armani

MILAN—While half the planet queues for half-priced lentils and the other half frantically googles “how to survive on crypto,” Giorgio Armani is quietly staging a coup on the very concept of collapse. Forget bread lines—this week the maestro of minimalism unveiled a Spring/Summer 2025 menswear collection that looks suspiciously like what the last billionaire will wear to the climate-crisis after-party. Call it post-apocalyptic chic with a side of caviar: sand-colored linen cut wide enough to catch radioactive fallout, and sunglasses dark enough to hide the guilt.

Armani, now ninety and still trim enough to shame most thirty-year-olds, has always understood that Armageddon should arrive impeccably dressed. The global implications are deliciously perverse. In Kyiv, where air-raid sirens remix with Spotify playlists, the brand’s flagship remains open because, as one sales associate shrugged, “panic doesn’t match the décor.” Meanwhile in Shanghai, newly minted crypto princelings are bulk-ordering the same unstructured blazers once favored by Italian film stars who swore they’d never sell out—until they did. From Lagos to Los Angeles, the Armani silhouette has become a universal passport: proof that you can still afford to look bored by disaster.

The irony, of course, is that Armani built his empire on the promise of discretion—muted tones, whispered luxury, the anti-logo ethos that now functions as the loudest logo of all. In a world where every teenager’s Instagram bio screams pronouns and portfolio, wearing Armani is the sartorial equivalent of a Swiss bank account: silent, expensive, and legally ambiguous. One Tokyo stylist confessed she keeps a spare Armani jacket in her earthquake go-bag; apparently nothing steadies the nerves after a 7.2 like cashmere that costs $3,000 per square inch.

And yet the house is pivoting, because even purveyors of timeless elegance must occasionally acknowledge that time is running out. Enter the sustainability capsule—recycled fishing nets spun into tuxedos, organic silk harvested from worms fed only fair-trade mulberries, all delivered in packaging so biodegradable it might compost before you get it past customs. The marketing copy promises “conscious luxury,” which is a polite way of saying you can now feel morally superior while dodging taxes on the same Cayman account your grandfather opened in 1987.

Global supply chains, those fragile veins of late capitalism, have forced Armani to become geopolitically nimble. When India halted cotton exports during last year’s heatwave, the label quietly shifted to Mongolian yak wool—soft as sin, scarce as honesty. Sanctions on Russian titanium? No problem: the new frames of the iconic 1035 sunglasses are now milled from reclaimed Boeing parts. Somewhere, a Pentagon auditor is having an aneurysm, but in Milan it’s just another Tuesday.

Critics grumble that Armani’s world is a bubble of exquisite denial, a place where refugees are something you donate to between fittings. They’re not wrong. Yet the old fox has cannily turned critique into couture: for every humanitarian crisis, there’s now a limited-edition bomber whose proceeds “support awareness,” a phrase so nebulous it could mean anything from rebuilding schools to redecorating them. The brand’s website lists partners in Nairobi, Beirut, and, for reasons no one can quite explain, Reykjavík. The ambiguity is intentional; it keeps the conscience as weightless as the fabric.

What does it all signify, beyond the obvious conclusion that humans will accessorize even as they go extinct? Perhaps that the final luxury is narrative control—Armani’s ability to frame chaos as merely another texture. While governments rehearse austerity speeches and tech bros colonize Mars on PowerPoint, the house that Giorgio built offers a more practical escape: if you can’t fix the world, at least upholster it.

So as sea levels rise and democracy goes on clearance, remember there will always be one constant: somewhere, under soft LED lighting, an impeccably tailored jacket waits to absorb your sins—provided you’re a 48 regular and don’t mind paying in untraceable crypto. After all, the end of the world is no excuse for bad fit. Cin cin.