Giorgio Armani, whose death was announced Wednesday at the age of 91, turned the Hollywood red carpet into a runway — starting with the 1990 Oscars.
Giorgio Armani turned the Hollywood red carpet into a runway.
The iconic fashion designer, whose death was announced Wednesday at the age of 91, is synonymous with awards-show fashion: Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Demi Moore, Beyoncé, Denzel Washington and Sean Penn have all worn Armani to the Oscars.
But he first turned the Academy Awards into a fashion show in 1990, when he dressed Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange, some of the hottest young A-listers of the moment. He also pulled off a coup by dressing 85-year-old Jessica Tandy, who won Best Actress for “Driving Miss Daisy.”
Before that, star style barely registered. “Stylist” was not a job. Formal wear tended to come off the rack, not from fashion designers, or be provided by the wardrobe departments of movie studios.
“A lot of the looks were really gaudy or over the top,” Nancy MacDonell, fashion historian and author of “Empresses of Seventh Avenue,” told The Post. “It was Bob Mackie or Nolan Miller or costume designers who do film and Broadway.”
Armani, though, put Foster — who, the year before, attended in what looked like a taffeta prom dress — in a chic silk trouser suit. Roberts, still a starlet, wore an understated, earth-toned tank dress. Pfeiffer showed up in body-skimming black with long sleeves.
“These women looked powerful,” Clare Sauro, a fashion historian and curator at Drexel University, told The Post in 2016. “They stood in contrast to the big poufy skirts of the time. They had an understated glamour. It was the transition from ’80s opulence to ’90s minimalism.”
It prompted Women’s Wear Daily to dub the evening the “Armani Awards.” And after that, designers clamored to claim celebs as their red-carpet models.
“The whole Armani thing is refined and sophisticated,” MacDonell said. “It let people present themselves very differently. He transformed the way these people are seen on red carpets.”
But Armani was hardly an overnight success. While Diane Keaton had accepted her 1978 Best Actress Oscar, for “Annie Hall,” in an oversized Armani jacket her character might have loved, Michelle Pfeiffer famously responded to his first offer of formal wear with: “I can dress myself, and who is Giorgio Armani?”
Instead, the designer really got his start in Hollywood on the big screen.
