This is The Close-Up, where the biggest names in entertainment explain the story behind their latest personal style statement.
How can someone summarize the late Giorgio Armani’s impact on style? A paradigm-shifting career stretching across five decades, countless red carpet best-dressed lists, and silhouettes that fundamentally transformed the art of tailoring? Leslie Bibb is willing to give it a shot. “No one did it like Mr. Armani,” she tells me in an email after the label’s 50th anniversary show.
In a sentimental conclusion to Milan Fashion Week’s Spring 2026 season, Bibb had joined stars like Eiza González, Glenn Close, and Cate Blanchett in the candlelit Giorgio Armani front row within the Pinacoteca di Brera, a historic museum in the neighborhood where Mr. Armani lived and worked for his entire career. The intimate setting, and the array of beaded evening gowns that twinkled like a starry sky on the runway, reaffirmed what Bibb loved about the designer, who died at 91 this September. “You can’t help yourself: You put on one of his gowns and you’re cooked,” she says. “Everything else pales in comparison.”
Bibb would know. The White Lotus star has sourced custom Armani for several of her most memorable red carpet walks. When her husband, Sam Rockwell, was nominated at the 2019 Academy Awards for Vice, she wore an open-back Armani gown to the ceremony. Rockwell’s manager, Jason Weinberg, captured the pair walking arm-in-arm out onto the carpet in a “magical little moment,” with a video Bibb plays back in her head and on her phone. “Jeanann Williams, my stylist, took these long necklaces and had them draping down my back. I just loved that night and that look,” she reflects.
At the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Bibb wore what she calls another “knockout gown”: a strapless Armani Privé confection from the Spring 2025 runway, coated in lilac-pink crystals with a semi-sheer skirt. “To be wearing that dress, in Venice at the festival that Mr. Armani had such strong ties to, was another very treasured memory,” she says. “That gown just made me smile.”
The look she and Williams selected for Giorgio Armani’s Spring 2026 fashion show picked up where those moments left off. They chose a beaded black corset top cinched over a ballgown skirt, swirling with coordinating beaded lace flowers. Alongside her semi-sheer skirt, Bibb added open-toe black sandals and a delicate pearl ring. “Jeanann loved how romantic the skirt was with the floral lace and the movement it had,” Bibb explains. “Then, pairing that with the corset top that fit like a glove just felt like classic Armani to her.”
Makeup artist Kale Teter and hair stylist Jacob Rozenberg juxtaposed the actress’s elegantly tailored clothing with an understated, “model off-duty” beauty beat. “Once they saw what I was wearing, they felt like leaning into a bit of an opposite vibe to the classic feel of the clothes,” Bibb explains.
Rozenberg sculpted Bibb's signature bob into subtle, glossy waves. On the makeup front, Teter built the look up from Bibb’s special events and on-camera staples: Armani Beauty Luminous Silk Foundation and Luminous Silk Concealer.
The actress talks about them like a beauty equivalent to her perfectly-proportioned Armani dresses and corset; the radiant finish, she says, “makes me feel like the most powerful version of myself.” “They’re magic,” she adds. “I just love the glowy finish it gives me—I am disciple, seriously.”
Bibb tapped another everyday requirement, the label’s Luminous Silk Cheek Tint, for a final flush of color. “I don’t like fussy makeup and it’s just easy to use—and you can build it up depending on how blushy you want it to be.” (Bibb clarifies her own approach in all-caps: “I LOVE A BLUSHY CHEEK.”)
By the time she arrived at the show, Bibb was surrounded by other stars with their own memories of Armani—and favorite pieces to show it. “It [was] so meaningful to me to be able to be here tonight, to celebrate 50 years of this iconic brand, and to remember Mr. Armani at one of the last shows he played a part in. I get chills thinking about that,” Bibb says. She was “gutted” to watch one of Mr. Armani’s most consistent models close the runway in a sequin gown with a constellation of his face placed on the front. “Not seeing him walk out at the end…the whole show was more emotional than I expected.”
It stirred up in her a sense of history. While its founder is no longer here, its legacy will live on. “I realized something, a word I forget to use when talking about Giorgio Armani: timeless,’” Bibb adds. “My mother used to say to me, ‘Don’t buy a lot of cheap clothes, save up and buy one suit or one dress that is well-made and classic.' I realized tonight that adage was missing two words: Giorgio Armani.”
Bibb signs off by repeating her first comment.“No one did it like Giorgio Armani.” For the designer’s cherished fans, those seven words seem to say it all.
Photographer Pierre Mouton | Stylist Jeanann Williams | Makeup Artist Kale Teter | Hair Stylist Jacob Rozenberg
