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 Bergé, 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 clichés 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. Bergé 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.