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Giorgio Armani’s secret code of Fashion
His most subversive contribution was fashion not as fantasy, but as realism. Not as disguise, but as disclosure
“I put on the clothes, I put on the shoes, and I can just be him. And he does what he’s gotta do.”
For forty-five years, American Gigolo has been inspiring men to do what they gotta do — all they need is a suit. A Giorgio Armani suit. If the inspiration hasn’t worked for many, it’s only because buying the suit is easy; becoming one with it is not. (Especially so if you are not Richard Gere.)
And now, even Giorgio — the gigolo-maker — is gone.
Giorgio didn’t just make clothes; he redrew the silhouette of a society by cutting the flab from the semiotics of masculinity and modernity. Since he was called the Coco Chanel of suits, let’s get to the business of deconstructing Giorgio’s ‘Armani Jacket’ with the same precision that Roland Barthes employed to understand a Chanel outfit.
The Armani jacket was an act of rebellion against the masculine power dressing. By the 1970s, the West had recovered from WWII, Christian (Dior) and Coco (Chanel) were dead, and mad men were getting madder on money. Giorgio quietly set out to challenge the constructivist ethos of the exaggerated shoulders, and the peacocking of the superfluous collars and bows and such. His tailoring didn’t need the crutches of show-stopping details. By removing the classical scaffolding of masculine power dressing, Giorgio offered liberation, not only to bodies but to identities, through his easy yet uncompromising silhouettes.
Dressed in Armani greige (grey beige), women in the 1980s were not becoming man-like but demanding a neutral space for both. What Laura Mulvey defined as the guilt-appropriating male gaze was now met by a demand for respect. The Armani wardrobe was about the confluence of softness and subversion. The yin and yang of comfort and command worked equally well across gender boundaries.
One could argue that Giorgio took the flamboyance out of fashion. Yes, the Armani jacket aims to draw the attention away from the wearer while establishing the latter as the one in command. Maybe Giorgio presaged the late-capitalist craving for a secret sartorial code of the elite. Or, the quiet luxury of today. Those who know it, know it. Something that allows the rich to instinctively know the other rich in the room without a single word being exchanged, à la The Talented Mr Ripley.
In essence, Giorgio was a designer doing what designers are supposed to do: offer solutions to a puzzle. The Armani jacket was an armour for women in the boardrooms against the probing gaze, and a quiet signifier of some men’s rejection of the vulgar in club lounges. No, an Armani jacket didn’t alter one’s character. It certainly did a great job of hiding what needed to be hidden. Did he, then, create a Baudrillardian hyperreality of sophistication or a Buddhist space of equanimous neutrality?
Eschewing bright hues and ornamentation of the disco age, Giorgio embraced the neutral as an aesthetic stance. An Armani man or woman didn’t have to rely on a riot of colours to build their personality. Colour only accentuated, not overwhelmed, the person. What Giorgio understood, perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, is the need for dressing. He created garments not to shout, but to shield. They did not provoke, but protected. They offered, in the Lacanian sense, a mirror stage — a way to see oneself not as spectacle, but as subject. This was Giorgio’s most subversive contribution: fashion not as fantasy, but as realism. Not as disguise, but as disclosure.
It is no surprise, therefore, that in cultures where colours are not accessories but extensions of a person, the brand Armani stayed synonymous with self-effacement. Giorgio also came under criticism for questioning the rainbow ethos of LGBTQ+ sartorial resistance. By suggesting that the lack of colour did not mean a lack of dignity or personality, Giorgio occupied the grey area between the coloured and the neutral. Geographically speaking, Giorgio’s rejection of the maximalism of Italian aesthetics that Northern Europe frowns at was not an embrace of the latter. It was, perhaps, an assertion that loud and muted are both aesthetic choices, and the so-called loud cultures can do the snobbish muted well. But is it also true the other way round? Sometimes, the nuance of such a message takes time to reveal itself.
This author, for example, would not have been caught dead in an Armani pair of greige trousers a decade ago.
Nishtha Gautam is an author and academician. The views expressed are personal
