Armani applies a velvet touch to suit revival at Milan Fashion Week

Giorgio Armani showed his velvet touch on Monday as he brought down the curtain on a Milan fashion week heralded as marking a revival of the suit-based womenswear he pioneered in the 1980s. Velvet has always been one of the Milanese maestro's favourite materials and it is ubiquitous in his autumn-winter collection: black as the darkest night and, as he put it in his collection notes, dense, tactile and mysterious.