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Forties Glamour At Armani Prive

In a couture show that tag teamed as a perfume launch, Giorgio Armani reminded us all of the whole point of couture: To dress the seriously rich with serious class.

That was clear even before this fall 2009 show began in Paris on Tuesday, July 7, because Armani had scores of actual paying clients in the audience. Armani competes as vociferously as any designer to dress the red carpet but he also has real couture customers, the well-heeled prepared to pay over $20,000 for a suit or $50,000 for an evening dress.

Staged in his typical black box show space before an audience of 600 that included actresses Cate Blanchett and Megan Fox, Armani sent out a collection of haute glamour, almost certainly his most successful haute couture collection of daywear to date.

“Forties film noir, but not Joan Crawford, more Katherine Hepburn,” said an unusually thin Armani. The 74-year-old designer recently suffered a bout of hepatitis.

What worked best, brilliantly so, were the impeccable trouser suits finished with crystal cluster buttons, blousons in white kidasssia - hairy goat - and some great cardigans with crystal mesh embroidery.

Armani, famous for using relatively obscure models in his signature shows in Milan, also upped the ante with a casting of the industry’s top models, who all wore spiky wigs.

A series of Atlantic blue column dresses did not quite work, nor did a foursome of semi-sheer, champagne-hued bodies that were way too giddy. But the key memory in an otherwise exemplary show was a trio of blindingly brilliant silver jackets in rhinestone, sequins and crystals that produced the biggest burst of applause. They reeked rich, and called out class with Italian panache.

The couturier also played around astutely with shoulders, wrapping them in knots of gold silk or caressing them with spider web strands, underlying that he can play the couture tailor as well as anyone.

After the show, guests strolled past Paris finest view, the Eiffel Tower seen from the Trocadero, to the Musee de L’Homme, for the launch of Idole d’Armani, the latest scent from the designer.

Guests witnessed a projection of Idole’s ad campaign, featuring the lasciviously pretty Kasia Smutniak, the daughter of a Polish air force general and latterly actress in Italy.

Armani said Smutniak "combines true feminine sensuality and rare beauty with inner strength of character,” as he posed with her on the same set used in the ad.

But if his show whispered the 1940s, his new scent, made in a crystalline glass sphere, alluded to the Thirties. Both of them, in Armani’s hands, gilded glamour.

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