We'll Always Have Paris

Giorgio Armani and muse Michelle Dockery bravea surprise snowstorm at the Place Vendôme to show offthe designer’s latest couture collection.

- Alexander Fury

Never forget that Giorgio Armani is a smalltown boy: born in Piacenza, a cathedral town in northwest Italy, in 1934, he grew up dreaming of more for himself. He talks often of his mother’s rigor and dignity; of the hardships of interwar and postwar Italy. It sounds like the script of an Italian neo-realist film by Roberto Rossellini or Vittorio De Sica, except, of course, it was real. “That idea of achieving so much, even with so little,” says Armani, who has achieved so much.

Given Armani’s backstory, it’s fitting that the images on these pages — these scenes, even — also resemble ones culled from a movie. They star Michelle Dockery, who reprises her role as Lady Mary in a big screen continuation of the period drama Downton Abbey, reaching cinemas on September 19, alongside Armani himself. A fashion designer who is as famous and recognizable as any Hollywood star, he has dressed the great and good of Hollywood’s finest. “Cate Blanchett, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kristin Scott Thomas, Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Chastain, and Lady Gaga,” the designer reels off from his studio in Milan. “But the list goes on.” He left out Sophia Loren, a veritable Armani avatar of understated, timeless Italian style.

Even before Armani began dressing Hollywood — when a young director, Paul Schrader, recruited the breakout star of Italian menswear to dress a near-unknown Richard Gere for his 1980 movie, American Gigolo — his point of view was more allied to cinema than to fashion.