The Great Fashion Designers (33 page)

Marsh wrote:

Many in the industry like to believe the fashion business is all about the design, cut, colour and draping of garments—that it is an artistic endeavour—that the fashion industry is one based more on creativity than on commerce. However, the American designer houses that have reigned supreme … have proven that design is a small part of the business of fashion. These businesses draw breath from things like the marketing and positioning of the company's image, shrewd partnerships with retailers, regular support from the fashion press and, above all, astute business management who can see beyond the hype.

Certainly these things, done so consummately well in America, have resulted in some US brands gaining an undeserved dominance of world markets. But in the case of Calvin Klein, working so successfully to remould American designer sportswear for the 1970s and 1980s, the design input was more than a ‘small part'.

In 2003 Klein and Schwartz sold the company to Phillips-Van Heusen for $739 million, and Francisco Costa took over as creative director, regenerating the brand and restoring its fashion profile.

Further reading:
For Klein's life, see
Obsession
(1994) by Stephen Gaines and Sharon Churcher; for the story of a mega-brand, see Lisa Marsh's
The House of Klein: Fashion, Controversy and a Business Obsession
(2003).

At the Milan menswear shows in February 2000, Bernard Arnault, the predatory head of the luxury goods conglomerate, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) was observed taking a front-row seat at the Armani show. Immediately, speculation was rife that Armani was about to join Dior, Givenchy and Lacroix in Arnault's stable of top fashion labels. The denial came promptly. The company was, according to a terse press release, considering taking preliminary steps to study the feasibility of various different proposals it had received. Such proposals, the statement implied, had become almost tediously frequent over recent years. That was hardly surprising. Giorgio Armani Spa is the most profitable company in Italy, a position it had then held for two years running. Giorgio Armani was the country's biggest taxpayer. ‘Not because I am the richest,' he said. ‘I am just the most honest.'

Fashion is, of course, big business in Italy, but business acumen, the kind that puts the flagship companies of other industries like car manufacturing and pasta production in the shade, is not that common. And Armani maintains its pre-eminence despite the fact that other fashion labels had pre-empted the big headlines. However, Giorgio Armani was sixty-five in 2000 and, while there's doubtless an ascetic side to his character, he did not, he told Brenda Polan a month later, want to work forever. Yet Armani passed his seventieth birthday still in the driving seat and as he approached the next milestone of seventy-five, he showed no sign of sliding out from behind the wheel. This is reassuring for the millions of women and men who have adopted Armani's cool, streamlined, modern-minded style as their own. Armani is committed to subtle change, to what he calls ‘a soft evolution', at the heart of which is a consistent and rational view of the needs of a contemporary wardrobe. It is a utilitarian approach but far from bland; the Armani style is imbued with a refined sensuousness, expressed in the retrained luxury of the fabrics, in the sophisticated fluidity of the cut and in the perfection of details and accessories.

Although the late Gianni Versace, generally perceived as Armani's polar opposite in terms of taste, famously sniffed that a designer whose favourite colour was beige could hardly be expected to know much about sex appeal (this in response to a suggestion from Armani that Versace's own designs might be considered vulgar), Armani's clothes
are
sexy. It has to do not with direct display but with the way the soft, tactile fabrics and the easy, almost liquid cut make the wearer feel, feelings which are then reflected in the deportment: sensuous, relaxed, at ease.

The man himself appears to be anything but those things. John Fairchild of
Women's Wear Daily
called him ‘the monk of fashion,' and he does have a reputation for a rather chilly reserve, but his biographer, Renata Molho, described the child and the man thus, ‘He was an observer, timid, introverted, and keenly aware of everything going on around him. He was also restless, never contented, always looking for something, whether a rare checkered shirt or a special texture in his relationships with others. These qualities are … fundamental to his complex character; he is immensely adaptable, yet he seems incapable of real satisfaction with what he achieves. He always thinks there must be something more.'

And he does have a sharp sense of humour. He is, above all, intensely pragmatic. He told Brenda Polan, who interviewed him for the
Financial Times
in 2000:

I never had a desire as a young man to design fashion. A series of coincidences led me on to a fashion path. Perhaps this starting point is something which already makes me different; I considered this a job like any other. I was never spoilt by the fashion atmosphere, by its preciousness. I never had the attitude, ‘I am a creative talent therefore this is what you have to wear.' It was a job, a profession. I came from a department store, not an atelier. When I realised—and it was very much as a result of my contact with customers—there was room for me to do something different, that I could devise a different way of dressing, I realised this was going to be my life.

His refusal to lay claim to any great creative destiny reminds you how very different the northern Italian temperament is to the southern. Historically, Lombardy is the home of bankers, merchant princes and industrialists. Armani was born in 1934 in Piacenza, to the south of Milan, one of three children of Maria and Ugo, an industrial manager who was imprisoned after the Second World War for his membership of the Fascist Party, a possibly disproportionate retribution that left its scars on his family. Giorgio enrolled to study medicine at the University of Milan but left in his third year to do his military service as a paramedic. However, on leaving the army he realised medicine was not for him. In 1957 he took a job in the advertising department of La Rinascente store and was soon promoted to assistant buyer. ‘I was responsible for making sure,' he said, ‘that the clothes they were buying for the stores were getting the right response from the public.'

In 1961 he was recruited by Nino Cerruti who had inherited the family textile company at age twenty and had expanded into clothing. Armani's job, after a month's training in the factory, was to design the menswear collection, Hitman. Instinctively he chose lighter fabrics than were common in tailoring and cooler colours. He discarded layers of internal structure, reduced shoulder pads, moved buttons and pockets and took the stiff formality out of the man's suit, replacing it with something loose, relaxed, youthful. With the support of
L'Uomo Vogue
, launched in 1968, it was sensationally successful.

In 1966 Armani met Sergio Galeotti, the ebullient Tuscan who was to become his partner in life as well as business (he died tragically young in 1985). In 1970 the two set up an independent design consultancy working for important labels in Italy, France and Spain. In 1975, just as Gigi Monti of Basile orchestrated the move of the fledgling Italian high-fashion ready-to-wear shows from provincial, inaccessible Florence to Milan, the flourishing industrial hub, they launched the Armani label with a collection for men and women for spring/summer 1976. The womenswear show featured Armani's first menswear inspired jacket for women.

‘It was the time when French and English designers were beginning to come to Italy for their production,' he told Polan in 2000. It was the beginning of fashion as a global industry, and Armani perceived that he could aspire to an international market:

To make a mark I would have to do something different. That would not be so easy. And it was a time when fashion was all about flower power, very baroque and decorated. So I made a choice. Women were beginning to be more emancipated and liberated in their way of thinking; I had been used to designing men's wear so I decided to bring into women's wear that sort of practical, rational way of dressing that really did not exist for women, although in America a lot of women embraced that style.

One thinks of Katharine Hepburn, of course. ‘Obviously,' he continued with a humorous shrug of the shoulders, ‘it was necessary to sacrifice any desire to be “creative” but that is what I saw was needed.'

But, of course, his whole approach was creatively fresh, a leap of imagination that was to capture the hearts of women seeking a way to look in the executive workplace. In 2007 he told his biographer, Renata Molho, that when he started out he ‘aspired to emulate … Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent. “They modernised fashion, bringing it in
line with the way people wanted to live nowadays. They allowed people to live differently through their clothing. They didn't create apparel, they created a different society.” Armani's great breakthrough in which he still takes pride (while making it clear that he resents being acknowledged for that alone) was his ‘deconstruction' of the women's jacket. He stripped out the interfacing and the heavy-duty padding, eliminated the body-sculpting darts and co-opted worsteds and tweeds from menswear. And, although he cuts a great skirt, more often than not he teamed his easy youthful jacket with the best trousers women had ever had a chance to step into.

Armani and Galeotti built on their success to create a pyramid of labels which allow access to the Armani cachet at most levels of the market. ‘No, no, there was no strategy,' he told Polan in 2000:

I am not a creative genius and I am not a marketing genius. I am not a miracle on the fashion scene. It became clear to me, after the establishment of the Giorgio Armani label that there was another market out there interested in this style which was younger and had not as much money so, since I was not studying fashion creation on a yacht, I recognised this and created Armani Jeans. But where to sell it? That's how Emporio came about. Then I realised that the young wanted more than just a pair of jeans and a jacket—and that was because I would be in the shop in via Durini [in Milan] and they would come to me and give me advice. So it became a collection and the whole idea changed.

Armani labels are found at every level of the designer market, including a couture collection, Privé, which he shows in Paris, a Junior range, underwear, swimwear, ski wear, golf clothes, spectacles, scarves, ties, shoes, accessories, watches and fragrance. The brand has stores at every level all over the world. Said Armani:

I could have become much richer much quicker if I had decided to take advantage of my name by licensing. The decision not to has meant that every line is successful and there is no confusion, no overlapping. The identity is clear and controlled. We financed ourselves every step of the way; I have never had half a lira debt in my life. I don't think this Cinderella story could happen now; I am happy it happened to me but the system has changed. Nowadays there are the big groups which decide who is going to be successful; the press, the industry, finance, it all works together to promote a certain designer. That is the limit of fashion today and the embarrassment.

He deplored the triumph of manufactured image over honest product.

For someone my age, it is an embarrassment; anyone starting out does not know any different. But I have always liked to fight; I have always fought against the system in a certain sense. If a certain system exists, even if it is in my interest to belong, I have never wanted to be part of it. Yes, I have always been a loner. Obviously, I have had a lot of support from the press but I have never really been part of an explosion of a huge celebration of my fashion and my style. If I have had problems it has been with the media. Perhaps these subtle changes in my style are not shocking enough. The press like to be shocked; they like to find something which gives them a shock every season. They like revolution, big explosions, not evolution. They just say: Armani is Armani and [he mimed spitting on his hands and swiping them together in a gesture of dismissiveness] wipe their hands. That's not good for me.

What, he said, he dislikes about the fashion media's hunger for abrupt change is the way it ignores the customer. ‘What they all forget,' he said, ‘is that we really only have one purpose: to make women and men look better. And anyway, after an explosion, there's nothing left, only ashes. But then there's another explosion, and more ashes.'

This view overlooks the prolonged explosion of the late seventies and most of the eighties which was all about Armani, when everyone, from sleekly ambitious executives of both sexes to brand obsessed football fans, aspired to the label. In the 1980s the grown-up Armani look was what women finally making their way in the workplace needed. Interviewed by Brenda Polan in 1983 for
The Guardian
, Armani said: