Giorgio Armani, the architect of prêt-à-porter

On the day of Giorgio Armani’s passing, we remember him with the January 1988 Domus article, where the figure of the fashion designer-architect emerges, along with his drawing table and the creative process that precedes the making of the “Armani's fashion.”

Why Armani? Because the question of planning design remains, we believe, substantially linked to the optimization of a manufactured object in its formal, technical and communicative valency so as to permit large scale production that is, or rather, which is therefore a renewed capacity for dialogue with an unspecified number of users. Users who can personally re-interpret the object itself, taking possession of it and so making it ineffably and infinitely different. That is why Armani.

Because in his work it is possible to see a sign of this attainable Utopia which today is politically and poetically forgotten. Armani’s prét-à-porter as a paradigmatic “design series”, in contrast to a high fashion which is the equivalent of high craftsmanship (neo-craftsmanship or antique craftsmanship, with no substantial difference) and a current prét-à-porter which oscillates between an excess identifiable with high fashion and a basic condition of low production. 

Why Armani? Because correct design planning, within the personal poetic evolution of the designer, should always speak the difficult language of continuity, of progressive movement, of progressive transformation and integration. That language in which research, experience, words and phrases from the past return symptomatically in the experience of today. The resulting form consequentially becomes concrete, day after day, creating a park full of objects capable of expressing different modulations (otherwise there would be boredom) of a single, strong poetic language (otherwise there would be cacophony). 

C.A. Quintavalle, 1982

But, vice versa, with a mechanism which today is extraordinarily well-known (Armani’s fashion), it was necessary to go over the whole creative process from the sketch to the technical card and then to the patterns (cardboard shapes of the various components of the garment), to the prototype (the fabric used is similar to the definite one, but simpler), to the model (the fitting), to the definitive model (the show). At the start of everything is an ideal profile of a human figure which will be repeated in every sketch of the collection to indicate the fundamental choice of a posture, that is, of a movement, and that is, of social impact. 

“If we look at these drawings ...we discover that... the dimension of the legs, or of the arms, or of a part of the body is as if disassociated from the rest; ...Armani, planning the body, intends to detach single sections, underline them, give them different durations, means to suggest right from the sketch a behaviour, a story, a performance which, if one prefers, is different” (C.A. Quintavalle, 1982).

At a successive stage a sample of material is “pinned” at the side of such a sketch. And it is in this completeness that it was chosen to present the sketch meaning the impossibility of putting a priority on design (form) and cloth (matter). In fact the first sketch is carried out close to the pieces of cloth: with this one doubtless determines the volume, but starting from precise material characteristics. To present the sketch alone would mean emphasising the line to the detriment of the material; on the other hand the material alone would seem nothing other than “a lifeless body”. This intriguing interweaving of design is visible, unchanged, in successive stages. In the modelling prototypes, for example, the absence of the cloth is in fact a very strong presence, and it is only in this way that the final result avoids penalizing the “wearability” compared to the “visual monumentality”, as it is in High Fashion. Thus, wishing for a moment to overcome the disciplinary boundaries which we believe in and in whose existence we must deduce that Armani believes we can recognize how Armani comes to find himself in a position envied by the architect and the designer.

On his table lie his idea (the design itself) and the practical aspect (the material - cloth) and even the site (the body itself, the body in front, of who he will meet or who he has met). Undoubtedly every serious designer plans considering materials but he will never find himself in such strong physical contiguity with his whole work. This is why the thorough and unrepeatable penetration, perhaps more than the relative economy facilitates the ephemeral of the article and it represents an apex in the interpretation of contemporary society: this is why it has been a primary vehicle of every revolutionary idea.

Together with this completeness, in Armani’s work, is the knowledge of “making”, which is obviously not the ability to cut, as many still believe but the ability to control a creative process that gives rise to a large scale productive process. The Armani object-garment of clothing today represents for us that Utopia of quality and quantity which is not experienced in terms of dichotomy but closely inter-related in that single possible common denominator: identity. 

At such a point as not to be touched by today’s fundamental problem, the copy. In fact a) carrying not an image but a concept, a mode of use, Armani makes himself the bearer of an exhaustive message where the sharing of a value and not a model is significant; b) optimizing the creative and productive process makes the single piece x-times repeatable, in the sense of interpretable; that is, it is unique, full of such design quality that it cannot be repeated in the sense of imitated.

Basically this has been the case for various objects in the recent history of furniture design, from lamps by the Castiglioni’s, to the Scarpa’s Coronado sofa, to Sapper’s Tizio lamp. Inimitable because they were already destined to the propagation (of an image) and therefore rough with those easy signs of commercial recognizability where imitators immediately get a handhold.