Purity and exoticism in Emporio Armani's legacy, Prada's redeeming uniforms

The emotional overload of the contemporary is disruptive. Those who make fashion, we are seeing in this Milanese week finally full of quality and substance, react as they can: some by resisting, some by adapting, some by fleeing or by proposing radical actions.

For Giorgio Armani, the only way to face the present has always been to be consistent with an aesthetic credo of purity, synthesis and exoticism. There is great excitement surrounding the Emporio Armani fashion show, the first of two in this fashion week without Giorgio (the second will be on Sunday 28), who passed away on 4 September. On the collection the meticulous and attentive king worked until the end, always passionate, unable to stop making things with his own hands. It is, however, his heirs - his granddaughter Silvana Armani, in this case - who bring it to the stage. It should therefore be regarded as his legacy.

In fact, it is a somewhat recapitulatory test, which consciously but without nostalgia reiterates signs and stylistic features, rooting them in the present. It is entitled Ritorni (Returns), to be understood both as a return to the origins and as a return from a long exotic journey, when souvenirs and fragments of elsewhere are woven into the everyday. They are impalpable but clear echoes - ikat, kimono necks, obi, the colours of sand - that punctuate typically Armani fluid and light silhouettes. The story is long, and in some passages rambling, but the style is cohesive.

The response to today that Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons give at Prada is cogent and timely, adaptability: the very force behind evolution, human and otherwise - at least when it is consistent with the ethos and proxemics of this brand whose unique identity lies at the intersection of cerebrality and frivolity. The 'juxtaposition of different elements as an act of creation', which is how the creative co-directors describe the counterpoint, overlapping and mingling of austere uniforms, half-slips with braces, brassieres reduced to pure cut-outs, and more gloves, composite skirts, satin doll skirts and jewellery at all hours, is nothing more than a new iteration, at once drier and more playful, of one of the founding principles of Prada-ness: unheard-of conjunctions. It's just that now the context changes.

Says Simons, as the lady nods: 'It was important for us to react to the present without proposing an escape'. The most convincing part of the rehearsal is uniforms, the spirit of which, however, is subversive and romantic, because, Simons continues, "my father wore a caretaker's uniform, and I don't associate anything oppressive with it". And Miuccia Prada adds: 'The uniform is also a way of freeing the person from the thought of clothes'.