Suiting Up For Easy Street

By JAY COCKS

Giorgio Armani defines the new shape of style

Just the name . . . the name alone . . . the very mention of the name sends off sparks and sets up a clamor like a French fire drill. "Giorgio Armani! Except for white truffles, pasta and opera, the Italians can't be credited with anything!"

Pierre Berge, partner and protector of Yves Saint Laurent, peeks over the battlements at the enemy force below and, as if panicking, fires off a salvo before he has found his aim. "Give me one piece of clothing, one fashion statement that Armani has made that has truly influenced the world."

Alors, Pierre. The unstructured jacket. An easeful elegance without stricture. Tailoring of a kind thought possible only when done by hand. The layering of fabrics by pattern, texture and color so that clothing takes on for a second the quiet shimmer of a 17th century Japanese print. Surprising combinations of garments--leather pants as part of a suit, a long jacket over foreshortened slacks, a vest worn over a coat--that scramble cliches and conventions into a new and effortless redefinition of style. A functional celebration of fabric. A reshaping of traditional geometry with witty contours, sudden symmetries and startling vectors. A new sort of freedom in clothes. An ease, the Armani ease. And that, as we say in French, is just for les openers.

The temperament is understandable. Berge has a legend to burnish and a business to run. He sounds like a man who knows strong competition when he sees it taking a stroll down the boulevard, decked out, more than likely, in some splendiferous Armani assemblage. The fact is, Saint Laurent remains the pale eminence of high fashion, in part because of his undisputed creative coups over the years, in part because of his huge volume of business and the relentless mythologizing of the fashion press. The fact is also that while Saint Laurent's contributions have been generative and historic, he has often appeared to be treading water (sparkling mineral, no doubt). Armani, meantime, has made a huge splash reshaping and restructuring the way people dress--not only the people who wear Armani designs but those who wear the myriad clothes influenced by him and those whose very ideas about clothing are colored, in some cases unconsciously, by the Armani attitude.

This all may not be a matter of great moment. But it is very much a matter of the moment, and what may now seem like a temporal fancy can become, decades hence, a tactile key into the past. Clothes are the fabric of history, the texture of time. And this time, right now, belongs to Armani.

He has so thoroughly captured and made over this little pocket of the present that when he decided not to show his new fall women's line during the semiannual glitz and giddiness known loosely as the Milan collections, he incurred the wrath of the press but walked off with the honors anyway. "Armani is the king of the Italian Alps," says Geraldine Stutz, president of the modish New York City department store Henri Bendel. The assorted princesses, princelings and pretenders scattered about the feudal fashion kingdom of Milan sent their models gadding down runways in all the latest but did not succeed in dislodging the king. Gianni Versace, Armani's keenest competitor, took up the historical theme with a vengeance. He weighed in quite literally with some rarefied leather and chain-mail combos that looked like rough-trade rigging that Prince Valiant might have worn to go cruising. Mariuccia Mandelli, who designs for Krizia, sent finlike flounces cascading all over suits and dresses--something, perhaps, for the spouse of Jaws' elasmobranch villain to slip into for the Oscars. There were the usual parades of plushy furs by Fendi and dazzling knitwear by Missoni, but even Gianfranco Ferre, who made the week's best showing with a severely drafted, almost architectural collection, took honors by default.

"Fashion shows have become too much show business and too little fashion business," says Armani, 47, who preferred to present his collection to small groups of buyers. News that drifted out from these private sessions--plus the resplendent showing of a line of suedes and leathers in high-noon colors that Armani designed for Mario Valentino--was sufficient proof that he was still secure atop Stutz's Alps. His absence from the collections--the very term weighty with a self-seriousness completely at variance with Armani's stylings--rebounded loudly and probably widely, at least to Paris, where the French are strutting their stuff this week. Hard pressed by Armani and his Milanese colleagues in the American market (as much as 70% of the European clothes I. Magnin and Bergdorf Goodman now merchandise are Italian, according to one fashion consultant), the French fashion industry is retaliating with standard operational disdain. "I think Italian designers are certainly worth encouraging," sniffs the mighty Givenchy. "I've never been into Armani's boutique here, or that of any other Italian designer," claims Sonia Rykiel, Parisian designer of knits that seem to slink under their own power. "The French have all the Italian skills and madness and creativity. Quite honestly, I can't name you a really crazy Italian designer."

So much the better. The French idea of folie, which encourages a designer like Daniel Hechter to talk about "ecological colors" and take pride in once having worked "28 different shades into one man's outfit" may be the thing that is now cramping their style. Certainly folie is absent from Armani's fall women's collection, which is previewed exclusively on these pages. Armani's clothes show wit instead of frivolity, refinement of detail instead of great experimental expanses, what Grace Mirabella, editor of Vogue, calls "style without excessive design." Says American Designer Bill Blass: "He has an extremely soigne approach to the female form. Armani has a sureness. He is a genius for his time."

Certainly, his gift has never before seemed so sure, his humor so high, his sophistication so unassuming yet so emphatic and eclectic. Highlights: evening jackets of gold lame and a caped raincoat reworked from an Australian shepherd's field garment; hooded sweatshirts in flyweight suede so brightly colored they are nicknamed "the jelly beans"; felt hats that look like Philip Marlowe fedoras blocked by the College of Cardinals; gaucho-style pants gathered at mid-calf or just below the knee; an elongated jacket, of the customary faultless tailoring, that is a zoot-suiter's vision of respectability. And the fabrics: striped and patterned wool velvet with crepons of silk and wool against quilted padded linen, or satined cotton lined with silk set over printed velvet. Each outfit is a little essay in boulevard sensuality, with an average high-end price tag of $1,300 that could drive anybody around the block.

Putting on Armani is, indeed, suiting up for Easy Street. The quality does not fall off with the price in his less expensive lines, but the cheapest Armani may still bust many budgets. His women's clothes are strictly top of the line; a 30% less expensive collection, called Mani, is available only in Europe and New York. His men's wear ranges from what Armani calls couture (although the clothes are made 70% by machine) through ready-to-wear, which costs 40% less and is manufactured solely for America, to couture sportswear made in Italy and less costly items that are partly made in Hong Kong. But for the moment, one may deal with these clothes not as commodities but as wish fulfillments; dreams like this are not too rich for anyone's blood. The reveries that the clothes conjure up may be, to everyone's surprise, a lot more realistic than the price tag.

Armani's clothes--whether a man's nubby tweed jacket with a back flap like a game warden's or a woman's gray suede greatcoat cut with playful severity--are not meant to be like those magic cloaks that, once donned, whisk the wearer off into fairy-tale deliriums. They are clothes for the exalted everyday, not intended to suggest a masquerade. This leads some, like Elio Fiorucci, guiding light of the trendy boutiques that bear his name, to suggest that "Armani's clothes for women are overserious and not for the many women who like to have fun." The fun that is there, however, is usually sly and (like the military wrist warmers hidden inside the cuffs of his oversize sweaters) often functional as well.

Armani means his clothes to be worn in different combinations for different effects. There is no set Armani mood, just as there is no consistent Armani image or typical Armani customer. "I don't have in mind either a tall person or a short person, ugly or beautiful, jet set or middle class," Armani says. "I aim at a client who dresses from individual choice, not imposed fashion, and not simply because something was designed by Armani." Snaps Berge: "I'm in the fashion business, and even I can't tell you what an Armani man or woman is." That is just the point. The fact that it got past Berge so easily may indicate that the Saint Laurent enterprise has lost its sure touch with a significant--and significantly younger--portion of the market, newly moneyed and sartorially independent, who do not want "a look."

If there is a consistency in Armani, it is one of adventurousness and quality. If there is a trademark--besides those winged initials that work their way onto the backs of his jeans, the loops of his leather pants and entirely too many other places--it is the tailoring. This means not only the standard of craftsmanship but, more generally, the look, shape and fall of a garment. English Designer Bruce Oldfield maintains, "Men's wear hasn't looked back since Armani dropped the lapels and made the softer tailored look." Says another English designer, David Emanuel, who with his wife Elizabeth whipped up the Princess of Wales' wedding dress: "I feel good when I put on an Armani jacket because the cut and balance are right. So easy, stylish, uncluttered. His distinguishing mark is clearly his tailoring." Adds the innovative American designer Norma Kamali, "I don't know a lot about Armani. But when I say to a guy he looks great, 99% of the time it's Armani he turns out to be wearing."

Armani, who reversed the usual career pattern by designing for men before making women's clothes, brought not only his fine eye for fabric but his scrupulous tailoring to the women's line. "My first jackets for women," he confesses, "were in fact men's jackets in women's sizes." Says Stutz: "Taking that snappy, pinched-in-the-right-place Italian men's wear look and translating it into women's clothes was Armani's special contribution. No one had ever done that before."

Many of Armani's things for women are too unusual and finely detailed--and thus too expensive--to knock off, but his jackets have been endlessly copied. "You can copy the look," cautions Dawn Mello, executive vice president of Bergdorf Goodman, "but you can never copy the fit." Indeed, Mello's description of wearing an Armani suit goes past simple enthusiasm or even shrewd salesmanship; it sounds like a recollection of a heavy first date. "Armani really put women in suits," she says. "He emancipated them, in a way. A man expects his suits to be very well made, to move easily when he walks Armani tailored that suit for women, then took it a step further. She can stand tall or keep her hands in her pockets, and the jacket will fit. The way the armholes fit-just right. The waistband sits properly. The skirt pleats are deep. A woman can move easily. His suits have a stride."

Armani works hard on details to make this man-tailoring feminine, and has no patience with notions of unisex dressing ("I say, 'Vive la difference,'don't mix the sexes"). Indeed, his women's clothes are sensual without being overtly sexual, just as his men's wear maintains a certain roughed-up panache, whether it is meant to be dressy or sporty. He has also been warring against what he calls "suit slavery," pushing toward a time "when you make your own eclectic and very subjective definition of style. A suit may now be a jacket with a pair of subtly contrasting sports trousers worn with a printed shirt and a zip-front vest. There should be no dictates, no rules."

This is the spirit that animated Armani back in 1975, when he was getting his first small collection together. The '60s had passed but left their strange sartorial legacy: hippie nonchalance on the one hand, and, on the other, dressy clothes that tried to press people into patterns that they would put on their denims to break. This often meant endless variations on the Cardin suit, with its racetrack contours and crotch-cleaving pants that made any man, in profile, look like a bisected hourglass. For women, this meant extravagant and restrictive couture. Armani sensed that what was needed in clothes was something that looked "a little used, not absolutely perfect."

He was trying, really, to get elegance back into clothing without sacrificing ease. He wanted to find a way of dressing up that looked like dressing down: men's jackets that looked as if they had just been resurrected from a steamer trunk, women's suits that could have been borrowed from men but felt as if they had been cut to order, skirts and blouses that could seem at first randomly pulled from the closet but that, once together, worked a very particular and sudden magic. Legend has it that Fred Astaire would break in a new suit by throwing it against a wall until it yielded up a spontaneous modification of its original cut. Armani wanted the modification without the wall, a notion that could easily have been lost in the translation from sketch to hanger.

The translation, in this case, was all in the tailoring: the moving of buttons and dropping of lapels, the sloping of shoulders and strategic modification of inner structure by following the Savile Row technique of not gluing the lining to the underside of the fabric. The result, an epiphany of choreographed rumple, was like cutting the buckles and taking the stuffing from a straitjacket. Citizens out for a stroll down a sunny American boulevard, or cabbing to a cocktail party, or even (gasp!) commuting to their office, looked like first-class cruise passengers who had just unpacked for a walk around the deck. The look was liberating for some; for others, it resembled the prize exhibit in a dry cleaners' museum of horrors. Recalls Fred Pressman, president of Barney's New York, the forward-looking store that was Armani's first Stateside champion: "Manufacturers said I was trying to ruin the industry, promoting wrinkles. They didn't see the collection in terms of lifestyle, only as some kind of fashion statement, or misstatement. They couldn't understand why people would want things that wrinkled like that or draped like that."

All that seems to have been cleared up nicely, thanks. In 1976, the year Pressman was instrumental in introducing Armani to America, the combined sales of the men's and women's lines was $90,000. This year the ante will be a bit higher: $14 million, which accounts for only about 10% of Armani's worldwide revenue. That figure, an estimated $135 million, is a 60% increase over '81 sales.

The prospects for such a success were by no means clear twelve years ago, when Armani had to be cajoled away from his steady $40,000-a-year job designing men's wear for Nino Cerruti. It took the considerable persuasive powers of Sergio Galeotti, then 25 and a draftsman in a leading Milan architectural firm, to lure Armani from the kind of early middle-aged complacency he was slipping into. Armani, the second of three children of a transport-company manager in Piacenza, 40 miles southeast of Milan, grew up during World War II and remembers waking up screaming from nightmares about air raids. A childhood like that requires a heavy investment in security, which his parents Ugo and Maria did their best to provide.

Giorgio's grandfather Lodovico had a shop in Piacenza where, his grandson recalls, "he made wigs in the 19th century style, many for the local theater. He took me backstage with him. I was fascinated." Giorgio's parents diverted him from dreams of the lively arts and into medical school, which he endured for three years before surrendering to the inevitable military service and a three-year hitch as a medical assistant. Back in civvies in 1954, he took a job, "almost by accident," with La Rinascente, one of Italy's largest department-store chains. He helped put together a series of ambitious window displays "showing quality products from countries the ordinary Italian couldn't visit--Japan, India, the United States." They turned out to be products the ordinary Rinascente customer could not afford either, and Armani found himself transferred to the office of Fashion and Style, where, as he says, "employees were sent who had nothing to do."

There, however, he found plenty to do. "I began to understand about fabrics and the importance of rapport with the public," he says. "It's one thing to design clothes, but it's something else again to hang around the salesrooms watching the public react to them." After seven years in Fashion and Style, he was steered by a Rinascente manager to an interview with Textile Magnate Cerruti, who was hunting for an assistant in the new fashion line he was adding to the family business.

"You look per bene [respectable]," Cerruti said. "You will do." Then he tossed a pile of materials across the desk and asked Armani to choose what he liked. "Luckily," Armani says, "I chose what he liked. I got the job." Later Cerruti disclaimed credit for discovering Armani. "Discovering a man like Armani is impossible, because he discovered himself," Cerruti insisted. "He had a natural talent, and he is self-taught. He would have stood out from the crowd in any case. Men like Armani are so rare that when one emerges even the blind are aware of it."

For a little on-the-job training, Cerruti sent Armani off to spend a month in a factory, where, Armani recalls, "I fell in love with textiles and began to understand the work behind each yard of fabric. That's why today, when I see anyone throwing away a sample of cloth, it's like cutting off my hand." He stayed with Cerruti and nourished until 1970; then, buttressed by Galeotti's perfervid reassurances, he decided to make his move as an independent designer.

At first, he called himself a consultant and hired out his designing skills to such manufacturers as Ungaro, Zegna and Sicons. Armani kept busy at the drawing board, while Galeotti took care of business. By mid-decade, Armani had begun to attract local attention and a bit of international interest. Fred Pressman of Barney's recalls working with Armani in "an office no bigger than 14 by 14," crowded with one huge table and a few cane chairs used for everything from long business conferences to quick lunches. Bergdorf's Mello remembers "buying a collection of Armani's under a bare light bulb in a tiny hotel room. We could hardly see the colors, so he took the lamp shade off." In 1975, when the Giorgio Armani Co. was founded, it had a working capital of $10,000 and one receptionist, a student whom, Galeotti recalls, "we could pay so little we had to let her study on the job."

The receptionist remains--now promoted to the sales department--but the capital has grown apace with the headquarters, today located on the first floor of a 17th century palazzo in the heart of Milan. Frescoes cover the walls and ceiling of Armani's office, from which mythological characters gaze impassively at the modern furniture (including a couple of nifty long draftsman's desks designed by Armani), models, staff and assorted items of evolving wardrobe. Armani has positioned paneling and mirrors around the room so that the frescoes can claim his attention only from above. "In Florence, you would look up there," he says but adds, gesturing toward his paneling, "in Milan you look this way." The modernity of Milan seems to be in the very weave of his clothes. He speaks of the city in a way that might also describe his designs. "Milan is not apparently elegant," he says, "but you must seek it out. Its elegance is more subtle than other cities. You can find it in courtyards, in certain details, in the interiors of certain houses. True elegance is that which is most subtle and hidden."

For a grand master of surreptitious sophistication who is portrayed in the Italian press as brooding, moody, uncommunicative and withdrawn--a Heathcliff with Magic Markers--Armani sets a fast pace and a high level of good humor and good will with his 26 employees. A trim, quick figure of medium height, with cobalt eyes, he is all compacted energy, like a jack just popping from his box, as he shows up for work around 9. He may begin his twelve-hour day by doing sketches, while his staff sorts out a regimen that, typically, has no rigid schedules or fixed appointments. Buyers who come to the showroom to order a new line are treated, as one of them puts it, "like a guest in Armani's home. Someone offers you a simple cup of coffee. You're not blitzed with champagne, like the other fashion houses. There's no row of booze. It's so understated." Armani may come in to say hello or to work over a fine point. "Almost every buyer is a frustrated designer," he sighs. "They want to change my designs. Again and again, I have to tell them there is room here for only one designer . . . although sometimes I see their point, and we compromise."

Beginning usually with a sketch and a bolt of fabric, Armani will work out each of the 500 pieces he designs for his collections, most of which he will offer to buyers in a choice of three colors or fabric combinations. Occasionally, he will wrangle with Galeotti over the practicality of a design ("He will insist I've gone too far, that something is just not salable"), and often he sounds out staff members, whom he calls "my family." But all the designs, even his commissioned uniforms for the Italian Air Force, are Armani's. Unlike some big-name designers, he has no subordinates producing sketches that go out under his signature.

Armani has a realist's interest in the work of other designers, and a respect for Saint Laurent that approaches reverence. "He has given so much to the world of fashion, done so much to make women more beautiful," Armani says. "Saint Laurent broke with a certain 'chic' look of the past, which had become redundant, to produce something more youthful, more lively, more modern." Armani is also catholic enough to admire the giddiness of Kenzo, the classicism of Blass, the eccentricity of Karl Lagerfeld and the sidelong inspiration of Kamali.

He may respect both the past and the competition, but Armani has little patience with the fussiness and pretension that occur at the higher altitudes of the fashion business. He gave up going to a favorite restaurant because the owner, with Italianate reverence, insisted on calling him maestro, and he treats the fine art of fashion with fitting insouciance. "My ideas may come from unimportant things," he says with a shrug. "From a book, a film, from talking to my staff or from watching how people behave and live. I cannot allow myself the luxury of waiting for 'the moment of inspiration.' I design clothes that can be produced at a certain cost, that can be sold and can be worn. The beginning of a new collection is a drama. But eventually, without being theatrical, without drinking or smoking or listening to background music, I just begin to design on a sheet of white paper."

Armani's cunning blends of invention and convention are seemingly offhand but ultimately tough to miss. The reason is that he has been instrumental not only in working out what people want to wear but in changing their attitudes about it. His clothes--even the ones with those damn airborne initials--are a kind of congenial tutorial in the applied science of emphatic understatement. He has educated the eye and eased the conscience by giving a new grace to informality. There may be nothing democratic about high fashion (consider those price tags), but Armani's design ideas suggest not only shapes to be copied but attitudes to be shared.

Although fashion is ephemeral, style is more influential, and surely more lasting. Style has to do with assumptions, even more than attitudes, and much of what Armani has contributed to contemporary design assumes, then conveys, a common, casual sensory enjoyment of clothing. Not as a statement, not as a sign language or a power trip or a status squelch or any of the other miscellany from the pop-shrink handbook; just as a simple and sustaining pleasure all unto itself.

In order to spread the pleasure around--and, not incidentally, to keep the balance sheets burgeoning--Armani is opening a string of shops called Emporiums, which will sell a full line of clothing significantly less expensive than his ready-to-wear. "The kids wouldn't buy an item only because it had the Armani label," Galeotti explains. "We had to meet their demands--and their price range." Four Emporiums are already open; by September, there will be nearly 50 others all over Italy. And only, for the time being, in Italy. Prices can be kept down because the items are produced in quantity and locally: this fall, an Armani Emporium blouse may go for $35, a skirt may range from $40 to $65, a man's leather jacket from $250 to $300. There have been plenty of designer boutiques--most notably Saint Laurent's Rive Gauche--but never any that set out to sell a full designer line at such reduced prices, without a precipitous decrease in quality. One would be hard put to tell the difference, in fact, between a leather jacket from the Emporium and one from the couture line, without resort to the price tag; an X ray would come in handy too.

The idea of his label achieving such wide circulation might reduce Armani stock in the snob market, but that would be fine with him. His clothes, from the beginning, have mocked that kind of lofty social stratification; they have always been meant, in every sense of the word, to be loose. They should be an ideal within easy reach. It is a goal that Armani, alone among great designers, has not only appreciated but implemented. One dream fits all.

--By Jay Cocks. Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York and Wilton Wynn/Milan

With reporting by Georgia Harbison, Wilton Wynn

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