On Friday, February 8, 1980, Paramount Pictures released American Gigolo, a neo-noir crime thriller written and directed by Paul Schrader, in approximately five hundred American theaters. The film starred Richard Gere, then thirty, as Julian Kay, a Beverly Hills male escort whose careful Italian wardrobe was the visual signature of his profession and his identity. Approximately fifteen minutes into the film, in a scene shot in Gere’s character’s Westwood apartment, Julian laid out shirts, ties, jackets, and trousers across his bed and methodically paired them. The scene took roughly ninety seconds. It became one of the most cited menswear-on-film moments in American cinema history.
The Italian clothing Gere wore throughout the film was designed by a forty-five-year-old Milanese designer named Giorgio Armani, who had founded his eponymous label five years earlier with his business and life partner Sergio Galeotti. Armani had been quietly building a presence in American fashion editorial since 1976. The American Gigolo deal was the first time his suits had been the visible center of a Hollywood film. The film had originally been cast with John Travolta, fresh from Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Travolta dropped out in 1979 to deal with his mother’s death and father’s illness. Gere took the part. Armani’s tailors re-cut the wardrobe Travolta had already been fitted for, dropping the chest, shortening the trousers, and adjusting the shoulders for Gere’s smaller frame.
The film opened February 8, 1980. By Easter, American department-store orders for Armani had doubled. By the end of 1980, Bloomingdale’s had committed to opening an Armani boutique inside its Lexington Avenue flagship. By April 5, 1982, Time magazine had put Armani on its cover with the headline “Giorgio’s Gorgeous Style,” making him the second fashion designer in the magazine’s history to receive a cover, after Christian Dior in 1957.
American Gigolo, February 8, 1980
The fashion impact of American Gigolo was disproportionate to the film’s commercial performance. American Gigolo earned approximately twenty-two million dollars in its initial theatrical run, modest by Paramount’s 1980 standards. Its critical reception was mixed; Roger Ebert gave it three stars; Pauline Kael disliked it. The Schrader screenplay, derived from his own previous work on Taxi Driver and from Robert Bresson’s 1959 French film Pickpocket, was admired by some critics and dismissed by others. The Giorgio Moroder score and the Blondie single “Call Me,” which spent six weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in April and May 1980, were widely praised.
But the wardrobe was the cultural transmission. Gere wore Armani throughout: charcoal jackets with peaked lapels, lightweight wool gabardine trousers, pleated linen trousers in tan and beige, brown leather belts, polo shirts in slate and dark olive, knitted ties from the Italian label Basile, and an Italian-cut dinner suit with a crushed-velvet bow tie. The clothes were styled by costume coordinator Alice Rush and costumer Bernadene C. Mann, with Armani’s team in Milan supplying the actual garments.
The wardrobe scene approximately fifteen minutes into the film, in which Gere methodically laid out jackets, shirts, ties, and trousers across his bed, became the most-cited menswear-on-film moment of the decade. The scene functioned as a tutorial in coordinated Italian dressing for a generation of American men who had previously had limited exposure to it. Esquire, GQ, and Playboy ran features on the Armani look across 1980. By 1981 the American department-store wholesale price of an Armani jacket was approximately seven hundred dollars, roughly three times the price of a comparable Brooks Brothers jacket of the same wool weight.
Piacenza to Milan
Giorgio Armani was born on July 11, 1934, in Piacenza, a small city in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, the second of three children of Ugo Armani, an accountant for a transport company, and Maria Raimondi, a homemaker. The family lived in poverty through the Second World War. Armani was severely burned at age eight when an unexploded artillery shell he had been playing with detonated; one of his playmates was killed in the same incident. After the war the family moved to Milan, where he attended the Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci. He intended to become a doctor and enrolled at the University of Milan medical school in 1953. After two years he dropped out, served a year in the Italian Army, and in 1957 took a position as a window dresser at La Rinascente, the historic Milan department store on Piazza del Duomo.
He worked at La Rinascente for seven years, transitioning from window dressing into menswear buying. In 1964, Nino Cerruti, the Italian textile manufacturer who had launched his own menswear label two years earlier, hired Armani to design menswear for his Hitman ready-to-wear line. Armani worked at Cerruti for six years, learning the relationship between fabric and construction in industrial manufacturing. The Cerruti period was where Armani first encountered the principle that would define his career: the unstructured jacket, with the canvas chest piece and shoulder padding removed, that allowed the wool to drape on the wearer’s body rather than build a separate architectural form.
In 1966, on the beach at Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany, Armani, then thirty-two, met Sergio Galeotti, a twenty-one-year-old Tuscan architecture student. The relationship became both romantic and professional almost immediately. Galeotti spent the next nine years convincing Armani to leave Cerruti and start his own label. In 1973, Galeotti opened a small design office at 37 Corso Venezia in Milan. On July 24, 1975, Galeotti and Armani sold Armani’s Volkswagen for ten thousand dollars and used the proceeds to incorporate Giorgio Armani S.p.A. in Milan, with Galeotti as business partner and Armani as designer. Three months later, in October 1975, Armani showed his first men’s ready-to-wear collection under his own name.
The Soft Jacket
The Armani jacket was an engineering object. The English bespoke tradition that had dominated Western menswear since the late nineteenth century built the suit jacket as an architectural form: a stiff canvas chest piece sewn between the outer fabric and the lining; thick shoulder pads to extend the line of the shoulders beyond the natural body; heavy interfacing in the lapels to hold their shape; a high buttoning point that drew the eye to the chest; a closely fitted waist that suggested an underlying corset. The English jacket built a body the wearer did not have, and it did so primarily for upper-class men who employed a personal bespoke tailor to do the building.
Armani removed each of these elements in turn. He took out the canvas chest piece. He removed the shoulder pads or reduced them to almost nothing. He thinned the lapel interfacing so the lapel would roll naturally rather than stand. He lowered the buttoning point from the natural waist to the hip, elongating the apparent torso and making the silhouette read as casual. He widened the shoulders slightly to compensate for the loss of structural padding. He chose lighter Italian wool from the Biella mills in northern Piedmont, in approximately half the weight of British Savile Row wool. The resulting jacket draped on the body rather than fit it. It read as informal authority rather than formal authority. It looked Italian rather than English.
The engineering had cultural consequences. The unstructured jacket required less precise tailoring than the English jacket, which meant it could be manufactured industrially with acceptable results, which meant it could be sold ready-to-wear at department-store price points. The wholesale price was still expensive, but it was not bespoke-priced. The man who wanted an Italian jacket could now buy one off the rack at Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus. The bespoke tradition had been disintermediated by the Italian textile and manufacturing complex.
The construction principle traveled into Armani’s other product categories. The Armani trouser had a softer waistband and a longer, more pleated leg. The Armani polo shirt was cut looser through the body than the Brooks Brothers original. The Armani overcoat was constructed without the heavy canvas interlining standard in English overcoats. Every product was lighter, softer, more drape-oriented, and more casual than its Anglo-American predecessor. The construction was the design philosophy.
The Yuppie Decade
The American adoption of Armani through the 1980s was not gradual. By 1983, Armani had become the dominant Italian menswear brand in American department-store distribution. The Bloomingdale’s flagship on Lexington Avenue carried a full Armani boutique by 1981. Saks Fifth Avenue followed in 1982. The Armani flagship at 815 Madison Avenue in Manhattan opened on October 25, 1989, occupying twenty thousand square feet across three floors and representing the largest single-brand fashion installation in New York City at the time. The Emporio Armani line, launched in Milan in 1981 to serve a younger and lower-priced segment of the market, opened its New York flagship in SoHo in 1986.
Hollywood adoption tracked retail. Armani designed costumes for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (June 3, 1987), dressing Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, and Sean Connery in 1930s-cut Italian double-breasted suits that combined period accuracy with Armani drape. Armani designed costumes for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (December 11, 1987), in which costume designer Ellen Mirojnick dressed Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox in Armani as a deliberate marker of his ascent from broker’s son to Gordon Gekko protégé. Armani designed Julia Roberts’s oversized gray men’s suit for her January 20, 1990 Golden Globes appearance, where she won Best Supporting Actress for Steel Magnolias; the look became one of the most-cited Armani moments on a red carpet and effectively launched the modern fashion-house red-carpet partnership.
The class signal of the Armani suit through the 1980s was specific. The English bespoke tradition was old money. The Brooks Brothers sack suit was American upper-middle-class establishment. The Cardin suit was 1960s European mod. The Armani was something newer: a global Italian luxury for the rising professional class that came of age in the 1980s. It was the suit the McKinsey associate, the Goldman Sachs analyst, the Hollywood agent, the Italian banker, and the Wall Street trader wore when they wanted to signal that they were successful, sophisticated, and not their fathers. The suit was the visible signature of the yuppie demographic that Time magazine’s January 6, 1986 cover story had identified as the defining new American class formation.
After Galeotti
Sergio Galeotti died of AIDS-related complications on Wednesday, August 14, 1985, at his home in Milan. He was forty. At the time, the cause of death was reported in the international press as heart failure following a long illness. The decision to misreport the cause was Armani’s. AIDS was not yet publicly discussed in Italian fashion circles in 1985, and Armani believed correctly that an AIDS diagnosis would compromise the public image of his fashion house. The misreporting persisted in obituary coverage for several years before subsequent journalism corrected the record.
The death changed Armani personally and structurally. Galeotti had run the business side of the company; Armani had designed. After Galeotti’s death, Armani took on full control of both functions and remained the sole owner of Giorgio Armani S.p.A. for the next forty years. The company grew. Armani opened diffusion lines (Emporio Armani 1981, Armani Jeans 1981, Armani Exchange 1991), a beauty line (Giorgio Armani Beauty, 1984), a fragrance line, an eyewear line, a hotel line (Armani Hotel Dubai opened in 2010 inside the Burj Khalifa, Armani Hotel Milan in 2011), and Armani Casa for home interiors. By 2024 the company’s annual revenues exceeded two billion euros and Armani’s personal net worth exceeded twelve billion dollars. He never sold the company. He never married. He never had children.
He continued working until the last months of his life. He missed his June 2025 Milan Men’s Fashion Week show, the first runway show of his fifty-year career that he had not personally attended. He died of liver failure at his home in Milan on Thursday, September 4, 2025, at age ninety-one, three months before the planned celebrations of his company’s fiftieth anniversary. Approximately fifteen thousand people attended his public wake at the Armani/Teatro in Milan. The BBC obituary observed that no fashion designer since Coco Chanel had produced as lasting a change in the way people dress. Donatella Versace, whose late brother Gianni had been Armani’s stylistic rival, said simply that the world had lost a giant.
The Leisure Suit needed Dacron. The Armani needed Biella wool, hand-finished seams, half-canvas or no-canvas construction, and an Italian banker willing to spend twelve hundred dollars on a jacket. The 1970s wore one suit at a time. The 1980s wore the right suit at the right meeting.