An almost wild fervor and eternal youth seemed to emanate from these aviator jackets, heavy with memories and conquests, and from these bomber jackets where one could sense the soul of skies traversed.

The sweaters, loose and draped over the shoulders, fell with a nonchalance reminiscent of antique draperies, while the wide, free-flowing trousers embraced the movement of the body like a river its bed.

One hundred and thirty-six pieces, as many fragments of a bygone era, which Giorgio Armani, like a chronicler of past elegances, assembles into a fresco where the shawl collar, austere and noble, mingles with the Mao collar, rigid and solemn. Everything here breathes the hesitation between rigor and abandon, as if fashion, too, were torn between order and reverie.

The fashion shows, held in this underground space on Via Borgonuovo, stripped of all artifice, offered a spectacle of stark, almost austere beauty. The models, those familiar shadows of the catwalk, advanced with a stride that was both proud and nonchalant, as if the weight of decades no longer bore down on their shoulders.

Their silhouettes, draped in washed silks, thick and worn by time, in gray wools like northern mists, or in corduroys as fluid as the waters of a lake at dusk, glided on the supple soles of suede boots. They were like elegant specters, returned from the eighties and nineties, those decades when audacity was adorned with simplicity.

Armani, like a guardian of memories, stands at the crossroads of these bygone eras. His legacy now becomes fertile ground where young designers, eager for renewal, will draw their inspiration, like excavating the ruins of a forgotten temple. Haven’t we seen, in Paul Smith’s work, these same echoes of the past reborn in unexpected, audacious, almost insolent forms? Fashion, an eternal cycle of renewal, reminds us that beauty is never truly dead: it slumbers, waiting for a fresh perspective to awaken it.

FM