Long Live the King : Yes, he’s been away for a while, but he hasn’t been forgotten. Giorgio Armani--Mr. Armani--shows Hollywood who came first.
Giorgio Armani sits in a white wooden folding chair inside a sound stage at Fox studios. It might as well be a director’s chair, the way he controls the fitting session in progress.
One model is too short, he tells his aides in Italian. Another is too bosomy. A frowning, brainy-looking model may be unconventional, “but I like her,” Armani says. Across the room, a brunette twirls on the fitting platform revealing extraordinarily beautiful legs to match an extraordinarily beautiful face. “Bella, bella,” he says, and everyone around relaxes.
Is perfection too much to ask for? Not if you’re Mr. Armani, as he is respectfully called. And not when the audience for your fashion show is le tout Hollywood, as it was at Wednesday night’s Fire & Ice Ball, a benefit for the Women’s Cancer Research Clinic at UCLA.
Dressed in his uniform of navy corduroy trousers, a long-sleeved T and brown bucks, Armani--the ball’s honorary chairman--issues a stream of directives in preparation for the event. “Take out the shoulder pads.” “Try a lower heel.” He’s unhappy with the volume created by a blouse over a gathered skirt. The volume is pumped down.
Armani’s last official appearance in Los Angeles was eight years ago at a dinner and show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, “when I was doing more masculine styles,” he says. As if anyone could forget.
Indeed, to wear Armani in the ‘80s was an exercise in restraint that changed the way men and women in Hollywood would dress forever. Understatement and the luxury of impeccable tailoring told the world you’d arrived in a more modern, though not necessarily less costly, style than sequins and rhinestones.
But since he’s been away, challengers for the Hollywood-status-symbol crown have appeared. Such designers as Richard Tyler and Jil Sander have won fans with their distinctive versions of the tailored suit. And insiders say Calvin Klein has already made overtures to actresses who might attend the Academy Awards next year--a ceremony once practically monopolized by Armani.
By taking center stage in a splashy, high-profile event like the Fire & Ice Ball, Armani is, in effect, reminding Hollywood who came first--and ensuring that his reign as an important designer continues into the ‘90s. The trade publication Women’s Wear Daily recently anointed him “the world’s most successful designer,” but how potent is Armani’s message now? Even he acknowledges the realities of the way women dress today. And it’s not always in a $2,000 Armani suit.
“Women mix different perfume,” he says philosophically. And likewise, the impulse in the ‘90s is to shed the designer uniformity of the ‘80s. Armani is attuned to the impulses of fashion--for both creative reasons and financial ones.
After the death of business partner Sergio Galleotti in 1985, Armani took over the reins of the company’s business affairs.
It was a mistake, he says in retrospect, to price his A/X line so high initially, since the point is to offer affordable Armani basics. By increasing volume, he’s been able to lower the prices (jeans, once $75, now start at $45).
And although he is aghast at the revival of this season’s obsession with fashion from the ‘40s (he calls retro “another word for a lack of ideas”), Armani is sensitive to the increasing desire by women to look, well, womanly again. He responded with a spring collection that was acclaimed for its femininity--high heels, a bit of exposed tummy, the suggestion of a ruffle.
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Good reviews were overshadowed, however, by a corruption scandal that swept through the creme de la creme of the Italian fashion world during the October shows in Milan. Government officials questioned Versace, Krizia, Missoni and Armani, among others, to determine if bribes had been paid to reduce tax payments. (No fines have been levied again Armani.)
“If something like that would have happened in Paris, no one would have heard a word about it,” Armani says. “But in Italy, everyone has to talk, talk, talk. Sensationalize it.” He reaches for an Italian newspaper and shows an article that blames jealousy and envy for the sensational media coverage of the inquiries, which have not been limited to the fashion industry.
“Italy needs to recover from this. It is not an easy time. But we need to go on,” he says with a gravity that hints at why director Robert Altman excluded Armani from his fashion farce, “Ready to Wear (Pret-a-Porter).”
“He said I was too serious,” says the designer, looking quite pleased. And he is serious, so serious about work, for example, that he works through sickness, hunger, exhaustion.
“During the last 10 years I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of energy increasing the size of the business. And as a result,” he says, “I’ve neglected some of my dreams.”
Armani is anxious to design a line of home furnishings, for example. And he recently designed costumes for an opera by Mozart. “I would love to do a musical,” he says. Or, even better, a film about fashion that would depict the struggle for creative success.
Just walking onto the Fox sound stage was, he says, a very moving experience. Not the sets so much, but the “big, empty space” of the sound stage, where “you could create anything.”
Armani’s creation is a replica of his fashion theater in Milan--from the plexiglass runway lit from below to the quilted white bleacher seats.
The models’ hair, though, is hopelessly indigenous--the sort of surfer-girl-meets-love-child coiffure that L.A. women are so loath to give up.
“I prefer short hair,” says Armani, explaining that he’d planned to have the long-haired models wear their locks pulled up. “But here, looking at these young girls with their hair long and loose, I want them to feel natural.”
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Armani, who is 60, says maturity has helped him relax his exacting standards. “I look at things in a more tender way now than I used to,” he says. The fittings are a case in point. “The models want to work with you, to give you what you want. . . . It can be very humiliating for a girl to be told something is wrong with her. It’s not her, it’s just that the clothes are not working on her.”
Armani still takes pride in directing the fittings (“most designers don’t”) and in the general calm that pervades an Armani show. “There is no time to waste on hysteria,” he says, then allows that hysteria can be useful, even necessary, when it is critical that something be done in a very specific way.
One senses that Armani gets what he wants, without resorting to temper tantrums, by the force of his convictions. He refuses, for example, to use super-models in his shows or ad campaigns.
“There have always been stars. Like Suzy Parker,” he says. “But not like we see today.” Armani likes pretty “girls” who don’t overpower the clothes--which, of course, are the real stars. He dislikes vulgarity, nudity and enormous displays of cleavage. “It’s too much,” he says, shaking his head.
Much better, in Armani’s view, for a woman to be mysterious. Such as? “Michelle Pfeiffer and Uma Thurman.”
The last fitting complete, Armani breaks for lunch with Lee Radziwill, Armani’s director of public affairs. He’s anxious to try the food at a place he’s never visited--the restaurant at Emporio Armani.
