“The Armani Edge,” by Tad Friend, was originally published in the March 1992 issue of Vogue. Photographed by Arthur Elgort. Fashion Editor: André Leon Talley. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Sonia Kashuk for Aveda.
For more of the best from Vogue’s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here.
Fifty of the world’s most beautiful models waited for Giorgio Armani. Wrapped in white housecoats against the air conditioned chill, clutching bottles of Pellegrino in their thin, lotioned fingers, their hair espaliered in curlers, they sprawled indelicately in the first three rows of Armani’s private theater in Milan. Five hundred journalists and celebrities would soon throng in to see them model Armani’s spring collection.
Accompanied by an interpreter, Armani strode onto the runway to deliver his credo on deportment. Though Armani was chewing gum and looked customarily casual in a purple sweater and black cotton pants, this traditional session is his high mass. With one hand at his throat, like a man keeping his tie out of the soup, Armani considered the muted palette of women before him, the hair and the skin that rippled from black to chalk white, and he frowned.
Fire-engine red blazed in the front row: Linda Evangelista was still wearing the pouffy red wig she had worn in Versace’s show earlier that day. Armani waved his fingers, and Evangelista pulled it off. Armani winced again: her hair was dyed just as red. Daringly, laughing, Evangelista handed her wig to Armani, urging him to put it on. He considered the red tangle in his hand, then gingerly popped it on for two seconds while gesturing to the bank of cameras at the far end of the theater : “No photos!” The photographers never get to shoot the stick-on eagle tattoo on Armani’s right forearm, either.
Then, still gravely, Armani said, “Remember, you are women, not young girls walking down the street. This will be very elegant, very simple, and very natural. The makeup is not strong, the hair is not strange”—a glance at Evangelista—“and the clothes are fantastic.” He struck an angular pose, his hands braced on his hips, elbows out. “No! Not fashion!” He relaxed: white maned, composed, erect. “Elegance, elegance.”
“Did you notice the models’ hands?” Donald Sutherland asked me after the show, fluting his own hands aloft wonderingly. “Their hands were perfectly relaxed, yet full of energy. There’s something about those clothes, and Armani himself, that conveys a self-assurance even to the models.” (“He’s trying to achieve a dreamlike state,” model Yasmeen Ghauri said later. “But it can be very boring for us.”) Sutherland grasped the back of his neck, where his dark blue Armani suit lay smoothly: “On every other designer’s jacket, there’d be a bump here, but with Armani, never. He captures the flow of the human body.” Anjelica Huston, looking like Natasha Fatale in a black Armani dress, leaned over and said, “He’s simple, which is the hardest thing in the world.”
In the days to come, fashion writers would extravagantly praise his show as the pinnacle of the Milan season, pointing in particular to the way Armani had streamlined his classic cardigan jacket and offered it in unexpectedly bold colors, including raspberry ripple and nectarine, and to his radically different chiffon baby doll dresses. But Armani took greater pleasure from his show’s immediate gratifications. His eye flickered eagerly at the curtain peephole throughout, and at the end he bowed with genuine pleasure to the cascading applause, dashing tears from his eyes.
For Armani, at fifty-seven, this adoration was superfluous certification of his swift and forceful influence on fashion. When he started Giorgio Armani S.p. A. in 1975, he had $10,000; last year people spent over $1.6 billion for the five men’s and four women’s lines of Armani clothing and for his accessories, perfume, and eyewear. To complement his mainstay lines—the traditional Black Label and the trendier Emporio Armani—Armani recently launched A/X: Armani Exchange. The December opening of the first store in New York was a huge success, with people lining up to buy T-shirts, jeans, and casual wear for prices mostly under one hundred dollars: A/X sold twenty-six hundred items in the first two days. Twenty-five U.S. outlets are scheduled to be open by this month. This shark attack on market share, while it may dim the shimmer of the name Armani, should further enrich an unlikely billionaire.
After the fashion show, 250 of Armani’s most favored guests lingered for dinner in the banquet room of the seventeenth-century palazzo that serves as Armani’s office and apartment. The white canopy overhead was speckled with oak leaves, the long tables were illuminated by white church candles and draped in Armani-designed napery, the squadrons of waiters wore trim Cipriani jackets, the cast-iron lanterns were copies of one Armani had bought in Tunisia. Even the Godiva soap in the bathroom was a treat Armani had picked up in St.-Tropez. Everything was just so. Eric Clapton, gazing at the impeccable room, compared Armani with his rival for Hollywood’s affections: “Versace is all about sex and rock and roll—very raunchy. Armani is about harmony, harmony in tone and color and fabric—harmony in atmosphere.”
Armani himself circulated. Masked by his thin, watchful smile, he ensured that everyone had champagne, that nothing jarred. “I must tell you something grave,” Armani would say to me later. “In fashion, everything has been done. The only challenge now is new associations of the same elements—ties, stretch pants, the jackets. It’s the way they mix.” This instinct for catalytic elements explains, for instance, why Armani hired ex-princess Lee Radziwill as a “special events coordinator”: basically, her job is to attend Armani parties and look gauntly fabulous. She was there in Milan. And she looked gauntly fabulous.
Valerio Pinci, a former Armani model, recalled that “we once spent a full evening out at different clubs in Milan, twenty or thirty of us, getting the red-carpet treatment because we were with Armani. At 4:00 A.M. he brought us all back to his big house, woke up his servants, and made them prepare a sit- down meal, which they served wearing white gloves. Everyone was trashed, falling all over the place in an interesting chaos. And he sat there quietly, absolutely sober, observing us.”
“Clothes should transmit sensuality, not sexuality,” Armani told me the morning after the show. “Yesterday I was really worried because I didn’t want to display breasts underneath blouses or through transparent fabrics. There was a slight insinuation of breasts. [In fact, I saw at least three full-fledged breasts.] But I didn’t want people to say, ‘Breasts, breasts, beautiful breasts!’ I don’t want men to do a 360-degree turn when they see a woman in my clothes, I want men’s eyes to go like this—” Armani’s eyes darted shyly aside.
We sat in the living room of Armani’s apartment, upstairs from his office. The apartment welled with buttery light that soaked into the parchment white walls, the black doors and the black leopard statuary, the sixteen-foot ceilings. The living room had white raw-silk sofas, a bowl of wild white roses and freesia, a silver-topped walking stick reposing against the wall. Designed by Peter Marino, decorated by Armani, it is a cat person’s apartment (Armani has three Persians and a tabby), a safe house where nothing bad can happen. “A cat is discretion,” Armani will say. “A dog is tenderness.” He keeps his white Labradors at his country villa in Broni; when one gets on a footing to see them, one has penetrated Armani’s discretion to his humor, his tenderness.
Armani professes to love Milan, its “exclusive and private” hidden elegance, but aside from the red geraniums that float in window boxes high above this least elegant of Italian cities, Milan is hazy and dull. One suspects that the contrast between Milan’s concrete and Armani’s own exquisite niche on Via Borgonuovo is what pleases him. Armani likes contrast.
In his showpiece living room, for instance, Armani sat wearing blue jeans and a blue denim shirt over a white T-shirt, with a blue sweater draped over his shoulders. “I’m communicating simple and clean,” Armani said. “It’s almost like I’m coming out of the shower, that I’ve taken a big shower.” He smiled. “Clothes, really, are unimportant.” One recalls Truman Capote’s description of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “She was always well groomed, there was a consequential good taste in the plainness of her clothes, the blues and grays and lack of luster that made her, herself, shine so.”
Semiotician Marshall Blonsky writes in his forthcoming book, American Mythologies, that Armani reproved him for wearing a hard-shouldered Armani suit to their interview:
“ ‘I would have preferred,’ God said, ‘that you dress in a sweater, with pants in black cotton and a blue T-shirt.’ ”
‘But Signor Armani,’ I sort of cry, ‘That’s you. That’s what you’re wearing.’
‘No matter, that is you also.’ ”
“They label me the classic designer,” Armani said to me, “but if you look at my clothes, they break every classic rule. On a classic jacket the shoulders fit, the waist is marked, it hits the breasts—my jackets don’t do any of that.” Indeed, Armani’s jacket-based couture has seen at least three revolutions. Famously, he founded his line in 1974 with the unconstructed blazer—the sloping shoulders, the narrow lapels, the baggy pockets, and the loose-weave fabrics that, unconfined by interior linings, draped so sinuously on both men and women (and often stretched or ripped—the price of flexibility).
At the end of the seventies Armani lowered the gorge, widened the lapels, and extended and padded the shoulders to create the wedge-shaped power suit. In the mid-eighties he abandoned the power suit for the looser, roomier sack suit. But more than the changes, one noticed the thematic continuity: the ideals of understatement and a slouchy androgyny. Armani deconstructs jackets, de-creases pants, deaccessorizes jewelry, and deplores the hair-trigger flamboyance of the stereotypical Italian designer.
“Now,” Armani said, running a thoughtful hand over his suede shoes, “with the Berlin Wall down, it would be offensive to make clothes that are screaming with luxury, screaming with opulence.” His Black Label outfits still cost upwards of seventeen hundred dollars, but they look less assertively expensive. “I have taken things I did ten years ago and corrected them for today,” Armani continued. “Ten years ago if I’d done a kimono cardigan, I would have shown it with a geometric hat, a geometric piece of jewelry, to bring it overboard so people would pay attention. Now I almost want to go unnoticed—so for the woman’s jacket, my bread and butter, there’s a straight, thinner sleeve that caresses the arm and makes the woman feel she is being hugged. And the shoulder is back, but softer. The eighties shoulder was a woman’s manager. Now she doesn’t need to tell anybody what she is. She is.”
“More than any European designer,” Marshall Blonsky suggests, “Armani is a wild, savage semiotician. Through his clothes he’s unconsciously educating the people who wear them in the ideology that’s coming.”
“Life is a movie,” Armani has said, “and my clothes are the costumes.” While demonstrably untrue, this wish helps explain Armani’s and Hollywood’s mutual fascination. Armani’s clothes have decorated movies from American Gigolo to Batman, emblematizing sleek assurance, and in the last few months alone Armani jokes have enlivened both Hook and Father of the Bride. Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford were married in December in complementary Armani suits, and actors from Kevin Costner to Jodie Foster, as well as moguls including Mike Ovitz, Dawn Steele, and Sherry Lansing, regularly sport Armani. Women’s Wear Daily called him “the official outfitter of the 62nd Annual Academy Awards.”
“Wearing Armani in Hollywood makes no statement, no, no,” Donald Sutherland said in Milan. “It makes you look individual and terrific. And everyone in Hollywood wants to look as individual and terrific as possible. “ Without necessarily being individual and terrific.
Armani studies the way Lauren Hutton and Michelle Pfeiffer wear clothes (often his): “Lauren will wear a very important, expensive embroidered jacket on top of underwear and jeans. Michelle wears a gold lamé suit with no makeup and a pair of black glasses. It’s the contrast that consecrates the image.”
“Armani is very clever,” Eric Clapton mused in Milan. “He’s managed to sell American clothes of the thirties, forties, and fifties, that great Hollywood look, back to the Americans, who think they’re buying Italian.” Armani, in other words, sells an image of an image, a seductive allusion to a seductive illusion.
In his quest for the perfect sotto voce understatement, Armani dreads vulgarity like death. He will go to extraordinary lengths to frame his creations properly, so they—and he—can never be accused of crassness, of ill breeding. “My atmosphere is everything,” Armani said. “If you ask me to design a pillow, you can predict the color, the shape, the amount of puffiness. But because I have a line of thought doesn’t make me a monk. There should be frivolousness, but frivolousness in my style.
“Last night’s baby doll dresses would make you say, ‘Oh, that’s not Armani.’ But within my context, it is Armani. Another designer would have interpreted the baby doll with an aggressive print or an aggressive color, accessorized it with high heels, pearls, rhinestones, or put it on a glamorous girl like Claudia Schiffer or Naomi. But I do it in soft, see-through veils, with flat heels, on an androgynous model, so she looks like a little girl. I love to put masculine outfits on glamorous, made-up women, and then give masculine or androgynous-looking girls clothes that don’t belong to them, feminine clothes. The contrast is important, otherwise you get an Armani caricature.”
Armani contends against two familiar criticisms. One was well expressed by a silver-haired man I sat next to at an Armani fashion show at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. As the models strutted in the fall line, this observer, cloaked in a navy Brooks Brothers suit and black Lloyd and Haig shoes, groaned to his wife, “Oh no!...Awful! What’s that, for Chrissake? Shapeless.. .revolting. . .the drabbest clothing I’ve ever seen.” Boston has been a tough sell for Armani.
The suggestion is also made that Armani, who approves even the weight of the stationery in his branch offices, may be overfond of control. When Michael Jackson asked Armani to design the look for his Dangerous album and tour, Armani suggested a jazz singer idea, a retrofitted Cab Calloway concept that Jackson seemed delighted with—but Armani withdrew when he discovered he wouldn’t be in complete charge of Jackson’s image.
Gabriella Forte, Armani’s executive vice president, interpreter, and lovingly ferocious protector, sat with me in one of Armani’s pearl white offices and preemptively explained—I hadn’t asked— that these two charges are absurd. “Armani’s clothing system is not monotonous,” Forte said. “It is coherent. And he’s not a control freak. He’s a detail person. He feels the weight of being. If he sees an ugly flower in a restaurant, he’ll move it and then say, ‘Didn’t anyone see that flower mushing away there?’ When he’s walking in a park and the grass is too high, he’ll tell someone to cut the grass, or if the animals aren’t clean, he’ll say to someone, ‘Wash them.’ ”
Armani himself passed by during Forte’s explanation and, interested, sat down in a rigid and squeaky swivel chair. Looking pained that he couldn’t swivel smoothly—and his compelling neediness is such that Forte and I wanted desperately to solve his aesthetic crisis—he said, “Yes, it’s a question of respect. I have a house in the country, in the Po Valley, near where I was born. When I moved in, there were two old farmers who were taking care of the garden and the chicken coop and the rabbit hutches. The first thing I did was fix the chicken coop, removing all the dust and feathers and making it into a mini chicken hotel. The old people were in shock, thinking, ‘This new owner is weird.’ Now, though, they polish everything, they’re fundamentally worse than I am. And they do it with great pleasure, because they know that I care, that when I look at the animals it must be calm and soothing.”
Armani grew up a shy perfectionist in a lower-middle-class family in Piacenza, near Milan. “I think Giorgio was even a fussy baby,” one friend said. The middle of three children, he was the most frightened by the bombs of World War II. After the war, on Sunday afternoons he and his older brother would put on meticulously produced marionette shows at the church. Giorgio’s mother, Maria, made the puppets’ clothing, but Giorgio loved painting the faces and arranging the hair, designing the tickets. “When he was twenty, in Milan,” said his younger sister, Rosanna, a model at the time, “he would pay a lot of attention to the way I looked. In an affectionate way, he’d say, ‘You should have your hair up, you should wear a skirt instead of jeans, you’re wearing too much makeup.’ I didn’t listen then, but now…” She turned her palms up, her hands emerging from a burgundy Armani jacket.
After stints as a department-store buyer and a designer for Nino Cerruti, Armani was convinced by his friend and eventual business partner, Sergio Galeotti, to go solo. Armani showed his first menswear line in 1974 and his first women’s line the following year; by 1982 he was on the cover of Time.
The single defining event in Armani’s life since then was Galeotti’s death after a lingering illness in 1985. Galeotti was the company’s financial wizard, and he had, to an extraordinary extent, protected Armani from the business side of the business. Armani had to begin fresh: like a teenager, he had to learn to carry a wallet, a credit card. Predictions for the company’s collapse were widespread, but Armani and his protective circle of intimates, most of them women, showed unsuspected business acumen. The company continued to expand and maintained its astonishing retail margins of 55 to 67 percent. More important, Armani says, is that “since then, I became a human being. Because I understood that you die. I woke up to reality.”
“My eyes are very expressive, but my body shape is all wrong,” Armani said moodily. It was the last of our conversations, and he had slowly lowered his guard. “I usually read people through their body movements, it’s my work, but my body just doesn’t speak. My shoulders are too big, my face is too big, the calf muscles should be longer, and the thighs should be shorter—and then, fundamentally, there’s a certain insecurity I have. I would like to have the physique of Daniel Day-Lewis. He doesn’t have such a good body, but he’s very sensuous. Or Jeremy Irons, or Matthew Modine in Birdy—their bodies speak.”
Could you rid yourself of this physical insecurity?
“Yes, if I role-played. If I wore dark glasses and a blue suit, if I played the part of Giorgio Armani the creative entity, the man of success. But I don’t want to do that.” He paused. “I realize that people love me for my insecurities.” He thought some more, and his sad blue eyes glinted with humor. “Probably because I require them to.
“Physically I love loving better than being loved. I love loving someone else’s body, feeling someone else’s need. I’d rather caress someone else than be caressed.”
And through your clothes you caress strangers all over the world?
“Yes!” he said. “Exactly. Do you think they notice?”
Only a man so gifted and forlorn would have such success cloaking the world’s needs, dressing its lacks. It is possible and even pleasant to imagine a whole world designed by Armani. The grass would be green and trim, the animals clean; incense would burn in the hallways, people would stride about to dreamy pop music. All loneliness would be soothed, wrapped in the loose weaves of self-assurance. And no one would die except nobly, murmuring, like Chekhov, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had any champagne…” or crying out, like Goethe, “More light!”