The red carpet, if you can believe it, was once a fashion dead zone, a sequin-strewn wasteland where good taste went to die. For years, many stars served as their own stylist or whipped up their own clothes, with predictably patchy results. In 1989, when Demi Moore showed up to the Academy Awards in a spandex-bike-shorts-and-corset ensemble of her own design, Women’s Wear Daily called it an “Oscar Fright.”
But earlier this year, Moore dominated awards-season best-dressed lists, winning raves for an elegant, metallic Oscars gown with a plunging neckline and a skirt that swept to the floor, pooling in a shimmering puddle. The dress was the work of the Italian designer Giorgio Armani, who died yesterday in Milan at the age of 91—and who was the reason so many stars wear high fashion in the first place. During his 50-year solo career, the designer transformed the red carpet into a runway, teaching Hollywood how to dress and harnessing the power of celebrity to build his global fashion empire—and his legacy.
As a young man, Armani studied medicine and served in the military. He got his start in the fashion industry “almost by accident,” he told Time in 1982, by taking a job at the high-end Milanese department store La Rinascente. There, he learned about fabric and customer behavior, and his skills eventually led him to a role with the Italian designer Nino Cerruti. A relationship with Sergio Galeotti, an architect, helped Armani strike out on his own; although Armani valued the stability of a salaried job, Galeotti encouraged him to create designs under his own name. In 1975, the two of them founded the Armani label in Milan.
From his earliest days working in Italy, the designer excelled in both menswear and women’s clothing—an unusual feat—and androgyny was a hallmark of his work. He was known for suits, and though they were often labeled “power suits,” they were the antithesis of high-finance stuffiness. Loose and drapey, they evoked the Italian Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura, or effortless elegance, and both men and women were seduced by them. Armani helped make pant suits chic for women at a time when they were just becoming widely accepted as officewear and eveningwear.
His relationship with Hollywood took off in the 1980s. At the time, the red carpet was a site of chaos. Under the Hollywood studio system that had controlled the film industry since the late 1920s, in-house wardrobe departments typically served as both designers and stylists, dressing each studio’s stable of actors for premieres and parties. That system collapsed in the 1960s, freeing actors to choose their own projects and collaborators but leaving them sartorially adrift. Although some stars had long-standing relationships with A-list fashion designers—Audrey Hepburn with Givenchy, Liza Minnelli with Halston—others turned to the Vegas-style glitz of homegrown Hollywood dressmakers such as Bob Mackie and Nolan Miller, or made their own clothes, as Moore did. The situation grew so dire that at one point, the Oscars telecast provided Academy-approved gowns and tuxedos free to presenters. As the show’s costume designer, Ron Talsky, explained to the Daily News in 1984, attendees “would be offered suggestions on what to wear, but they just showed up and nobody really cared how they looked.”
Yet Armani saw an opportunity: He believed that he could win over American customers through the entertainment industry. Diane Keaton was an early adopter of his designs and in 1978 wore one of his jackets while accepting her Oscar for Annie Hall. Just a couple of years later, his profile exploded. He had jumped at the chance to dress Richard Gere’s posh hustler in the 1980 film American Gigolo, and in Armani’s slouchy, sexy, unstructured suits, Gere “did more for the cause of men’s fashions than any spiffy dresser since Cary Grant,” a fashion editor at the Chicago Sun-Times gushed at the time. (The understated looks served as harbingers of today’s stealth wealth and quiet luxury.) Armani’s sales soared, and the designer went on to create menswear for many movies and TV shows, including Miami Vice, The Untouchables, The Dark Knight, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Social Network.
In 1988, Armani opened a palatial 13,000-square-foot boutique on Rodeo Drive, making a bold claim to his self-appointed position as Hollywood’s resident couturier. He installed a VIP showroom and hired a “director of entertainment-industry communications” to serve as a liaison between the boutique and the red carpet. He took pride in not paying celebrities for access, but he didn’t hesitate to offer his preferred clients free or discounted clothes and all-expenses-paid trips to Milan to sit in the front row at his shows.
This was the opening salvo in a red-carpet arms race. Other designers quickly imitated Armani’s tactics, but he was already an honorary member of the Hollywood elite. Julia Roberts wore an oversize menswear-inspired suit (complete with tie) to the 1990 Golden Globes, and Jodie Foster accepted her 1992 Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs in a pale-pink Armani suit with subtle silver beading. His clothing became equally popular with Hollywood agents and power brokers, such as the director Martin Scorsese, the producer Don Simpson, the Columbia Pictures president Dawn Steel, and the dapper NBA coach Pat Riley. Armani’s relaxed silhouettes and lightweight Italian wools, crepes, and cashmeres worked as well in Los Angeles as they did in Milan. In 1990, Women’s Wear Daily declared the Academy Awards the “Armani Awards.” As the designer had predicted, by conquering Hollywood, he had conquered America.
Over the years, however, not everyone has applauded the changes that Armani ushered into Hollywood. Rita Watnick, the owner of the celeb-friendly Los Angeles vintage-clothing boutique Lily et Cie, didn’t like that women were wearing pants to the Oscars; she blamed Armani for dressing down Hollywood. In 1999, after more designers had established relationships with celebrities and Oscar looks had become more uniformly tasteful, Anna Wintour suggested that the event’s fashion had also become boring, writing in Vogue, “It was enough to make you yearn for the memorable fashion faux pas of years past, or at least a star secure enough to forgo designers and stylists and dare to express herself.”
Armani, for his part, remained steadfast in his choices, and insisted that he maintained values of elegance in his work no matter what changed around him. At the same time, he seemed to welcome the idea that what happened on the red carpet might change again. In 2018, during the height of the #MeToo protests, when some stars turned clothing into a form of solidarity—rows and rows of them dressing in all black at the Golden Globes—he appeared to marvel at just how powerful a symbol that fashion on the red carpet had become. But he also noted that he didn’t think it was necessarily surprising. “The red carpet,” he wrote in The Guardian, “was always an opportunity for developing new ideas and thus for progress.”
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