this before, but I would really like to see real women, women of any age on the street wearing my clothes. This, for me, remains the most important achievement and the greatest satisfaction.”