The Teatro del Giglio in Lucca is hosting an exhibition from May 29th that links Giorgio Armani with the seventh art. Fifty original sketches, press clippings, and posters from films such as American Gigolo and Annie Hall make up the exhibition. A dress worn by Richard Gere stands out. The pieces, taken from the Giorgio Armani Archive in Parma, reveal how cinema shaped the aesthetic of the Italian designer.
The Parma archive as a visual database 🎬
The Giorgio Armani Archive in Parma, with 8,000 unpublished pieces from the 1970s and 1980s, functions as a technical archive of cinematic references. Each sketch and clipping documents how Armani translated textures and silhouettes seen on screen into his collections. The exhibition selects 50 of these items to show the creative development process. It is not a chronological display, but an analysis of how cinema influenced design decisions and textile production of the era.
From the runway to the cinema and back to the wardrobe 👔
Armani dressed Richard Gere, and then Gere dressed Armani. A virtuous circle that now ends up in a display case in Lucca. Meanwhile, the Lucca Fashion Weekend adds circular fashion and tributes to Turandot and the Atelier Ricci. So, if you don't have a tuxedo from the 80s, you can always recycle one from your grandfather and say it's a tribute to Italian cinema. No one will notice the difference.