ARMANI’S DUBAI NIGHT: Giorgio Armani is reprising his One Night Only events, planning to stage a fashion show in Dubai scheduled on Oct. 26.
The event will mark the 10th anniversary of the Armani Hotels in Milan and Dubai at a key moment for the latter, where the Expo 2020 kicks off on Oct. 1, running until March 31, 2022. The Dubai Expo was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as was Armani’s event, suspended twice as a precautionary measure.
The Italian designer was meant to travel to Dubai in April 2020 and then in November that year, but the health emergency changed those plans.
Armani on Thursday said he was “very happy to return to Dubai after 11 years,” with a new leg of the itinerant One Night Only series, which, so far, touched London in 2006; Tokyo in 2007; Beijing in 2012; Rome and New York in 2013, and Paris in 2014. An event had also been planned for Shanghai in May 2018, but that never took place due to technical and logistic reasons at the time.
Armani has always matched the One Night Only events with a special fashion show, exhibition or store opening. For example, in Paris in 2014 he paraded his spring Privé collection at the Palais de Tokyo, which was followed by an exhibition of couture dresses, accessories and jewelry titled “Eccentrico.”
The designer had originally scheduled the event in Dubai to show his cruise 2021 collection, coinciding with the reopening of the Giorgio Armani boutique at the Dubai Mall and marking the first decade of the Armani Hotel in the city. Details about the collection to be shown in October were not revealed on Thursday.
The Armani Hotel in Dubai is located in the soaring Burj Khalifa, under the Armani Hotels & Resorts banner, a venture between Giorgio Armani SpA and Dubai-based developer Emaar Properties PJSC that was formed in 2005. The Milan hotel opened in Nov. 2011, located in the 1937 building that also houses Armani’s Manzoni 31 flagship.