Giorgio Armani's sartorial creations interplay with Italian masterpieces at Milan museum exhibition

MILAN (AP) — Giorgio Armani hesitated at first when the Brera Art Gallery proposed an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of his signature label, placing his creations among celebrated Italian masterpieces by such luminaries as Raphael and Caravaggio.

But by the time Armani reached the gallery’s final room on a visit aimed at winning him over, the designer, who became one of the most recognizable names in global fashion, was already mapping out which sartorial creations would best interplay with the Brera’s artistic treasures.

“Giorgio Armani, Milano, for love,’’ featuring 129 Armani looks from the 1980s through the present day, opens Wednesday at the Brera Art Gallery, just weeks after the designer’s death on Sept. 4 at the age of 91. The exhibition is one of a series of Milan Fashion Week events planned before his death to highlight Armani’s transformative influence on fashion.

“From the start, Armani showed absolute rigor but also humility not common to great fashion figures,’’ said the gallery's director Angelo Crespi. “He always said that he did not want to enter into close dialogue with great masterpieces, like Raphael, Mantegna, Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca.’’

Instead, the exhibition aims to create a symbiosis with the artworks, with the chosen looks reflecting the mood of each room without interrupting the flow of the museum experience, much the way Armani always intended his apparel to enhance and never overwhelm or exploit the individual.

During the exploratory tour, Armani was particularly moved by Andrea Mantegna’s “Lamentation over the Dead Christ,’' a Brera masterpiece that meditates on death with realism, and he specified that his pieces should not be placed in direct view, said Chiara Rostagno, the Brera’s deputy director.

Behind it, a long blue asymmetrical skirt and bodysuit ensemble worn by Juliette Binoche at Cannes in 2016 reflects the blue in Giovanni Bellini's 1510 portrait “Madonna and Child.”

The show opens with a midnight blue velvet dress featuring a quasi-ecclesiastical embroidered panel with Maltese crosses that play nicely against the frescoed chapel backdrop. A trio of underlit dresses glow on a wall opposite Raphael's "The Marriage of the Virgin,'' their creases and draping in some way reflecting the Renaissance master’s careful geometry.

The famed soft-shouldered suit worn by Richard Gere in “American Gigolo,” arguably the garment that launched Armani to global fame, is set among detached frescoes by Donato Bramante, the slate gray of the suit picking up on the frescoes' architectural details.

The seamless juxtapositions of 1980s looks alongside his most recent garments throughout the exhibition underscore the timelessness of Armani’s fashion.

Armani himself makes a cameo, on a T-shirt in the final room, opposite the Brera's emblematic painting “Il Bacio,” or “The Kiss,” by Francesco Hayez.

“When I walk around, I think he would be super proud,’’ said Anoushka Borghesi, Armani’s global communications director.

Armani has been celebrated with museum exhibitions in the past, but the Brera show is particularly fitting as the museum abuts Armani’s home and historic offices and showroom. Armani had a long relationship with the museum, and the Academy of Fine Arts, housed in the Brera museum complex, bestowed Armani with an honorary title in 1993.

Honoring the designer’s commitment to his work, Armani’s fashion house confirmed a series of events this week that Armani himself had planned to celebrate his 50th anniversary.

They include the announcement of an initiative to support education for children in six Southeast Asian, African and South American countries. The project, in conjunction with the Catholic charity Caritas, is named “Mariu’,’’ an affectionate nickname for Armani’s mother.

In a final farewell, the last Giorgio Armani collection signed by the designer will be shown in the Brera Gallery on Sunday, among looks he personally chose to represent his 50-year legacy. The exhibition remains open until Jan. 11.

A plaster model of a portrait statue of Napoleon I by Antonio Canova (1803-1806) looms over Giorgio Armani's creations on display during the exhibition “Giorgio Armani – 50 Years” at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Giorgio Armani's creations are displayed in front of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini's painting “The Preaching of Saint Mark in a Square in Alexandria, Egypt" (1504-1507), during the exhibition "Giorgio Armani - 50 Years," which opened to the public at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Giorgio Armani's creations are displayed during the exhibition "Giorgio Armani - 50 Years" opened to the public at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Sept. 24 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

A Giorgio Armani's creation is displayed during the exhibition "Giorgio Armani - 50 Years" opened to the public at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Sept. 24 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Giorgio Armani's creations are displayed during the exhibition "Giorgio Armani - 50 Years" opened to the public at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Sept. 24 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Giorgio Armani's creations are displayed during the exhibition "Giorgio Armani - 50 Years" opened to the public at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Sept. 24 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

Giorgio Armani's creations are backdropped by the painting by Francesco Hayez titled "The Kiss", during the exhibition "Giorgio Armani - 50 Years" opened to the public at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, Wednesday, Sept. 24 2025. (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is ordering a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro in a move that seemed designed to put a tighter chokehold on the South American country's economy.

Trump's escalation comes after U.S. forces last week seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, an unusual move that followed a buildup of military forces in the region. In a post on social media Tuesday night announcing the blockade, Trump alleged Venezuela was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to continue the military buildup until the country gave the U.S. oil, land and assets, though it was not clear why he felt the U.S. had a claim.

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

Pentagon officials referred all questions about the post to the White House.

The buildup has been accompanied by a series of military strikes on boats in international waters in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The campaign, which has drawn bipartisan scrutiny among U.S. lawmakers, has killed at least 95 people in 25 known strikes on vessels.

The Trump administration has defended it as a success, saying it has prevented drugs from reaching American shores, and they pushed back on concerns that it is stretching the bounds of lawful warfare.

The Trump administration has said the campaign is about stopping drugs headed to the U.S., but Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles appeared to confirm in a Vanity Fair interview published Tuesday that the campaign is part of a push to oust Maduro.

Wiles said Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”

Tuesday night's announcement seemed to have a similar aim.

Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and produces about 1 million barrels a day, has long relied on oil revenue as a lifeblood of its economy.

Since the Trump administration began imposing oil sanctions on Venezuela in 2017, Maduro’s government has relied on a shadowy fleet of unflagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.

The state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., commonly known as PDVSA, has been locked out of global oil markets by U.S. sanctions. It sells most of its exports at a steep discount in the black market in China.

Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University in Houston, said about 850,000 barrels of the 1 million daily production is exported. Of that, he said, 80% goes to China, 15% to 17% goes to the U.S. through Chevron Corp., and the remainder goes to Cuba.

It wasn't immediately clear how the U.S. planned to enact what Trump called a “TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.”

But the U.S. Navy has 11 ships, including an aircraft carrier and several amphibious assault ships, in the region.

Those ships carry a wide complement of aircraft, including helicopters and V-22 Ospreys. Additionally, the Navy has been operating a handful of P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft in the region.

All told, those assets provide the military a significant ability to monitor marine traffic coming in and out of the country.

Associated Press writers Konstantin Toropin in Washington and Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.

President Nicolas Maduro joins a rally marking the anniversary of the Battle of Santa Ines, which took place during Venezuela's 19th-century Federal War, in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Cristian Hernandez)

President Donald Trump speaks during a Mexican Border Defense Medal presentation in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Dec. 15, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)