What Dario Vitale Could Bring to Emporio Armani
Images via Dario Vitale/Jeannette Montgomery Barron/ In Digital/Versace
Dario Vitale is officially heading to Emporio Armani, and the pairing makes a lot of sense. With decades of great Armani already there to work with, the real question is what he chooses to bring forward.
Dario Vitale is officially heading to Armani, where he has been named creative director of Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani Accessories. It is a major new chapter for the designer, but it also gives us a chance to finally see what Vitale can do with some real time and space. He spent 14 years at Miu Miu, eventually becoming design director of ready-to-wear and head of image, and his influence came during a period when the brand became one of the most closely watched names in the industry. What Vitale seems to understand particularly well is desire. He knows how to take something familiar and make you suddenly notice it again. A cardigan can be shrunken just enough, a skirt can sit a little lower, a jacket can feel slightly awkward in exactly the right way. None of it needs to scream for attention. It is usually the proportion, the styling that changes the entire look.
Then there is Versace, which gave us our first real look at Vitale on his own. His time there was unusually short, ending after just one collection following Prada Group’s acquisition of the house, but that Spring 2026 collection still told us quite a bit about the kind of designer he is. He did not walk into Versace and simply reproduce the gold, glamour and body conscious sexiness most people immediately associate with the name. Instead, he went looking for something stranger and more personal. There was color, looseness, layering and a certain scruffiness that made the collection feel lived in rather than overly polished. More importantly, it showed that Vitale is willing to challenge what people think they know about a famous house. He seems less interested in copying recognizable signatures than figuring out the attitude behind them and then finding his own way into that world. That is a difficult balance for any designer taking over an established name, and Vitale has already shown that he is not afraid to make choices that might take a minute to understand.
At Emporio Armani, that point of view could become even clearer. Vitale brings a sharp understanding of how younger people actually put clothes together, but he does not approach youth through obvious trends or gimmicks. His work has a slightly off quality that keeps things interesting. He likes tension between polished and casual, proper and sexy, familiar and strange. He also understands image making, which matters just as much now as designing the collection itself. The right casting, styling, campaign or single piece can completely change how a generation sees a brand, and Vitale spent years inside one of the best examples of that at Miu Miu. Emporio now gives him the chance to take everything he has learned and build something with more permanence. After such a long period working behind the scenes and such a brief moment at Versace, this feels like the first time we may really get to know Dario Vitale as a designer. And that might be the most interesting part of the appointment.