Armani ‘it's showtime!’ Minimalist fashion and stylistic experimentation in the theatrical space

Abstract

From a perspective that views fashion as a medium and a complex narrative tool, with fundamental aesthetic and dramaturgical potential in intermedial and transmedial storytelling, this paper analyses the methods used to create costumes for media scenes by Giorgio Armani, whose art has migrated from the catwalk to typically narrative media (e.g. cinema, television, theatre), redefining and reinventing the role of the costume designer, often bringing them to the centre of attention in different forms of entertainment. In fact, Armani's costumes, from a transmedial and intermedial perspective, have always been able to exert an innovative structural and aesthetic influence on the creation of scenes, characters and narrative spaces, in which he has given rise to new intersemantic relationships between fashion and the performing arts, thereby enriching each other.

Here, we propose to observe how, in the aesthetic and formal redefinition of Armani garments that become stage costumes, we can grasp the importance of the role played by his clothes at a dramaturgical level, especially in the case of costumes created for theatre scenes, where his dress code and the materiality at its core have always influenced or even radically changed the scenographic aspects and settings, redefining the entire spectacular-audiovisual apparatus in a minimalist and modern key.