Animate guardian not summoning

Can anyone help me figure out why my animate guardian isn't working? I'm in an empty map, I dropped a body armour I bought from an NPC on the ground (it is identified), hovered over it so that the item is highlighted, and pressed the animate guardian button. My character does the animation, but nothing happens. I even tried hitting my hover over keybind (alt) to see if that makes a difference, and it didn't. I tried dropping the item in a different map.

I can't imagine what I'm doing wrong. I've looked for a solution and found some old forum threads where people have had the same issue but there was no solution posted. Here's the thread:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2683470/page/1#p22905648

I have the exact same issue


Edit: I guess the problem is that I can't read. There are level requirements to what you can equip:
https://prnt.sc/essnS45Cb-su

My gem is just too low leveled for the items I was trying to equip