Fashion Garments

Reporting from Milan — Circle gets the square. Although most of the other designers at Milan Fashion Week were going soft and fuzzy with voluminous sheepskins and blanket coats for their Fall/Winter 2010 collections, Giorgio Armani’s Emporio Armani line was crisp, clean and cool.

Titled “A Geometric Theorem,” it was themed around five basic shapes: squares, triangles, rectangles, circles and rhombuses (or is that rhombi?), rendered in assorted shades of gray interspersed with vivid colors that included highlighter yellow, fluorescent green and vivid pink.

Combined with the skateboard gear that opened the show, the result was an ’80s-flashback wardrobe that would make Max Headroom weep pixels, chock full of black-and-white stripes, zigzags and graph-paper-textured scarves and blazers. Other scarves and some unstructured layered pieces were edged in metal zipper teeth.

There were also some pieces with pyramid-shaped designs that seemed OK on knit hats (it gave the models a slight Bart Simpson vibe), but on sweaters they looked odd to me, like raised geometric welts or tiny udders — but maybe that’s just the rural-Vermont upbringing in me.

The finale was more than two dozen men who took to the runway in nothing but their Emporio Armani skivvies and running shoes — an attempt to highlight a sneaker collaboration dubbed the EA7/Reebok collection, though the sudden stampede of beefcake meant the sneakers had little chance of being noticed.

– Adam Tschorn

Photo: Looks from the Emporio Armani Fall/Winter 2010 men’s runway collection on Jan. 16, 2010. Credit: Peter Stigter / For the Los Angeles Times,

source:http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2010/01/emporio-armani-mens-fallwinter-2010-runway-collection-a-study-in-geometry.html