The Great Fashion Designers

by Brenda Polan

  34 GIORGIO ARMANI (1934–)

  At the Milan menswear shows in February 2000, Bernard Arnault, the predatory head of the luxury goods conglomerate, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) was observed taking a front-row seat at the Armani show. Immediately, speculation was rife that Armani was about to join Dior, Givenchy and Lacroix in Arnault’s stable of top fashion labels. The denial came promptly. The company was, according to a terse press release, considering taking preliminary steps to study the feasibility of various different proposals it had received. Such proposals, the statement implied, had become almost tediously frequent over recent years. That was hardly surprising. Giorgio Armani Spa is the most profitable company in Italy, a position it had then held for two years running. Giorgio Armani was the country’s biggest taxpayer. ‘Not because I am the richest,’ he said. ‘I am just the most honest.’

  Fashion is, of course, big business in Italy, but business acumen, the kind that puts the flagship companies of other industries like car manufacturing and pasta production in the shade, is not that common. And Armani maintains its pre-eminence despite the fact that other fashion labels had pre-empted the big headlines. However, Giorgio Armani was sixty-five in 2000 and, while there’s doubtless an ascetic side to his character, he did not, he told Brenda Polan a month later, want to work forever. Yet Armani passed his seventieth birthday still in the driving seat and as he approached the next milestone of seventy-five, he showed no sign of sliding out from behind the wheel. This is reassuring for the millions of women and men who have adopted Armani’s cool, streamlined, modern-minded style as their own. Armani is committed to subtle change, to what he calls ‘a soft evolution’, at the heart of which is a consistent and rational view of the needs of a contemporary wardrobe. It is a utilitarian approach but far from bland; the Armani style is imbued with a refined sensuousness, expressed in the retrained luxury of the fabrics, in the sophisticated fluidity of the cut and in the perfection of details and accessories.

  Although the late Gianni Versace, generally perceived as Armani’s polar opposite in terms of taste, famously sniffed that a designer whose favourite colour was beige could hardly be expected to know much about sex appeal (this in response to a suggestion from Armani that Versace’s own designs might be considered vulgar), Armani’s clothes are sexy. It has to do not with direct display but with the way the soft, tactile fabrics and the easy, almost liquid cut make the wearer feel, feelings which are then reflected in the deportment: sensuous, relaxed, at ease.

  The man himself appears to be anything but those things. John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily called him ‘the monk of fashion,’ and he does have a reputation for a rather chilly reserve, but his biographer, Renata Molho, described the child and the man thus, ‘He was an observer, timid, introverted, and keenly aware of everything going on around him. He was also restless, never contented, always looking for something, whether a rare checkered shirt or a special texture in his relationships with others. These qualities are … fundamental to his complex character; he is immensely adaptable, yet he seems incapable of real satisfaction with what he achieves. He always thinks there must be something more.’

  And he does have a sharp sense of humour. He is, above all, intensely pragmatic. He told Brenda Polan, who interviewed him for the Financial Times in 2000:

  I never had a desire as a young man to design fashion. A series of coincidences led me on to a fashion path. Perhaps this starting point is something which already makes me different; I considered this a job like any other. I was never spoilt by the fashion atmosphere, by its preciousness. I never had the attitude, ‘I am a creative talent therefore this is what you have to wear.’ It was a job, a profession. I came from a department store, not an atelier. When I realised—and it was very much as a result of my contact with customers—there was room for me to do something different, that I could devise a different way of dressing, I realised this was going to be my life.

  His refusal to lay claim to any great creative destiny reminds you how very different the northern Italian temperament is to the southern. Historically, Lombardy is the home of bankers, merchant princes and industrialists. Armani was born in 1934 in Piacenza, to the south of Milan, one of three children of Maria and Ugo, an industrial manager who was imprisoned after the Second World War for his membership of the Fascist Party, a possibly disproportionate retribution that left its scars on his family. Giorgio enrolled to study medicine at the University of Milan but left in his third year to do his military service as a paramedic. However, on leaving the army he realised medicine was not for him. In 1957 he took a job in the advertising department of La Rinascente store and was soon promoted to assistant buyer. ‘I was responsible for making sure,’ he said, ‘that the clothes they were buying for the stores were getting the right response from the public.’

  In 1961 he was recruited by Nino Cerruti who had inherited the family textile company at age twenty and had expanded into clothing. Armani’s job, after a month’s training in the factory, was to design the menswear collection, Hitman. Instinctively he chose lighter fabrics than were common in tailoring and cooler colours. He discarded layers of internal structure, reduced shoulder pads, moved buttons and pockets and took the stiff formality out of the man’s suit, replacing it with something loose, relaxed, youthful. With the support of L’Uomo Vogue, launched in 1968, it was sensationally successful.

  In 1966 Armani met Sergio Galeotti, the ebullient Tuscan who was to become his partner in life as well as business (he died tragically young in 1985). In 1970 the two set up an independent design consultancy working for important labels in Italy, France and Spain. In 1975, just as Gigi Monti of Basile orchestrated the move of the fledgling Italian high-fashion ready-to-wear shows from provincial, inaccessible Florence to Milan, the flourishing industrial hub, they launched the Armani label with a collection for men and women for spring/summer 1976. The womenswear show featured Armani’s first menswear inspired jacket for women.

  ‘It was the time when French and English designers were beginning to come to Italy for their production,’ he told Polan in 2000. It was the beginning of fashion as a global industry, and Armani perceived that he could aspire to an international market:

  To make a mark I would have to do something different. That would not be so easy. And it was a time when fashion was all about flower power, very baroque and decorated. So I made a choice. Women were beginning to be more emancipated and liberated in their way of thinking; I had been used to designing men’s wear so I decided to bring into women’s wear that sort of practical, rational way of dressing that really did not exist for women, although in America a lot of women embraced that style.

  One thinks of Katharine Hepburn, of course. ‘Obviously,’ he continued with a humorous shrug of the shoulders, ‘it was necessary to sacrifice any desire to be “creative” but that is what I saw was needed.’

  But, of course, his whole approach was creatively fresh, a leap of imagination that was to capture the hearts of women seeking a way to look in the executive workplace. In 2007 he told his biographer, Renata Molho, that when he started out he ‘aspired to emulate … Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. “They modernised fashion, bringing it in line with the way people wanted to live nowadays. They allowed people to live differently through their clothing. They didn’t create apparel, they created a different society.” Armani’s great breakthrough in which he still takes pride (while making it clear that he resents being acknowledged for that alone) was his ‘deconstruction’ of the women’s jacket. He stripped out the interfacing and the heavy-duty padding, eliminated the body-sculpting darts and co-opted worsteds and tweeds from menswear. And, although he cuts a great skirt, more often than not he teamed his easy youthful jacket with the best trousers women had ever had a chance to step into.

  Armani and Galeotti built on their success to create a pyramid of labels which allow access to the Armani cachet at most levels of the market. ‘No, no, there was no strategy,’ he told Polan in 200
0:

  I am not a creative genius and I am not a marketing genius. I am not a miracle on the fashion scene. It became clear to me, after the establishment of the Giorgio Armani label that there was another market out there interested in this style which was younger and had not as much money so, since I was not studying fashion creation on a yacht, I recognised this and created Armani Jeans. But where to sell it? That’s how Emporio came about. Then I realised that the young wanted more than just a pair of jeans and a jacket—and that was because I would be in the shop in via Durini [in Milan] and they would come to me and give me advice. So it became a collection and the whole idea changed.

  Armani labels are found at every level of the designer market, including a couture collection, Privé, which he shows in Paris, a Junior range, underwear, swimwear, ski wear, golf clothes, spectacles, scarves, ties, shoes, accessories, watches and fragrance. The brand has stores at every level all over the world. Said Armani:

  I could have become much richer much quicker if I had decided to take advantage of my name by licensing. The decision not to has meant that every line is successful and there is no confusion, no overlapping. The identity is clear and controlled. We financed ourselves every step of the way; I have never had half a lira debt in my life. I don’t think this Cinderella story could happen now; I am happy it happened to me but the system has changed. Nowadays there are the big groups which decide who is going to be successful; the press, the industry, finance, it all works together to promote a certain designer. That is the limit of fashion today and the embarrassment.

  He deplored the triumph of manufactured image over honest product.

  For someone my age, it is an embarrassment; anyone starting out does not know any different. But I have always liked to fight; I have always fought against the system in a certain sense. If a certain system exists, even if it is in my interest to belong, I have never wanted to be part of it. Yes, I have always been a loner. Obviously, I have had a lot of support from the press but I have never really been part of an explosion of a huge celebration of my fashion and my style. If I have had problems it has been with the media. Perhaps these subtle changes in my style are not shocking enough. The press like to be shocked; they like to find something which gives them a shock every season. They like revolution, big explosions, not evolution. They just say: Armani is Armani and [he mimed spitting on his hands and swiping them together in a gesture of dismissiveness] wipe their hands. That’s not good for me.

  What, he said, he dislikes about the fashion media’s hunger for abrupt change is the way it ignores the customer. ‘What they all forget,’ he said, ‘is that we really only have one purpose: to make women and men look better. And anyway, after an explosion, there’s nothing left, only ashes. But then there’s another explosion, and more ashes.’

  This view overlooks the prolonged explosion of the late seventies and most of the eighties which was all about Armani, when everyone, from sleekly ambitious executives of both sexes to brand obsessed football fans, aspired to the label. In the 1980s the grown-up Armani look was what women finally making their way in the workplace needed. Interviewed by Brenda Polan in 1983 for The Guardian, Armani said:

  My clothes are for women who have money. They are not for a teenager who expects novelty; she could not afford them and the quality would be wasted on her since she does not wish to keep anything long. Too much of fashion is aimed at her so that mature women start to think that, since that is all there is, they must wear that too. I hate most of all the idea of women trying to look like children, trying to be a baby doll. So women like to look younger, that is natural but the general trend is for women to try to look like children and that is unnatural.

  Armani felt unfairly ignored in the 1990s and 2000s, although the major retrospective of his work mounted by the Guggenheim in New York in 2000 and shown in Bilbao, Spain, and Berlin, London and Rome reminded people of his importance. He remained, in 2009, in control of his many companies.

  Further reading: The biography by Renata Molho and Antony Shugaar Being Armani: A Biography (2007) is up to date; the catalogue Giorgio Armani, from the Guggenheim exhibition of 2000, is brilliantly illustrated and the text is good.

  PART 5

  1980s

  Introduction

  If the 1980s is the decade of excess, when greed was good and glamour was very much the order of the day—in Ronald Reagan’s White House and the London of Diana, Princess of Wales—then fashion had the designers to dress it. This was the time of high-glam Dynasty dressing, Joan Collins in Bruce Oldfield, Nancy Reagan in Oscar de la Renta, Princess Diana in the Emanuels. It was also the decade of the first of the great reinventions; Karl Lagerfeld took Coco Chanel’s legacy, shook it up hard and put it back together mischievously exaggerated and in slightly the wrong order.

  By the start of the 1980s Paris had regained much of the initiative in world fashion but it was no longer possible for one national industry to be dominant. The women’s movement was gaining momentum, and high-earning women in all kinds of professions were becoming consumers of fashion. They did not, however, all want to consume the same kind of fashion. The decade’s archetype is doubtless the high-flying executive ‘dressed for success’. Derogatively known as the ‘executive tart’ or ‘boardroom bitch’, she was suited and stilettoed, broad-shouldered, tight-skirted, plunge-necklined, decked in gold buttons, buckles, bangles and chains and cast as the predatory villain in several contemporary movies. In Paris, Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Azzedine Alaia and, when in the mood, Jean Paul Gaultier did the parody version. In Italy, Giorgio Armani and the young Gianni Versace and in America, Halston, Geoffrey Beene, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan and, when in the mood, Ralph Lauren did the well-bred, seriously grown-up version. In Britain, minimalist designers like Paul Smith and Margaret Howell kept pace with classics featuring, as Smith always puts it, ‘a twist’.

  But there were many alternative ways to dress. At the beginning of the decade London was experiencing a creative renaissance with a large number of exciting young designers including Vivienne Westwood, Jean Muir, Zandra Rhodes, Katharine Hamnett, Body Map, Betty Jackson, Sheridan Barnett, Sheilagh Brown, Wendy Dagworthy, Jasper Conran and John Galliano. They had varied styles ranging from Big Look to body-con, androgynous to lyrical. The Antwerp Six—Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter van Beirendonck, Dries van Noten, Dirk van Saene. Ann Demeulemeester and Marina Yee—presented their collections in London in 1985, adding to the prevailing atmosphere of innovation. In Italy Gianni Versace found his signature style, an upfront eroticism that offended feminists and delighted many others. The new kids on the block were Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana who also purveyed a corseted and clichéd sex appeal.

  Almost as a counterbalance to all the exhibitionistic sensuality heating up the catwalks, the most remarkable moment of the 1980s came at the beginning when the Japanese designers, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, first showed in Paris. In 1981 both separately sent out an army of grim-faced models, hair shorn, faces painted white or with smeared make-up, wearing clothes that were to change fashion forever. It made high heels, cartoon glamour and impeccable make-up look dated. Both designers eschewed occidental ideas of female beauty in favour of a more cerebral approach which used the body as an armature for extraordinary shapes sculpted in fabric. It provoked all fashion’s observers and many of its practitioners to reassess their subject.

  35 REI KAWAKUBO (1942–)

  Of the Japanese designers who made a worldwide impact in the 1970s and 1980s, Rei Kawakubo has perhaps strayed furthest from the pure, strict vision of the first collections she brought to Paris in 1981. It is possible that nothing so sensational had happened in fashion in Paris since Christian Dior had unveiled his New Look and the press, in shock, did running mental readjustments on their senses of proportion, propriety and aesthetics. In 1947 they re-embraced their inner fertility goddess; in 1981 they were forced to reassess the provenance of female sensuality and sexual attraction. Tr
aditional Western fashion has generally (but not exclusively) situated them in the body. Rei Kawakubo insisted that they were, in fact, located in the brain. She told Nicholas Coleridge in 1988, ‘The goal for all women should be to make her own living and to support herself, to be self-sufficient. That is the philosophy of her clothes. They are working for modern women, women who do not need to assure their happiness by looking sexy to men, by emphasising their figures, but who attract them with their minds.’ This dream of anonymous self-sufficiency had, said Kawakubo, been her beacon since childhood.

  Small and self-effacingly modest, Kawakubo is intensely work-focused, perhaps even slightly masochistic in her passion for doing things the hard way. ‘It’s boring if things are accomplished too easily, right?’ she insisted to Leonard Koren in 1984. ‘When I work I think about the excitement of achievement after hard effort and pain.’ In terms of her approach, Deyan Sudjic identifies her as a modernist (she admires Le Corbusier) but Harold Koda pointed out in his text for the 1987 Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) exhibition, Three Women, that Japan’s 1,000 year-old philosophy of aesthetics encompasses irregularity, imperfection and asymmetry as reminders of the fragility and transience of beauty. And Kawakubo was a student of philosophy. It is possible to identify postmodernism in her approach, too, in that she frequently deconstructs—literally and conceptually—and questions the clichés and familiar elements of Western and oriental clothing and makes us think. Not that she has any didactic purpose; she is on an exploration of her own which is to do with the relationship of clothes to the body and the body to clothes, of how sexuality is expressed or not in clothes and how something entirely new may be made within the challenging limits of what it is possible to make and wear.