In what now seems like the Pleistocene epoch but which was just four years ago, long stretches of Madison Avenue, widely judged the premier retail rialto on the planet, were boarded up against vandals and all but abandoned.
Along with the onset of Covid-19 and its ensuing tragedies and terrors came the inevitable prophecies that certain aspects of shiny, glamorous, chic New York were gone, never to return. If the doomsayers were many, Giorgio Armani was never one. Even as the city suffered through lockdown, this onetime window dresser whose fashion designs transformed his surname into one of the most legible fashion brand names in the world, instituted a game plan.
Far from throwing in the towel on the first city outside Italy to embrace his creations, Mr. Armani and his team began laying the groundwork for a renewal of his flagship at 65th Street. That building, expanded to 12 floors in an Art Deco-ish style with eight floors of luxury residences, sits atop an expanded store selling Armani-branded furniture, cosmetics, fragrances, fine jewelry, men’s and women’s wear and, yes, candy.
To celebrate its opening, Mr. Armani was hardly going to settle for a ribbon-cutting. So, for his first visit to these shores in nearly a decade, the designer produced a full-scale black-tie fashion extravaganza to showcase his latest women’s collection — 95 of his drifty and bejeweled, not-entirely-contemporary looks shown at the Park Avenue Armory for 650 seated guests, with a cocktail party to follow. And then the inevitable after-party, held at the Bemelmans Bar of the Carlyle hotel, where many of those flown in by Mr. Armani for the occasion and billeted at his expense could be seen cozying up on banquettes alongside the likes of Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Inevitably, the night magnetized platoons of the actors that Mr. Armani, one of whose contributions to fashion history was the invention of celebrity red carpet dressing, routinely uniforms for these affairs. Among the boldface Armani dolls were Amanda Seyfried, Brie Larsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Liev Schreiber, James Norton and Zachary Quinto, decked out in clothes from the brand. Cooper Koch was also on hand, flush with newfound celebrity for his turn in “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” on Netflix.
“There’s this excitement around Armani again because people are trying to feel elegant,” said Linda Fargo, the senior vice president of the women’s fashion office at Bergdorf Goodman. “They’re looking for clothes with a touch of feminine mystique.”
As if to illustrate her point, Katie Berohn, a beauty editor of Elle, was taking selfies with friends dressed in velvet Armani-like frocks on banquettes set up, railway-station style (the theme of the evening was “Il Viaggio,” meaning the journey, and it included a suspended clock and projections of steam trains), around the curtained vastness of the armory.
“A lot of young people are adopting an old-money aesthetic,” said Ms. Berohn, 28. “Old Money,” she added, is currently trending on TikTok.
Of designers at the show, there were Michael Kors, Daniel Lee and Willy Chavarria. “Mr. Armani inspired me as a 20-year-old wanting to get into the business,” Mr. Chavarria said, adding that for a young man from an immigrant family in California’s Central Valley, Mr. Armani represented a distant world. “He still inspires me now.” Mr. Chavarria said. “It’s what makes a night like this very tender.”
If not rubbing shoulders, exactly, they shared the same rarefied air with “friends of the house,” like the socialite Nicky Hilton Rothschild, who voiced a fantasy of escorting Mr. Armani on a dream date in her city. “I’d take him for tea sandwiches at Bergdorf, to the Viand coffee shop for a B.L.T. and to Rubirosa for the best pizza,” Ms. Rothschild said.
Significantly, the crowd was not limited to the celebrated or well-connected. As at the store opening the previous evening, many guests were drawn from a roster of Armani clients rewarded for their loyalty to the brand. “Growing up, no one in my family could ever afford Armani,” said Joe O’Neill, who in his early 20s took over a family-owned car repair shop and transformed it into the Benner’s Auto Body empire.
“We would never even have thought of going into the store,” he said. When flush with early success, Mr. O’Neill, who for the party was wearing a custom velvet Armani suit with embroidered lapels, finally took the plunge, he found “a world I could never have imagined,” he said.
Who should walk past at that precise moment but Pamela Anderson, seemingly also surprised to find herself in the middle of a glamour mosh pit. “I suddenly got very shy,” Ms. Anderson said. “I just saw Anna Wintour, and she’s a very important person in this world.”
A standout among the evening’s guests was 4-year-old Bianca Morselli, the daughter of an employee and close friend of Mr. Armani’s. “I consider her almost like my own,” Mr. Armani told the Corriere della Sera newspaper last week. “And this makes me realize that I would have been a great dad.’’
Now 90 and a child of World War II, Mr. Armani was too busy surviving to stop and build a family, he went on to explain in an interview in which he not only came out as gay but also spoke of his father’s troubling Fascist party affiliations, his start in business nearly a half century ago, the loss of his longtime lover, the architect Sergio Galeotti, to AIDS and his general distaste for the work of his competitors. (Gianni Versace partied too hard; Miuccia Prada designs for a world of her own; Calvin Klein made a career of copying Armani outright; Valentino was very “polite,” as Mr. Armani said.)
Mr. Armani, who is one of Italy’s most famous and wealthiest citizens, added in the startlingly frank interview (previously, the designer had declined to state his sexuality outright): “I see sacrifice as a personal victory.” And it is easy to view this as a summary credo for this particular lion in the winter of his life.
Fashion, it bears remembering, is replete with Horatio Alger stories, as the “image architect” Law Roach said before the runway show began. “If you came up like I came up and went to bed hungry and cried yourself to sleep, you felt like every opportunity might be the last opportunity,” he said.
As superficially disparate as the careers of the American-born stylist and the great Italian designer may seem, there are similarities in their hard-won wisdom.
“I would have never expected this,” Mr. Armani replied to this reporter on Friday by text, as he flew home to Milan on his private jet. He had been asked if, growing up amid the hardships of war in Piacenza, he had imagined anything like the trajectory his life would ultimately take and, beyond that, what in hindsight he might tell the boy he was then.
“I would say this to myself,” Mr. Armani replied. “Take each day one day at a time.”
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