Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (13 page)

In
1975
, Armani and his boyfriend, Sergio Galeotti, scraped together $
10
,
000
in start-up capital, rented a two-room office on Corso Venezia, and launched the Giorgio Armani fashion company. Galeotti handled the business; Armani designed. For his first men’s wear collection, which he presented to buyers in a first-floor apartment in the building where he and Galeotti lived, Armani introduced his new silhouette: the unstructured suit. Armani abandoned the traditional stiff English wools and flannels in navy, black, and charcoal in favor of lighter, pliable fabrics such as linen, wool jersey, and woven textiles in muted tones such as olive, mauve, slate blue, and a gray-beige dubbed “greige” that later became his signature. Three months later, he did the same for women in traditional men’s fabric. “This was the time of feminism,” Armani told me. “Women needed clothing that went much further than the little dress or a tight little suit—clothing that provided strength and power. Yves Saint Laurent did it, and it worked well, but I thought it should be translated into things that were easier to understand, more adaptable to a greater number of people. So I tried to alter this spirit a bit, with the help of women in my office who saw men’s clothing and said, ‘Why can’t we have this, too?’”

Fred Pressman, the visionary owner of the New York men’s wear store Barneys, thought Armani’s suits were genius and, according to Joshua Levine in
The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys,
Pressman flew to Milan in June
1976
and offered $
10
,
000
to sell Armani’s clothes—an enormous amount for a fledging company. In return, Armani gave Barneys exclusivity to sell the brand in the New York market. “That meant Saks won’t get it, Bloomingdale’s won’t get it, Bergdorf couldn’t get it, the specialty stores couldn’t get it,” Barneys executive Ed Glantz told Levine. “It was a real coup.” Armani’s early American customers were the in-the-know sorts, like director Martin Scorsese, Columbia Pictures president Dawn Steele,
Top Gun
producer Don Simpson (who, since Armani had limited L.A. distribution, would order twenty black suits at a clip from Barneys in New York), and Bob Le Mond, a talent manager who represented John Travolta, star of the recent hits
Saturday Night Fever
and
Grease.

In
1979
, when Travolta was hired to play a high-end Hollywood hustler in director Paul Schrader’s film
American Gigolo,
Le Mond told to Schrader that Giorgio Armani’s suits would be the perfect look for Travolta’s character: a suave, vain male prostitute in Los Angeles. Schrader and Travolta met with Armani in his studio in Milan and put together a wardrobe for the role. Days before shooting was scheduled to begin, Travolta pulled out to do
Urban Cowboy
and was replaced by the little-known Richard Gere. It was a perfect fit. Armani’s soft suits swayed with Gere’s swagger, his tight shirts sculpted Gere’s buff torso. Gere was casually formal and heart-stoppingly sexy. The movie lifted Armani’s fashion reputation, but his distribution was still limited to Barneys and a few other department and specialty stores. When
Time
put Armani on its cover in
1982
, only the second designer after Yves Saint Laurent to receive such an honor, his U.S. sales were close to $
14
million, a mere
10
percent of his worldwide total. Armani wanted to dress more than Hollywood and Wall Street hotshots. What about the rest of America? They needed great suits, too.

In
1985
, Sergio Galeotti died of AIDS. Armani was bereft and poured himself into his work. Not only was he now in charge of design, but he had to come up with and implement the company’s business strategy as well. Looking back at the impact that
American Gigolo
had publicity-wise, Armani realized that the best way to reach that middle-American audience was to dress its stars. In
1987
, he designed the retro-
1930
s costumes for Brian De Palma’s gangster flick
The Untouchables,
and suddenly crowds of Americans poured into Armani’s Madison Avenue store, his first in the United States. The following year, Armani opened a thirteen-thousand-square-foot, glass-front luxury emporium on Rodeo Drive and inaugurated it with a splashy, exclusive benefit at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art for three hundred of Hollywood’s most powerful and famous, with Spago catering and Peter Duchin’s orchestra playing. The tone was set. There was just one thing missing: “I needed to have the right people wearing my clothes the right way,” he said.

For New York, Armani hired Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as his “special events coordinator.” Radziwill wore Armani everywhere she went—the ballet, the opera, charity galas—and soon enough, her much-photographed socialite friends were wearing Armani, too. But what about the West Coast, what about Hollywood? Radziwill told her sister’s niece, Maria Shriver, who lived in Los Angeles, about the job, and Shriver told her friend, the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
society editor Wanda McDaniel, who had served as a bridesmaid in Shriver’s
1986
marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. McDaniel, it seemed, had just the right mix of conservative smarts and Hollywood savvy for Armani. She was born and raised in Macon, Missouri, attended the University of Missouri’s famed journalism school, and had worked as society editor first for the
Dallas Times-Herald
and, since
1977
, for the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
“I remember my first week here I went to an event at the Beverly Wilshire and there was Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, and Gene Kelly,” McDaniel told me over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m so out of my league here.’ I mean, in Dallas it was the Cowboys’ football coach Tom Landry and quarterback Roger Staubach. Those were the big stars. So I walk up to Cary Grant and said, ‘I just want to say hello because I don’t think I’m going to last past the first week of this job.’”

Instead, Cary Grant took her out and introduced her to all of his friends, and within a matter of months she had the town wired. Her scooplike approach to society reporting triggered an old-fashioned newspaper war with her competitor,
Los Angeles Times
society columnist Jody Jacobs, and she rattled the entire state of California with a frank and not terribly flattering five-part series about its former first lady Nancy Reagan that came out during the presidential campaign and included a rare interview with her father, Loyal Davis. “I tell you I thought [Nancy Reagan] was going to have my head chopped off,” McDaniel remembered, “and there were several people who opened up to me a lot and were axed from the friends’ list.” The following year, McDaniel married Albert Ruddy, the producer of such
1970
s boxoffice hits as
The Godfather
and
The Longest Yard
(and most recently Clint Eastwood’s
Million Dollar Baby
), with a swank star-studded reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They became a Hollywood power couple, and she become a far-better-dressed reporter.

In May
1988
, Armani hired McDaniel to be the director of entertainment industry communications. Her job: to get Hollywood players to wear Armani. McDaniel lunched with celebrity publicists, managers, and agents, and wore and preached Armani at dinner parties. Armani swiftly became the uniform for producers, executives, agents, and powerbrokers in town. But Giorgio Armani wanted more: he wanted movie stars to wear his clothes in public and cause a stir that would be captured by the paparazzi and run in papers around the world. McDaniel snagged the first one: Jodie Foster.

In
1989
, Foster accepted her Best Actress Academy Award for her role as a rape victim in
The Accused
in a baby blue taffeta ball gown with a giant bow on the derriere that she bought while window-shopping in Milan. “Everyone blasted her for it,” remembered McDaniel. “I knew Jodie would go back to the Oscars the following year to be a presenter, so I thought, why not call her right now and say, ‘You want to commit for next year? Why don’t we get you going and know that decision is done.’ And Jodie said, ‘You know what? You can do this for the rest of my life.’”

Armani found the second one while watching a video of Brian De Palma’s
1983
epic
Scarface:
the willowy blond moll, Michelle Pfeiffer. McDaniel contacted Pfeiffer and offered to dress her for the Oscars, too. Together they picked out a perfect navy blue sheath. “Before I went over to her house to get her organized the afternoon of the Oscars,” McDaniel remembers, “I called and said, ‘What else are you going to be wearing?’”

“I don’t know,” Pfeiffer responded. “You’ll figure it out.”

McDaniel threw some of her own handbags and jewelry in the car, and when she arrived at Pfeiffer’s old Spanish home in Santa Monica, Pfeiffer came downstairs dressed in her Armani gown and a tiny sea pearl necklace that her boyfriend, Fisher Stevens, had given her.

“Michelle,” McDaniel said almost disapprovingly, “this is the Oscars.”

McDaniel pulled out of her sack a string of large baroque pearls and a black alligator clutch evening bag.

“But I don’t
sparkle,
” Pfeiffer wailed.

McDaniel slid her big diamond wedding ring off and handed it to Pfeiffer.

“Is that weird?” Pfeiffer asked.

“No one is going to know,” McDaniel responded.

The next morning,
Women’s Wear Daily
ran the headline “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Under it there were two pictures: Kim Basinger in a freakish self-designed one-sleeve white number, and luminous Pfeiffer in her understated, utterly tasteful Armani.

She wasn’t the only one. Armani also dressed Best Actress winner Jessica Tandy, Best Supporting Actress nominee Lena Olin, Best Actor nominees Dan Aykroyd and Tom Cruise, Best Supporting Actor winner Denzel Washington, Steve Martin, Jeff Goldblum, Dennis Hopper, and the ceremony’s host Billy Crystal. “We were the only people calling,” McDaniel remembers. “We were the only game in town.”

Women’s Wear Daily
dubbed the event the “Armani Awards.”
Vogue
’s Anna Wintour declared it “a revolution…the end of that glitzy, over-the-top, rather vulgar way of dressing. Armani gave movie stars a modern way to look.” More important, it gave Americans a glamour they could actually imagine wearing. Sales for Armani soared: between
1990
and
1993
, worldwide turnover doubled to $
442
million, much of the surge coming from the United States. Jennifer Meyer, Ralph Lauren’s West Coast liaison at the time, said, “[McDaniel] single-handedly changed the paradigm.”

T
HE MESSAGE WAS CLEAR:
dressing celebrities for the red carpet was the best, and cheapest, advertising a luxury business could do. The following year “everybody tried to hire me,” McDaniel says with a laugh. “Valentino tried to get me. I met Gianni Versace in a cabana here at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hiding out. He said, ‘You are working for Armani, come work for me!’” She turned them all down and kept wrangling celebrities for Armani. Calvin Klein began staging an exclusive West Coast salon at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel twice a year where a select group of celebrities—including Meg Ryan, Anjelica Huston, and Goldie Hawn—could pick up his frocks at discount prices. Houses started luring stars to sit in the front row of their fashion shows in Paris and Milan by offering them and their loved ones free trips, hotel accommodations, and clothes. All the stars had to do was smile for the paparazzi for a couple of minutes and attend a champagne-infused postshow dinner or party. This way, the houses had a good relationship with the stars when it came time to dress them for the Oscars or the Golden Globes or some other big red-carpet event.

The sales impact was enormous. When Madonna wore a sapphire satin shirt and black velvet hipsters from Gucci to the MTV awards in
1995
, sales exploded: within days there were waiting lists for the pants in Gucci stores worldwide. After the world’s top celebrity, Princess Diana, was photographed in
1995
carrying a Dior handbag—dubbed the Lady Dior in her honor—the company sold a hundred thousand at $
1
,
000
apiece, single-handedly raising Dior’s
1996
annual revenues by
20
percent. Magazines devoted to celebrity style sprouted, beginning with
In Style
in August
1993
. The goal of
In Style,
founding editor Martha Nelson told me, was to show that “style was accessible. Readers feel that they ‘know’ the celebrities in a way that they’ll never know models. There’s glamour there but not a distant glamour. Celebrities are in TV, movies, and pop music. They are in people’s lives and in people’s living rooms. They are not that mysterious.” Fashion magazines such as
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar
began to put celebrities instead of models on their covers. “The bottom line is celebrities sell much better,”
Vogue
’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, explained to me.

The Academy Awards ceremony is by far the biggest celebrity event and the most important for luxury brands. “Hundreds of millions of people watch the Oscars, all over the world,” Lisa Schiek, former director of communications for Gucci Group, told me. “If you’ve got the right actress or actor walking up the red carpet, saying that designer’s name over and over, you get the heat, it’s validation and you’ve got the world. The magnitude is awesome.” Indeed, Dana Telsey, former luxury goods analyst of Bear Stearns in New York, declared: “The highly anticipated red-carpet arrivals [are] arguably the most important moment for fashion and jewelry designers.” Carol Brodie, who was working for jeweler Harry Winston when I met with her during Oscar week
2005
, told me that if a celebrity is photographed on the red carpet of the Academy Awards wearing your product, “You’ll get a hit once a month” for years. “Harry Winston’s advertising budget in the U.S. is slightly over a million a year,” she said. “But if you ask nine out of ten people in this country about Harry Winston, they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, they are the jeweler who dresses the stars.’ Dressing celebrities is an overwhelming way to gain awareness. Uma Thurman put Prada on the map. Charlize Theron put Vera Wang on the map. Halle Berry made Elie Saab. Americans spend billions of dollars on luxury brands because celebrities wear them.”