Scott Eastwood Strikes A Stoic Pose For Giorgio Armani Autumn/Winter 2022-23

No matter the year, muse, or season, one can always count on each Giorgio Armani collection to be an exploration in silhouette and material. For intrepid designers – and we’d very much count Italy’s King of Fashion among them – these aspects of clothing offer up a realm of intriguing possibilities – the kind men will come to enjoy, with wear and repeated experience, over the course of a garment’s lifetime.

That quality of introspection might well be why, for AW 2022/23, Armani has chosen actor & model Scott Eastwood as muse. Stoic and rough-hewn, the 36-year-old Californian – who has made a career out of playing strong, brooding, “men of action” types – is seen here in a variety of classic Giorgio Armani articles.

For this year’s autumnal men’s wardrobe, Armani crafts a “silky nocturnal glow… where soft formality prevails.” Those guiding principles are embodied in trousers, jackets, and accessories that extract the rigour from traditional sartorial codes: what remains, confidently draped upon Eastwood’s frame, is a uniform in which men can live their best (night)life.

Formalwear classics, such as the waistcoat, are transformed into a silk and velvet gilet – bringing with them clean lines and sumptuously detailed volumes. Decorated with a Y-shaped insert (woven in silk jacquard) there’s an all-too-real allure to wearing this amidst a sea of mundane Christmas cocktail attire.

Eastwood’s lupine good looks are put to further use in Giorgio’s eponymous smoking jacket: yet another example of how masterfully Armani interrogates materials. Its “crinkled velvet” surfaces are cut from silk and viscose: together, yielding a fabric that comes alive in any nocturnal setting: dynamic, mellifluous, a love letter to all the shades of black. True to the relaxed posture that pervades AW 2022/23, Eastwood pairs this velvet number with checked cupro trousers – a staple in the Armani man’s wardrobe, at ease with a blazer or your favourite lived-in knitwear.

The campaign – which revels in a pureness of fabric and geometry – has been styled by Anna Dello Russo, Italian fashion writer and Editor-at-Large of Vogue Japan. An erstwhile collaborator of Armani’s, Russo crafts an austere backdrop against which these new menswear designs are able to really sing; the sole point of visual punctuation being a cubic armchair, filled by Eastwood mid-recline.

Alongside Irina Shayk, fellow frontwoman for the collection, Eastwood is captured in black & white by photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, best known for their seven-year partnership with Riccardo Tisci. Playing with the same minimal toolbox as both designer and stylist, the duo eschews elaborate set pieces or much in the way of digital enhancement to hone in on Eastwood’s relaxed, ruminative gaze. Much like the clothes that Armani has become synonymous with across, it’s a vision of masculinity that lingers in the memory.