Why ’90s Armani Looks So Good Now

The Giorgio Armani suit of the ’80s, shoulders padded and waist nipped, was a vessel for masculine decadence. For that decade’s newly gym-obsessed corporate elite, the zoot suit-like silhouette so captured the spirit of the moment that, after its debut on American Gigolo star Richard Gere, Eric Clapton donned it for his slick pop comeback and Larry Gagosian wore it to build Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career. (Basquiat also got one for himself and painted in it.) Armani’s suit became shorthand for swagger and wealth—the original power suit. Then came the rebuke: the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987. As a Fiat executive put it at the time, the Armani suit was the look of “savage capitalism.” Giorgio Armani went back to the drawing board and emerged with a new idea—the sincere look. He stripped out the padding, the jacket’s signature low gorge came up, and the trousers blossomed. He sent his models slouching down the runway, their hands dug deep into besom pockets. The silhouette was a little clownish, almost derelict, but still reflected Armani’s masterful control of fabric. He never regarded the new direction as an about-face. Rather, as he told GQ recently by email, he considered it the natural progression of “my constant quest for soulful, sophisticated simplicity.” To Armani, the silhouette made as much sense then as it does today. He said at the time, “At this moment of the world, one has to rediscover a little heart, and fashion can help. One has to have the courage to show oneself a little bit as one is inside.” Read more at GQ.