Giorgio Armani. Style becomes politics: elegance is an act of peace

Never trust appearances . Especially when it comes to Giorgio Armani . Just because he didn't physically appear at the end of the eponymous fashion show for spring-summer 2026 to a mass of deserved applause, it didn't mean he wasn't involved. Indeed, never like this time has his absence - due to a period of convalescence from a short illness - amplified his character: a video call to correct a flaw, a WhatsApp message that arrives ten minutes after the official start time of the show ("why hasn't the fashion show already started?"), the team backstage like a court waiting for signals.

Armani was there yesterday, like those presences that you can feel even with your eyes closed, like the scent of Pantelleria before you even see its colors. And the island was entrusted with the scenography, where shiny black rocks contrasted with a backdrop of intense blues and oranges that seem stolen at sunset. These are precisely the colors that Leo Dell'Orco - head of design for Armani's men's line - claims as the manifesto of the season. The Pantelleria blue palette (a blue that is not just a shade, but a state of mind, a pause, a temporary suspension of chaos) brightened by pale pink, aquamarine, bougainvillea and cyclamen, powder blue, coffee, cloudy gray, dense black, comes together as a declaration of peace between elements that elsewhere would fight each other.

Not a melting pot, but a chromatic democracy : East and West join hands, North Africa whispers to the Mediterranean, and no one claims supremacy. In an era in which war is at home even in the most peaceful mind, and coexistence seems to have become a rare luxury, Armani makes a choice that to us seems – in the best sense – overtly political: to define an elegance that is a place of peace and compatibility of contrasts. Thus, clothes that do not impose, but invite, parade. Tailoring is emptied of that solemnity that in past decades was a hallmark of success: double-breasted jackets with shawl collars (lowered as if to suggest that even power, every now and then, can take a day off); wide trousers, with pleats, closed at the ankle or left free to swing over pastel moccasins and leather sandals. The entire silhouette becomes light, mobile, floating: there is no constraint, but a carefully monitored freedom – because only those who really know the rules can afford to play them so well. Leather trench coats that weigh as much as a summer shirt; wraparound sweaters that are both full-bodied and impalpable; blouses closed like kimonos or similar to North African tunics; large bags, key rings and knotted belts, a game in which every accessory is the affectation of those who carry the world on themselves with nonchalance.

This is not the formal elegance of the tourist who collects stamps, but of a cultured traveler who mixes city and vacation, North and South, perhaps discovering that the most successful synthesis lies in difference. One day, perhaps, they will tell us that the only antidote to today's anguish is to rediscover the kindness of detail and the pleasure of diversity: in the meantime, Armani anticipates the lesson. The show flows like an uninterrupted dialogue between surfaces and graphics, fabrics that intertwine or simulate interweaving, zig-zag patterns that speak of other geographies, knitted caps and raffia hats that smell of Africa and Italian summer.

There is more: in this relaxation lies the most subtle of transgressions. If the world outside screams, here the answer is a whisper; if everywhere one runs, here one walks slowly, in search of a new way of thinking about time. Let's rename it "polite escapism", which does not mean escaping from reality, but finding an alternative to it. And if, as dall'Ogre says "we start again from the ABC of elegance", then perhaps the revolutionary gesture is to return to breathing calmly, to allow ourselves the privilege of being simple in a world that wants us artificially complex.

Thus ends another men's fashion week: and Milan, for a few minutes, becomes that dreamed place where beauty is a right, peace a wonderful nuance and grace is a declaration of courage: sweet, calm. But irresistible.