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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