His work has allowed Giorgio Armani to gain a deep understanding of the power of art, thanks to the artists who have accompanied him season after season and the greats of the past. In 2015, he dedicated the Armani/Silos exhibition space in Milan’s Via Bergognone to artistic photography to celebrate his 40-year career. The space has hosted major exhibitions personally curated by the designer, as well as the permanent exhibition “Giorgio Armani Privé 2005-2025. Twenty Years of Haute Couture,” dedicated to his haute couture creations. Armani’s approach to photography has always been linked to the thrill of discovering an unexpected point of view in the observation of reality, as he himself has stated.
He drew inspiration from painting for the garments that featured in the most important collections of his career. Crossovers, influences, and suggestions of styles and techniques fascinated him in his private life as well as in the creation of his designs dedicated to the female universe. In the patterns of the elegant evening dresses of past seasons, we find Matisse’s palette and Paul Gauguin’s ethnic motifs.
Armani/Silos, the center dedicated to artistic photography
The designer’s intention in this project was to create a center for contemporary photographic culture “including what is close to the world of Armani, but also what is far from it.” This statement of intent has been realized in several exhibitions over the years featuring artists who have accompanied him in his professional and personal life, all selected directly by Giorgio Armani.
The art photography exhibition “Aldo Fallai for Giorgio Armani”
Among these is the latest exhibition curated directly by the designer in 2024, dedicated to Aldo Fallai (“Aldo Fallai for Giorgio Armani”), a fashion photographer whom the designer met in the mid-1970s at the beginning of his career and when Made in Italy was born. The artistic and professional dialogue between the two lasted almost thirty years and was captured in photographs that defined “the essence of an aesthetic that made its mark on the collective imagination,” in Armani’s words.
First, the 2022-2023 collective exhibition “Magnum Photos Colors, Places, Faces” dedicated to photographers whom Armani particularly admired, such as Christopher Anderson, Olivia Arthur, Bruno Barbey, Werner Bischof, and others he met when he himself “began to see the world with new eyes.” Between the two, there is an exhibition dedicated to French photographer Guy Bourdin (“Guy Bourdin: storytelling,” 2023), with whom Armani never collaborated but whom he wanted to honor with the exhibition for his creative freedom, narrative ability, and great love of cinema. Bourdin, like Armani, did not follow the crowd and did not compromise: a trait with which the designer identified completely.
The French author’s photographs, which offer a reinterpretation of fashion in the form of cinematic storytelling, are of interest to collectors, as in the case of the famous images for French Vogue and those reminiscent of the settings of director Alfred Hitchcock and artist Edward Hopper, which are constantly featured in the catalogs of major international auctions (average prices range from €5,000 to €25,000 but can exceed €50,000). Other exhibitions worth mentioning were those dedicated to Peter Lindberg in 2021 (with whom the designer collaborated in the 1980s) and Larry Fink in 2017.
Painting in haute couture
Armani has always said he is fascinated by the work of Impressionist artists such as Monet, Manet, and Edgard Degas. Other great artists of the 20th century have also inspired his women’s collections and brought fame to the designer. From the bright colors beloved by Matisse, which we find in the clothes of the 1993-1994 fall-winter collection, to the ethnic motifs of Paul Gauguin, revisited in the 1993 spring-summer collection, from the shapes of Anish Kapoor’s sculptures in the 1997 dresses to Kandinsky’s style and the magical atmospheres of Picasso’s “blue period,” both revisited in the early 2000s collections, to the surrealist art that inspired the 2005-2006 fall-winter collection. The designer was also interested in Japanese Ukiyo-e art. Artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige were at the center of his research with their prints dedicated to the animal and floral world and natural landscapes.
In addition to clothing, we find art in the designer’s collaboration with contemporary artists in recent years. With artist-designer Marcantonio, he presented the Love project, whose blue sculptures on diversity were exhibited at Milan Fashion Week in 2021 and Miami Art Basel in 2022.
Article taken from We Wealth Magazine no. 83. Subscriptions here.
