In this week’s blog post, our News Editor Dr Babette Radclyffe-Thomas reviews the Aldo Fallai for Giorgio Armani, 1977 – 2021 exhibition at Armani/Silos, Milan.
Curated by Giorgio Armani, Rosanna Armani and Leo Dell’Orco, this fashion photography exhibition celebrates the artistic collaboration between fashion designer Giorgio Armani and photographer Aldo Fallai that has resulted in some of the most defining images of Armani.
Fallai and Armani first met in the mid-1970s, as Armani was making his debut as a freelance designer and Fallai was a graphic designer interested in photography. This was the era of the Made In Italy phenomenon appearing, and Armani was interested in society’s changing gender roles at this time. Armani wanted to portray and define this new lifestyle and Fallai helped bring this vision to the page. Fallai’s images aspire to show ideal lifestyles while also portraying a natural candour, all with hints of neo-realism and cinematographic influences. Images are mostly in black and white, and appeared across billboards and magazine pages.
Of the collaboration, Giorgio Armani said; “working with Aldo allowed me from the very beginning to transform the vision I had in my mind into real images: to communicate that my clothes were not just made in a certain way with certain colours and materials, but that they represented a way of life. Because style, for me, is a total form of expression. Together, with a constant fluid and concrete dialogue, we created scenes of life, evoked atmospheres and sketched portraits full of character. Today, looking back at everything we did, I myself am struck by the power that these shots still emanate, and by Aldo’s great ability to capture the nuances of personality.”
“My work with Giorgio was the result of a natural, continuous dialogue and great trust on his part. Both of us were interested in highlighting an aspect of style linked to character and personality and this translated into images that appear just as relevant today as they did yesterday: a quality highlighted by the layout of the exhibition, which does not follow a chronological sequence. I have vivid memories of our 30-year collaboration. Production was always agile and streamlined: we achieved the results with little means and no special effects. This, I think, appealed to the public,” Aldo Fallai said.
The exhibition is spread across two floors showing approximately 250 images. The exhibition is not a retrospective, the images are not curated thematically or chronologically, instead guests are encouraged to take a meandering path throughout the floors. Images are presented without captions and guests are encouraged to scan a QR code for more information.
The images show a wide array of scenes and narratives, from Antonia Dell’Atte dressed in career woman wide-shouldered tailoring in the middle of the crowd on Via Durini by the Armani office to a topless male posting with a tiger cub, taken in Palermo when the troupe took refuge at the Togni circus one rainy day.
The top two floors of Armani/Silos are dedicated to a permanent exhibition of Armani’s work. Opened in 2015, Armani/Silos offers an overview of almost 50 years of the designer’s career, including approximately 200 outfits and 200 accessories from Giorgio Armani’s ready-to-wear collections from 1980 to the present.
The fashion here is thematic; the Voyage area celebrates an imaginary journey through art, culture and society while the Glamour area is interested in decoration and embellishment. On the Voyage floor, the rooms are brightly colour-coded: blue garments and accessories are shown in a bright blue room and so on. The Glamour floor instead focuses on white, beige and champagne colour palettes with a metallic backdrop. On the top floor there is a digital archive with computers allowing guests to search through extensive digitised archives including runway videos, magazines, celebrity red carpet images and much more.
Armani/Silos was opened in 2015, and the striking building was originally the granary of a major international company constructed in 1950. around 4,500 square meters on four levels. The silos is an unusual, concrete, architecturally interesting building encompassing 4,500 square meters across four levels.
Giorgio Armani has said: “setting up Armani/Silos, deciding what to exhibit and how, focusing on the themes that best represent a way of thinking and a style – all this helped me look back on my 40-year career in a passionate but balanced way. Because fashion, which seems to want to live in an eternal present, needs to reflect on itself and its own roots in order to face the future. Through this process of reflection, we see how fashion accompanies and often anticipates important social changes. Remembering what we were like in the past can help us understand what we might be in the future.”
Babette has previously reviewed fashion photography exhibitions, including Beyond Fashion at the Saatchi Gallery, London, which you can revisit on our blog.
