The softness of the encounter according to Giorgio Armani, new kindness for Prada

The brief Milanese round of men's fashion closed yesterday under the banner of a lightness that is not stolid evasion - the leaden times call for a lively eye and awareness - but renounces forcing as well as garrulous and imperious tones. Softness has always been the stylistic mantra of Giorgio Armani, who, although not physically present at the fashion show, hovers over everything with his conviction that soft - in manners and constructions - is the only possible way. The distance from snag becomes a new opportunity: looking from a different vantage point, acting through the sensitivity of the trustworthy and capable Leo Dell'Orco, Armani frees himself of his personal superstructures, appearing particularly ineffable and timely.

The collection expresses a quest for harmony that sutures city and holiday, Africa and Milan, using the horizon of Pantelleria - a place of the heart - as a porous borderline. Everything is very light, flying, concrete, with new and easy proportions for jackets that widen and shorten or lengthen like shirts with cuffs. "I wanted to once again explore a theme that is always dear to me: the combination of references and cultures, the idea of fashion that finds harmony between things that are apparently dissonant, uniting them in a clear and light sign of style," Armani explains in a press release.

"The most important thing for us was to seek a change of tone: from aggressive and powerful to gentle, calm, human," says Miuccia Prada expressing her and Raf Simons', co-creative director, feelings at the end of the Prada fashion show. Everything is bare: the set doesn't exist at all, so that the empty room of the Prada Foundation Depot is clad only with huge lobed carpets, abstractions of flowers between kindergarten and salle de bain.

The collection notes are reduced to a machine-gun of lapidary phrases, including 'unlimited combinations of elements/ simple light-heartedness/ imaginary places'. The clothes, in the end, have lean and essential lines, or archetypal ones like the acetate jumpsuit and the overcoat, and always tend decidedly towards the childish, with the shirts as long as pinafores, the trousers that are shortened like rompers, and the distinction between male and female illumined in a prepubescent position.

The desire to go against the tide, to avoid competitive posturing is laudable, but again results in an infantilism of style that is somewhat contrary to the initial urgency. It would be interesting, in the idea of a change of tone, to see a real change of pace, a break with the formula.