Editor’s Note: “Finally Buying Armani,” by Dodie Kazanjian was first published in the May 1994 issue of Vogue. We are reprinting it here in memoriam of the Italian designer who died at 91 on September 4, 2025.
The need to own an Armani jacket stole over me gradually, so gradually that by the time I became fully aware of it, I already wanted one quite a lot. I hardly ever buy top-of-the-line designer clothes—the last time I had the urge was four years ago, when I went all out and got my first Chanel suit.
The Armani jacket seems to have edged out the Chanel suit as this decade’s ultimate piece of clothing. A lot of women I know are addicted to its fluid, understated, soft, versatile, and blissfully comfortable style, and a lot of famous women I don’t know have been photographed wearing it: Diane Sawyer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Anjelica Huston, Winona Ryder, Jodie Foster, Ali MacGraw, Lauren Bacall, Sherry Lansing, Gayfryd Steinberg. (Not Hillary Rodham Clinton, though, and definitely not Ivana Trump.) Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford wore complementary Armani suits to their wedding in 1991. Annette Bening and Maria Shriver got through their pregnancies in Armani jackets. The Armani jacket has become the antidote to all the 1980s flashy, aggressive power dressing that we now despise. It’s the status symbol that doesn’t declare itself, conferring status without symbol. How can I resist?
What I want, specifically, is one of the jackets from the Armani spring collection that previewed in Milan last fall. There are five stores in New York where you can buy Armani’s signature Borgonuovo collection, or “black label” line: Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys New York, and the flagship Armani store on Madison Avenue.
I start with Bloomingdale’s. Nobody seems to want to pay any attention to me at Bloomingdale’s Armani boutique, which I visit in early December. Maybe, in my Banana Republic jeans and 10-year-old Yves Saint Laurent jacket, I don’t measure up as an Armani type. I’m only five-two, and my friend Brooke says Armani is too big for me anyway. “He designs for big, tall women,” she says. That’s been one of my worries, and so has the price; Armani’s black-label jackets go for something like $1,300. There’s also Le Collezioni, with less costly fabrics, where a jacket retails for $800 to $900, and Emporio Armani, a whole different line of cuts and fabrics for younger bodies, at half that much.
When a saleswoman finally deigns to approach me, and I ask if I can see the book for the spring collection, the answer is no. The spring book isn’t in yet. In any case, they’ve already ordered what they’ll be showing from the book. Would I like to be invited to their trunk show in February? She takes my name and says she’ll call. Before leaving, I try on one of the winter jackets that are on view, just to get the feel of it. It feels wonderful, but the size—38—is way too big for me. Could I try a smaller size? “It doesn’t come any smaller,” she says. “You just need a pinch here in the back, take in the shoulders a bit, take in the waist, and lift the sleeves.” That’s all? Feeling a trifle deflated, I move on.
It is more or less the same story at the other department stores. No spring book yet. They’ll invite me to the trunk show, but there’s no assurance I can get the jacket I want. Saks won’t even take my name—the saleswoman says I should call her because she “might forget.” Some stores are more gracious than others. At Bergdorf’s, a personal shopper unexpectedly greets me at the door, takes me to Armani, and promises she’ll get me in the day before the trunk show opens. At Barneys’ new palace on Madison and 61st, a saleswoman informs me that they do carry my size, 36. (The other department stores had insisted that 38 was the smallest; what would the well-known perfectionist Giorgio Armani have to say about that?) The saleswoman also trots me over to the nearby boutique of Jil Sander, whose designs have a lot in common with Armani’s; I like them, but the Armani mystique has me enthralled.
At the Armani store, nobody seems to notice me even though I’m the only shopper on the floor. I stand conspicuously near a saleswoman who seems to be having an interminable conversation on the telephone. Finally, another one comes rushing by and I do my best to tackle her. “Check in early February,” she calls back over her shoulder. No hard sell here.
While waiting it out, I decide to do a little research. Giorgio Armani has been making women’s jackets since 1975, a year after he burst on the scene as a designer of men’s clothes. “I was amazed when I saw women friends wanting to wear the jackets I made for men,” Armani said in his voice-over commentary for the half-hour film Martin Scorsese made about him in 1990. (Scorsese is an old friend of Armani’s; he wears his jackets all the time.) “They liked plain, soft, flowing jackets they could move in freely and naturally, like a second skin.”
The film, whose script was written by The Age of Innocence screenwriter Jay Cocks and which had its US premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, is an act of canonization as well as an ode to the jacket. “I created all my work around the jacket,” said Saint Giorgio. “It was my point of departure for everything…. My small but crucial discovery was making jackets that fall in an unexpected natural way. I tried new techniques, like removing the padding and the interlining…. I altered the way jackets were buttoned and radically modified the proportions. What used to be considered a defect became the basis for a new shape—a new jacket.” In the process, he developed a jacket that was as light and as comfortable as a shirt, sensual but not sexy, and right for any occasion. Although intricately constructed and beautifully made, Armani’s jackets have a “deconstructed,” minimalist look, free of signature buttons or self-congratulatory logos, that fits right in with the zeitgeist. He was the first postmodern fashion designer, doing for the jacket what others were doing for philosophy, architecture, and art.
Some people collect Armani jackets like paintings. Writer Joan Juliet Buck, a femme du monde if ever there was one, has at least 20 of them. She buys two a season when she’s feeling rich enough. “If you divide the cost per wear, they cost about 3 cents,” she says. “Armani jackets age differently from other clothes. Other jackets go seriously out of style. Old Armani jackets just get exhausted from overuse—they droop. It’s really about simplifying your life. You reach a certain age, get past 40, you know who you are, and you know what looks good on you. You think of getting through life elegantly with behavior that’s not going to drive other people crazy. I think Armani reflects that.”
Professional women (aren’t we all these days?) love the practicality of the Armani jacket. It goes with almost anything—Armani or not—and it’s so comfortable that you forget you’re wearing it. I keep hearing women say that you’re “taken seriously” when you wear one. “If you go into a boardroom in a canary yellow suit and a very short skirt, it’s hard to be taken seriously,” one corporate superstar tells me—she is wearing a beige wool crepe Armani jacket over matching wide-legged pants. But you don’t have to match to be taken seriously. The Armani jacket alone carries the seriousness of the suit.
When Ali MacGraw’s Malibu house burned to the ground last November, one of the things she really missed was her 12-year-old Armani tuxedo jacket. “I long ago stopped wearing the pants, but the jacket I wore all the time,” she tells me. “It was one of the most beautifully fitting and beautifully cut pieces of clothing I’ve ever owned. Year after year after year, I traveled in it. The fabric was amazing, the workmanship was amazing. The cut was wonderful on my big-boned carcass.” She went right out after the fire and got herself a black wool crepe Armani jacket.
MacGraw thinks it’s interesting that Armani has become such a hit in Los Angeles. (The Armani boutique on Rodeo Drive opened in 1988.) “Los Angeles is traditionally the land of no taste, and along came this megasweep of Armani to teach all those ladies how to dress,” she says. Agents, studio executives, and other high-powered Hollywood women are now “wearing a uniform that makes them look better than they ever looked. Of course, I think some people look better in it than others. A curvaceous body—the serious, old-fashioned movie-star body—is less terrific in it than a more athletic shape. It looks ludicrous with stiletto heels, nail polish, tons of jewelry and makeup. You have to know how to wear it.”
Anjelica Huston, a good Armani jacketeer, knows just how to wear it, and she tends to wear a lot of black and white and red. A year and a half ago, she got married in a “diamond white” Armani jacket over a white Armani dress. “He’s simple,” she has said of Armani, “which is the hardest thing in the world.”
Like all the great classics of fashion—the Chanel suit, the Kelly bag, the Manolo Blahnik pump—the Armani jacket is widely copied. Many of the top American designers have appropriated the tapered, stripped-down Armani look and the subtle Armani color palette in their own jackets. None of this has had much effect on demand for the real thing. Sales of Armani black-label jackets, which are made in a small factory outside Milan that has been run by the same family for several generations, have been increasing by 15 to 20 percent a year over the last three or four years. American women bought just under 30,000 of them last year. (American men bought a third that many for themselves; does this mean that women care more about being taken seriously?) Because the style changes from year to year are subtle rather than drastic, and because the things wear so well, there’s an Armani army out there that never wears anything else.
Okay, so what about my spring jacket? It’s been more than a month since I hit the stores, and nobody has called me about coming in. (Nobody ever does call me, as it turns out.) I call the Armani store, and a friendly (surprise!) saleswoman named Jenny tells me to come on over, they’ve got the spring book, and a few jackets have already arrived. Come early in the morning, she says, when it’s not crowded. I get there at ten o’clock on the dot the next morning. The book is about four inches thick and somewhat overwhelming.
I see shawl-collared jackets, collarless jackets, cardigan-style jackets, asymmetrical jackets, and of course the classic Armani blazers, both single- and double-breasted, with notched or peaked lapels. There’s a “cobra jacket” that buttons at the neck with a banded collar. Jackets with loops instead of buttonholes; jackets with only one button, perfectly placed; jackets that are bordered with a fine cord that runs down the front and ties at the waist. Linen jackets, wool crepe jackets, cotton jackets, silk jackets. A sea of muted earth-colored fabrics—beige, gray, taupe, stone, sand, jellyfish, navy, black, white. Jackets, jackets, jackets.
I can’t cope with shopping from the book. I try on several of the newly arrived spring jackets, all of which seem to be available in size 36: the salesman says that more are arriving every day. Armani’s spring jackets come in 16 styles, each of which can be had in a bewildering variety of lusciously discreet fabrics and discreet colors. The problem isn’t finding a jacket, it’s making a decision. I beat a strategic retreat.
My pal Brooke, one of the great shoppers, comes with me the next day. The friendly Jenny helps me this time; she turns out to be just my height, and she looks cool in Armani’s navy wool crepe pantsuit. Brooke is all authority. She spurns the three jackets that I had put on hold and pulls out several others I would never have thought of trying—a textured cotton-and-silk number with a mandarin collar: a collarless one in stone-colored wool crepe; and a tapered white linen jacket with a slim rounded lapel and a single button that closes with a loop. They’re all very long, and Brooke likes each one. “See, you’re not too small for Armani,” she says, as if it hadn’t been her idea that I was.
The truth is, they all make me feel taller. They make me feel wonderful, in fact; there’s a degree of unconfined comfort that I’ve never had in a jacket before. We narrow it down to the collarless wool crepe and the one-button linen. I go back and forth between them, slipping into one and then the other. I’m leaning toward the one-button, but I’d rather have it in another fabric—the stone wool crepe, specifically. Jenny brings out the swatch book and turns to that jacket. No dice. It doesn’t come in wool crepe. It does come in a loosely woven pale beige linen blend along with eight other fabric choices. After another 20 minutes of agonizing over colors and materials, I pick the beige linen.
A month later, it’s mine. The pleasure it gives me is amazing. This featherlight. minimal wisp of a jacket immediately registers as one of my all-time favorite pieces of clothing. It’s instant style—something I can wear anywhere and everywhere without even thinking about it. The Armani secret is all in the cut and the fabric. My jacket hangs from the shoulder in a smooth glide, skimming my body like a caress. It’s true, what they say: The feeling is sensual rather than sexual. It looks great with jeans, which is how I’ll mostly wear it, and it looks just as good with my black pleated skirt and a T-shirt. But wait a minute. I can’t get into the pockets! Two side pockets are clearly visible when I turn the jacket inside out and hold it up to the light, but there’s no mere tacking stitch here—it’s absolutely impossible to get in them. Pockets have always been important to me—that was one of the things I wanted in a jacket—but I can see that the slightest bulge would wreak havoc on Armani’s sinuous line. Oh, well, I’ll adapt. As Ali MacGraw says, you have to know how to wear an Armani. And I can see I’m never going to want to take this one off.
In fact, I wear it onto the airplane the morning it arrives. My husband and I are going to visit his married daughter in Los Angeles. Driving from the airport in her Ford Explorer, I get the once-over from Sherrick, her precocious seven-year-old. “Why do you have only one button?” he asks. “Did you lose the other two?”
“No,” I explain. “That’s how it comes. Don’t you like it?”
Pause for further scrutiny. “It’s okay,” he says, with his most winning smile.