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Armani works hard on details to make this man-tailoring feminine, and has no patience with notions of unisex dressing ("I say, 'Vive la différence,'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."