The group appoints a creative director for Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani accessories. The title is broad, but the organisation chart around it sets its limits.
Dario Vitale is appointed creative director of Emporio Armani and of Giorgio Armani accessories. He joins the group with immediate effect, and the group specifies that he is the first to hold this role from outside the Armani family. This statement comes from the group itself, and it is read with its limits.
These limits are in the organisation chart. Vitale will work alongside Silvana Armani, head of womenswear design at the Armani Group, and Leo Dell’Orco, head of menswear design. Both functions remain. His appointment entrusts him neither with the Giorgio Armani ready-to-wear line nor with an overall artistic direction. He is given a line that Silvana Armani and Leo Dell’Orco say was born as a space of freedom and experimentation, and a category, accessories, that chief executive Giuseppe Marsocci describes as a fine opportunity.
His career explains the choice. Trained at the Istituto Marangoni, with a period at Bottega Veneta under Tomas Maier, Vitale joined Miu Miu in 2010. He worked there with Miuccia Prada, rising to become design director of ready-to-wear and brand image director, then left the house in March 2025. In April 2025, he became creative director of Versace, the first designer from outside the family to lead creative direction at that House. The pattern repeats: a family house, and a first name from elsewhere. The biographical note provided on his time at Versace stops at the appointment. Its end and its date are not documented.
Three elements will make it possible to judge whether the appointment holds. The division of decisions between Vitale and the two design heads. The place that accessories will take in the presentation of the collections. The first Emporio collection he will sign, the date of which has not been announced. None of these three points is observable today, and this judgement has that limit.
At this stage, the appointment is an organisational decision before it is a decision of style. It adds a name to a team already in place and entrusts him with two delimited perimeters. What it brings to Armani will be measured by the first Emporio silhouette, and by the first accessory he signs.
Vitale joined Miu Miu in 2010 and left in March 2025, that is nearly fifteen years spent in the house. He was appointed at Versace the following month.
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