Emporio Armani Names Its First Creative Director From Outside the Armani Family

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Dario Vitale, who lasted one season at Versace, is now the first person outside the Armani family to lead Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani Accessories.

On Wednesday, September 16, the Armani Group named Dario Vitale creative director of Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani Accessories, effective immediately. No one outside the Armani family has ever held either title.

 

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The appointment lands a little over a year after Giorgio Armani died in Milan on September 4, 2025, at 91, and the group is frame it as the opening move in a wider reorganization of the house’s creative structure since his death. In a statement, Vitale described himself as honored to “take on this dual role across Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani,” and said the responsible comes with Armani’s design legacy, a heritage he wants to build on while helping define what comes next for it. Silvana Armani, the founder’s niece and the group’s head of womenswear design, and Leo Dell’Orco, her longtime counterpart on menswear, issued a joint statement calling Emporio a line that “was born as a space of freedom, experimentation and energy,” adding that they expect Vitale, already an established name on the international stage, to interpret that spirit with respect for what came before it.

The move follows months of speculation that had linked Vitale to houses range from Kenzo to Saint Laurent after his fast exit from Versace. Dell’Orco himself had dismiss talk of an Armani move as recently as Milan Men’s Fashion Week in June. According to reporting on the deal, Armani’s heirs had been weighing either to bring a young outside designer into the fold ever since the founder’s death, with Vitale one of several names in the conversation before anything was actually signed.

The brief itself is unusually broad for a first creative director post. Vitale is not simply inheriting one runway line; he is responsible for both menswear and womenswear at Emporio Armani and, separate, for accessor across the Giorgio Armani mainline, a split remit that spans two different price points and two different customer bases inside the same group. How he redefines that dual position, for apparel at one label and objects at another, is the detail retailers and licensees will be watching most closely over the next several months.

stir

Born in 1983 near Naples, Vitale graduated from Istituto Marangoni in Milan in 2006 and took his first job at Dsquared2. A year later he moved to Bottega Veneta, working under Tomas Maier during the label’s shh haute, craft-driven era. In 2010 he joined the Prada Group, landing at Miu Miu, where he would stay for the next fifteen years.

He rose gradually rather than suddenly, working for years alongside Miu Miu’s longtime design director Fabio Zambernardi before eventually becoming design director of ready-to-wear and, later, director of brand image himself. Unlike fashion’s roster of front-facing name designers, Vitale spent most of that period working behind the scenes, shaping a period of rapid commercial growth for the brand without his own name attached to it. Miu Miu’s retail sales rose 93 percent in 2024, the standout figure inside a Prada Group earnings report that put full-year net revenue at 5.43 billion euros, up 15 percent, and credited Miu Miu with reaching what the group called a new level of visibility and scale. The brand had already posted an 89 percent first-quarter jump that year, and the momentum held through the fourth quarter, when Miu Miu’s retail sales grew a further 84 percent. Japan was the group’s single strongest region for the year, up 46 percent, a detail that mattered for a design and image director whose work increasingly traveled through Asian markets during his time there.

His Miu Miu years also produced some of the era’s most discussed fashion moments, including the viral micro-miniskirts of spring 2022 and the so-called no-pants look that defined the brand’s spring 2023 presentations. Those years shaped the instincts he now brings to two more accessible Armani labels: an eye for what turns into an actual cultural moment, paired with the discipline of someone trained to work shh inside somebody else’s creative vision before stepping fully into his own.

Vitale’s name had already started circulating for a bigger job well before Versace called. Zambernardi, his longtime Miu Miu colleague, had stepped back from his own operational leadership post at Prada Group the previous autumn, and by November 2024 Italian trade press was reporting that Vitale himself, still working design director by day, had quietly become one of the most sought-after names for an open creative director chair somewhere in the industry. That speculation resolved itself within months. When Vitale left Miu Miu in January 2025, his deputy Francesca Nicoletti, also a Marangoni graduate, moved into the role he vacated, and Vitale himself surfaced two months later at Versace. His trajectory has since become something of a case study for Istituto Marangoni itself, whose own materials point to a wider network of alumni, Nicoletti included, now occupying senior design posts across the industry.

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Vitale’s stint immediately before Armani was considerably shorter than the one that preceded it. In March 2025, Donatella Versace announced she was stepping back from the creative directorship she had held since 1997, moving into a new role as chief brand ambassador. Versace named Vitale her successor, the first person from outside the Versace family to hold the position, with his appointment taking effect that April at age 41.

Coverage at the time described him as an under-the-radar designer stepping into fashion’s spotlight after nearly fifty years of family control at Versace, a contrast that framed almost everything written about him that season. His debut collection showed in Milan that September, built around a loud, full-throttle revival of Versace’s overtly sexual 1980s and 1990s codes: bold archive prints, second-skin tailoring, unbuttoned embroidered waistcoats over archive-print ties, and glamour drawn from an era largely absent from the house’s output during Donatella’s later tenure, including a revival of Gianni Versace’s 1991 Andy Warhol-inspired pop art print. Days before the show, Vitale previewed the new direction with an Instagram story built around a Jurgen Teller photograph of Kristen McMenamy from the brand’s 1990s Medusa era. His clearest public statement of intent actually arrived off the runway that same month, when he dressed Julia Roberts in a sleek blue wool blazer, striped shirt and jeans for the Venice Film Festival, her first look from Vitale’s Versace and a pared-back style that read as a deliberate contrast to the house’s usual bombast.

The reinvention did not last. By early December 2025, Vitale’s exit from Versace was confirmed, arriving within days of Prada Group’s completed acquisition of the label. Prada, which also owns Miu Miu, had been circling Versace for months by the time the deal closed, and Vitale’s departure, after producing only that single collection, left the house searching for its next creative lead less than a year after Donatella’s own decades-long tenure ended.

The reversal caught an industry that had only just adjusted to a Versace without Donatella at all, and it left Vitale, at 41, once again looking for a permanent creative home less than a year after the introduction that had made his name familiar to the wider public for the first time.

flow

Emporio Armani did not exist for most of Giorgio Armani’s career. He launched it in 1981, six years after founding his mainline house, opening his first dedicated boutique that same year primarily to distribute Emporio Armani alongside the since-discontinued Armani Jeans line. It was conceived as a lower-priced, more experimental label aimed at a younger customer, distinct from the formal Giorgio Armani label and from Armani Privé, the couture-level line introduced later, and it has long occupied a bridge position in the group’s hierarchy, priced above Armani Exchange but below the Giorgio Armani mainline itself. Over the following four decades the distinction between Emporio and the mainline gradually blurred, even as Emporio grew into one of the group’s largest and most widely distributed businesses, spanning ready-to-wear, eyewear, watches and jewelry. Its advertising over the years leaned into a more overtly youthful, star-driven image than the mainline ever did, with campaign faces including Rihanna, Victoria Beckham and Rafael Nadal.

 

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Giorgio Armani designed for Emporio himself, alongside his other lines, for the label’s entire history. His final collection for the line, created for spring/summer 2026, was shown after his death. Since then, Silvana Armani and Leo Dell’Orco, 71 and 73, have carried the creative direction of Emporio and the wider house, a continuity that stretches a little further than Vitale’s own arrival: Emporio Armani’s spring/summer 2027 men’s and women’s collection, unveiled September 24 at Armani/Teatro in Milan, was designed by Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani, not Vitale, and shown as a presentation rather than through the line’s traditional runway format. The same via Bergognone venue hosted Giorgio Armani’s own funeral chamber a year earlier, over two days in September 2025.

Vitale’s own first collection for Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani Accessories is expected in early 2027, which gives him several months to settle into two design studios he inherits mid-transition rather than at a clean break.

mutable

Vitale’s arrival is only one piece of a wider restructure set in motion by Giorgio Armani’s will. Earlier this month, Giuseppe Marsocci, a 23-year company veteran who had spent the past six years as global chief commercial officer, was named chief executive of the Armani Group, taking over a role the founder had held personally since starting the company in 1975 with financing that famously included the sale of his own Volkswagen Beetle. The will also laid out plans to sell a 15 percent stake in the company, expressing a preference for EssilorLuxottica, LVMH or L’Oréal as buyers, or another firm of comparable standing. Governance of the family’s remaining shares runs partly through the Fondazione Giorgio Armani, a philanthropic foundation the designer established in 2016 that was also built to anchor the company’s ownership structure after his death. The foundation, whose members include Dell’Orco alongside Armani himself, initially held just 0.1 percent of the company; under the succession plan it is set to receive a far larger share, becoming one of the key shareholders alongside the founder’s family.

Marsocci is not an Armani family member either, which means non-family leadership now sits in both the executive suite and, for the first time, the creative studio simultaneously. Handing Vitale the accessories brief alongside Emporio Armani also puts him in charge of leather goods, eyewear and jewelry, categories that carry disproportionate weight in a luxury group’s margins and that a group preparing to sell a stake to an eyewear or beauty conglomerate has every incentive to strengthen. Framed against that backdrop, the Armani Group has described Vitale’s appointment as the first concrete step in reorganizing its creative structure since the founder’s death, a phrase that applies as much to succession planning as to the clothes themselves. For now, the immediate handoff sits with Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani, whose September 24 Emporio Armani show will be the label’s last collection without Vitale’s involvement. His first, due in early 2027, will be the actual test of how a designer shaped by fifteen years inside Miuccia Prada’s studios and one turbulent season at Versace translates into Giorgio Armani’s own idiom.