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.”
All that seems to have been cleared up nicely, thanks. In 1976, the year Pressman was instrumental in introducing Armani to America, the combined sales of the men’s and women’s lines was $90,000. This year the ante will be a bit higher: $14 million, which accounts for only about 10% of Armani’s worldwide revenue. That figure, an estimated $135 million, is a 60% increase over ’81 sales.
The prospects for such a success were by no means clear twelve years ago, when Armani had to be cajoled away from his steady $40,000-a-year job designing men’s wear for Nino Cerruti. It took the considerable persuasive powers of Sergio Galeotti, then 25 and a draftsman in a leading Milan architectural firm, to lure Armani from the kind of early middle-aged complacency he was slipping into. Armani, the second of three children of a transport-company manager in Piacenza, 40 miles southeast of Milan, grew up during World War II and remembers waking up screaming from nightmares about air raids. A childhood like that requires a heavy investment in security, which his parents Ugo and Maria did their best to provide.
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