Milan, December 4, 2023 - The exhibition Aldo Fallai for Giorgio Armani, 1977 - 2021 opens at Armani/Silos, telling the story, set in the present time, of almost thirty years of uninterrupted artistic dialogue between Giorgio Armani and Aldo Fallai. Curated by Giorgio Armani, Rosanna Armani, and Leo Dell’Orco, the exhibition explores the boundaries of a unique collaboration that has defined the very essence of an aesthetic that has made an impact on the collective imagination.

The artistic partnership between Aldo Fallai - a Florentine born in 1943 - and Giorgio Armani began in the mid-1970s, even before the designer's solo career, and continued until the early 2000s, resuming in recent years. At the time of their first meeting, Armani was a young freelance designer; Fallai, a graduate of the Art Institute, was a graphic designer with a keen interest in photography. The understanding between them was immediate. The former, aware of the social changes taking place where women were gaining power and men were dressing with more awareness, was determined to rewrite the rules of dressing, creating a true lifestyle. The latter accompanied him in defining an imaginary world where cinematic evocations and neorealist hints mixed with echoes of late Renaissance and Mannerist painting, in a staging that feels alive and therefore profoundly authentic. The use of black and white, and the narrative abstraction that derives from it, was a winning choice: the images are immediate and timeless, of pure invention but as if captured in a real moment. Together, they aimed to paint scenes of the best possible life, situations in which the viewer could identify, and they succeeded because the images were primarily portraits or frames from a feature film: conceived to showcase the collections, they focused on the characters' personalities, making the clothes a subtle complement to their being, reflecting the designer's idea that elegance is not about being noticed, but being remembered.

The narrative journey unfolds on two levels and gathers, in a strict random order, about two hundred and fifty shots, which appeared in magazines or were transformed into impactful media posters. The exhibition juxtaposes images produced for different lines: there is the photo with the tiger cub, taken in Palermo when the crew sought refuge on a rainy day at the Togni circus; there is the career woman, embodied by Antonia Dell’Atte, portrayed, with a gaze fixed on a bright future, amidst the crowd on Via Durini, under the Armani offices. There is also the Venetian lagoon evoked in the studio, and the statues of the Foro Italico, translated into a play of sharp and graphic shadows. These are familiar and surprising photos, created with inventiveness and intelligence.