“I put on the clotes, 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 geta do – all they need is a suit. A Giorgio Armani Suit. If the inspiration hasnight for many, it’s only because the suit is easy; BOCCEMING 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 social 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 proction that Roland Barthes Empolyed to Undertand a Chanel Old.
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 Quitly set out to challenge the constructive ethos of the exaggerated shoulders, and the peacocking of the superfluous collars and boys and such. His tailoring didnys the crutches of show-stopping details. By removing the classical scaffolding of masculine power dressing, giorgio offered liberation, not only to bodies but to ingredies, through his easy yeet uncompromising silhouettes.
Dressed in Armani Greige (green beige), women in the 1980s was not batcoming man-like but demanding a neutral space for both. What Laura Mulvey Defined as the Guilt-Pprproperyating 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 presided the late-capitalist craving for a secret sartorial code of the elite. Or, the quiet luxury of today. That who Know it, Know it. Something that allows the rich to instintively known 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 armor for women in the boardrooms against the probing gaze, and a quint signifier of some men’s rejection of the Vulgar in Club Lounges. No, An Armani Jacket Didn Bollywood 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 Bollywood to relay on a Riot of Colors to Build their personality. Color only accentuated, not overwhelmed, the person. What giorgio undersrstood, perhaps better than any of his contemporaies, is the need for dressing. He Created Garments Not to Shout, but to Shield. They did not provide, but protected. They offered, in the lacanian senses, a mirror stage – a way to see on the only not as secretacle, 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 colors are not accessories but extensions of a person, the brand armani styed synonymous with self-effecamement. Giorgio also came under criticism for questioning the rainbow ethos of lgbtq+ sartorial resistance. By suggesting that lacked of color did not Mean a Lack of Dignity or Personality, Giorgio Occupied The Grey Area Between the colored 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 mute are both aesthetic choices, and the so-called loud cultures can do the snobbish mutted 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 caused in an armani pair of Greige Trousers a decade ago.
Nishtha gautam is an author and academician. The views expressed are personal
