\n<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Wear Daily<\/em> called it an \u201cOscar Fright.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2014and 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\u2014and his legacy.<\/p>\n As a young man, Armani studied medicine and served in the military. He got his start in the fashion industry \u201calmost by accident,\u201d he told Time<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n From his earliest days working in Italy, the designer excelled in both menswear and women\u2019s clothing\u2014an unusual feat\u2014and androgyny was a hallmark of his work. He was known for suits, and though they were often labeled \u201cpower suits,\u201d they were the antithesis of high-finance stuffiness. Loose and drapey, they evoked the Italian Renaissance ideal of sprezzatura<\/em>, or \u201ceffortless elegance,\u201d and both men and women were seduced by them. Armani helped make pantsuits chic for women at a time when they were just becoming widely accepted as officewear and eveningwear.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2014Audrey Hepburn with Givenchy, Liza Minnelli with Halston\u2014others 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\u2019s costume designer, Ron Talsky, explained to the Daily News<\/em> in 1984, attendees \u201cwould be offered suggestions on what to wear, but they just showed up and nobody really cared how they looked.\u201d<\/p>\n Ron Galella \/ Getty<\/p>\n Julia Roberts attends the 47th annual Golden Globe Awards on January 20, 1990.<\/p>\n Vinnie Zuffante \/ Getty<\/p>\n Jodie Foster attends the 64th annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles on March 30, 1992.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. Just a couple of years later, his profile exploded. He had jumped at the chance to dress Richard Gere\u2019s posh hustler in the 1980 film American Gigolo<\/em>, and in Armani\u2019s slouchy, sexy, unstructured suits, Gere \u201cdid more for the cause of men\u2019s fashions than any spiffy dresser since Cary Grant,\u201d a fashion editor at the Chicago Sun-Times<\/em> gushed at the time. (The understated looks served as harbingers of today\u2019s stealth wealth and quiet luxury.) Armani\u2019s sales soared, and the designer went on to create menswear for many movies and TV shows, including Miami Vice<\/em>, The Untouchables<\/em>, The Dark Knight<\/em>, The Wolf of Wall Street<\/em>, and The Social Network<\/em>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s resident couturier. He installed a VIP showroom and hired a \u201cdirector of entertainment-industry communications\u201d to serve as a liaison between the boutique and the red carpet. He took pride in not paying celebrities for access, but he didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n This was the opening salvo in a red-carpet arms race. Other designers quickly imitated Armani\u2019s 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 <\/em>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\u2019s relaxed silhouettes and lightweight Italian wools, crepes, and cashmeres worked as well in Los Angeles as they did in Milan. In 1990, Women\u2019s Wear Daily<\/em> declared the Academy Awards the \u201cArmani Awards.\u201d As the designer had predicted, by conquering Hollywood, he had conquered America.<\/p>\n Art Streiber \/ WWD \/ Penske Media via Getty<\/p>\n The actor Richard Gere shows the designer Giorgio Armani his suit label, as guests watch the exchange, with the socialite Lee Radziwill.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019s fashion had also become boring, writing in Vogue<\/em>, \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2014rows and rows of them dressing in all black at the Golden Globes\u2014he appeared to marvel at just how powerful a symbol that fashion on the red carpet had become. But he also noted that he didn\u2019t think it was necessarily surprising. \u201cThe red carpet,\u201d he wrote in The Guardian<\/em>, \u201cwas always an opportunity for developing new ideas and thus for progress.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[11872,2990,4510,11889,1411,241,9464],"class_list":{"0":"post-19410","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-armani","9":"tag-carpet","10":"tag-fashion","11":"tag-giorgio","12":"tag-red","13":"tag-show","14":"tag-turned"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}