Fashion designer Giorgio Armani dies at XX
Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer who cut the stuffing out of men’s heavily constructed suits for a softer yet sophisticated look that revolutionized the shape of fashion for men and women for decades to come, has died at home, his fashion house confirmed Thursday on social media. He was 91.
“Il Signor Armani, as he was always respectfully and admiringly called by employees and collaborators, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones,” his team said on Instagram. “Indefatigable to the end, he worked until his final days, dedicating himself to the company, the collections, and the many ongoing and future projects.”
Armani expanded fashion to all aspects of life, his team said, “anticipating the times with extraordinary clarity and pragmatism.” He established an open dialogue with the public and was mindful of the needs of the community, “especially in support of his beloved Milan,” the team said.
Armani came onto the fashion scene in the mid-1970s with a small menswear collection that broke all the rules. The centerpiece of his line soon became an executive class “power suit” with broad shoulders and narrow hips to recall Cary Grant in the 1940s. He continued to refine the shape through the 1980s, gradually easing the “wedge shape” jacket into a more relaxed silhouette with sloped shoulders and lower lapels.
The look became the unofficial uniform of the wealthy avant-garde, in a striking contrast with the fitted English tailoring that had dominated menswear for a century.
He had his own ideas about color and fabric as well. While the expected range went from black to charcoal and silver gray and on to his beloved beige, his colors were artfully off the mark. In an effort to describe them, fashion writers mentioned blackened silver and beach fog. Shades resembling minerals, stones and grasses compared to custom blended paints. His taste in fabrics was unconventional as well. He often mixed silk and wool or silk and linen for a softer alternative to the heavy, stiff gabardines and worsted wools that were typical for men’s suits and jackets.
“You could read into it what you wanted to: power, nonchalance, sexual cool, entitlement,” Judith Thurman wrote in the New Yorker.
The fashion industry was dazzled.
He used the same approach when he adopted menswear for career women. Neutral colors, luxurious fabrics, artful but unadorned effects.
The look was all the more striking compared with the leading fashion influences of the day. At the time, fantasy and costume perfected by French designer Yves St. Laurent ruled womenswear. Armani had a different plan.
“I wanted a style in women’s dressing that was closer to reality,” he explained. A work wardrobe should be “more comfortable for a woman, clothes to make her more credible in a business meeting,” he said.
His first jackets for women were designs he created for men and then recast in a woman’s proportions. Some of the earliest were unlined and so slightly constructed they had the feel of a linen shirt.
Not that he alone showed menswear looks on women. St. Laurent thrilled his admirers with pants suits and evening tuxedos from the early 1960s. He excelled at curvaceous silhouettes, jewel and floral colors, rich wool or satin fabrics.
Armani preferred straighter lines, subtler curves and light, fluid fabrics, to the point where his eveningwear gradually evolved into semi-sheer dresses that seemed to wrap the body in fine netting. He often added tiny beads that shimmered like distant stars.
Armani was his own best model. Perennially tan with silver hair, deep blue eyes and a body-sculpted physique, he dressed in fitted T-shirts or pullover sweaters more often than a shirt and tie.
His look became the gold standard for the Hollywood executives of the 1980s.
In a masterstroke of marketing, he built his bridge to the movie industry with a clear intention. He opened a boutique in Beverly Hills in 1988 and courted major stars, outfitting them for the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, dressing everyone from Jessica Tandy to Richard Gere.
Martin Scorsese, Anjelica Huston and Steve Martin were among his first and most faithful U.S. customers, along with then-Laker coach Pat Riley, who wore Armani suits courtside in the 1980s.
By the end of the decade, Armani-clad actors and actresses — Diane Keaton, Billy Crystal, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer — filled the fashion layouts accompanying news coverage of Hollywood parties and award shows.
Hollywood’s growing admiration led Armani to a number of movie assignments. He contributed wardrobe to some films and received a costume designer credit for others. One of the first was “American Gigolo,” a 1980 film that has often been compared to an infomercial for Armani menswear. In one scene, Gere’s character empties his closet and tosses his wardrobe on the bed in an airborne fashion show of Armani’s line.
Seven years later, Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” was a how-to for men drawn to a ‘40s fashion trend that Armani helped reinvent. Actors Kevin Costner, Sean Connery and Andy Garcia wore his stylish take on the era of broad shoulders and nipped waistlines.
