Word: armanis
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...Armani has a realist's interest in the work of other designers, and a respect for Saint Laurent that approaches reverence. "He has given so much to the world of fashion, done so much to make women more beautiful," Armani says. "Saint Laurent broke with a certain 'chic' look of the past, which had become redundant, to produce something more youthful, more lively, more modern." Armani is also catholic enough to admire the giddiness of Kenzo, the classicism of Blass, the eccentricity of Karl Lagerfeld and the sidelong inspiration of Kamali...
...respect both the past and the competition, but Armani has little patience with the fussiness and pretension that occur at the higher altitudes of the fashion business. He gave up going to a favorite restaurant because the owner, with Italianate reverence, insisted on calling him maestro, and he treats the fine art of fashion with fitting insouciance. "My ideas may come from unimportant things," he says with a shrug. "From a book, a film, from talking to my staff or from watching how people behave and live. I cannot allow myself the luxury of waiting for 'the moment...
...Armani's cunning blends of invention and convention are seemingly offhand but ultimately tough to miss. The reason is that he has been instrumental not only in working out what people want to wear but in changing their attitudes about it. His clothes-even the ones with those damn airborne initials-are a kind of congenial tutorial in the applied science of emphatic understatement. He has educated the eye and eased the conscience by giving a new grace to informality. There may be nothing democratic about high fashion (consider those price tags), but Armani's design ideas suggest...
Although fashion is ephemeral, style is more influential, and surely more lasting. Style has to do with assumptions, even more than attitudes, and much of what Armani has contributed to contemporary design assumes, then conveys, a common, casual sensory enjoyment of clothing. Not as a statement, not as a sign language or a power trip or a status squelch or any of the other miscellany from the pop-shrink handbook; just as a simple and sustaining pleasure all unto itself...
...order to spread the pleasure around-and, not incidentally, to keep the balance sheets burgeoning-Armani is opening a string of shops called Emporiums, which will sell a full line of clothing significantly less expensive than his ready-to-wear. "The kids wouldn't buy an item only because it had the Armani label," Galeotti explains. "We had to meet their demands-and their price range." Four Emporiums are already open; by September, there will be nearly 50 others all over Italy. And only, for the time being, in Italy. Prices can be kept down because the items...