Armani, who reversed the usual career pattern by designing for men before making women’s clothes, brought not only his fine eye for fabric but his scrupulous tailoring to the women’s line. “My first jackets for women,” he confesses, “were in fact men’s jackets in women’s sizes.” Says Stutz: “Taking that snappy, pinched-in-the-right-place Italian men’s wear look and translating it into women’s clothes was Armani’s special contribution. No one had ever done that before.”
Many of Armani’s things for women are too unusual and finely detailed—and thus too expensive—to knock off, but his jackets have been endlessly copied. “You can copy the look,” cautions Dawn Mello, executive vice president of Bergdorf Goodman, “but you can never copy the fit.” Indeed, Mello’s description of wearing an Armani suit goes past simple enthusiasm or even shrewd salesmanship; it sounds like a recollection of a heavy first date. “Armani really put women in suits,” she says. “He emancipated them, in a way. A man expects his suits to be very well made, to move easily when he walks Armani tailored that suit for women, then took it a step further. She can stand tall or keep her hands in her pockets, and the jacket will fit. The way the armholes fit-just right. The waistband sits properly. The skirt pleats are deep. A woman can move easily. His suits have a stride.”
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.”
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