A YEAR AFTER GIORGIO ARMANI'S DEATH, EMPORIO ARMANI NAMES ITS NEW CREATIVE DIRECTOR

The Armani Group has named Dario Vitale creative director of Emporio Armani and of accessories at Giorgio Armani, roughly a year after the death of the house's founder and the appointment carries real historical weight: Vitale is the first person from outside the Armani family ever given a creative role of this significance at the house.

Vitale's path to the role has been unusually turbulent for a designer this early in a major appointment. He was named creative director of Versace in April 2025, delivering a single collection - shown 26 September 2025 at Milan's Pinacoteca Ambrosiana - that New York Times critic Vanessa Friedman called "one of the most buzzed about, debated and potentially influential" of that runway season. He was dismissed from Versace on 12 December 2025 following the brand's acquisition by Prada Group, which brought in its own creative direction instead. Less than a year later, Emporio Armani has handed him one of Italian fashion's most consequential design chairs.

The appointment fills a genuine leadership vacuum. Giorgio Armani had continued personally overseeing the creative direction of both his namesake house and its younger Emporio line until his death, making succession planning an unusually high-stakes question for a company whose entire identity had been built around a single designer's singular point of view for nearly five decades. Notably, Emporio Armani will present its Spring 2027 collection through a presentation rather than a full runway show, and buyers will have to wait until 2027 for a first proper look at Vitale's vision for the house.

For Vitale personally, the move from Versace's maximalist glamour to Armani's built-on-restraint design language represents about as sharp a stylistic pivot as contemporary fashion offers and, after a single-season stint at his previous post, a genuine test of whether his brief, buzzy Versace debut reflected a durable design point of view or a moment that simply didn't survive its business context.