From Gigolo to New Man: Armani, America, and the Textures of Narrative

Abstract

Italian designer Giorgio Armani was amongst the very first to realize the potential of niche marketing through the creation of lower priced diffusion collections, and created as a result what would be commonly referred to as “white label,” now labeled Armani Collezioni. The strategy was a means to captivate foreign markets, namely the North American audience; what he created was a sort of hybrid collection, at once Italian yet decidedly diluted for an American consumer. The white label collection made its initial debut in Milan in 1978 and was then marketed strategically in the USA under the directional auspices of the newly created Giorgio Armani Men's Wear Corporation in 1979. This initiative made its spectacular debut in America on February 1, 1980 with the release of Ian Schrader's American Gigolo for which Armani designed a forty-piece wardrobe for John Travolta who was originally to play the lead character of Julian Kay. I argue here that beyond the obvious and clear impact American and Italian cinema have had on the designer, the influence is directly palpable in the textiles he develops and uses. Through the theoretical lens of “haptic looking” I expose a vital and significant intersection between the Italian cultural propensity for touch and the American obsession with visual stimuli in the work of Armani as it is presented on the “big screen.”