Luxury and Restraintapparent cool rationality of simple clothes rejected designs that flaunted this
image of women as spectacles of sexually charged flesh and glamour. Simpler
dress seemed to offer women freedom from culturally defined notions of the
body that focused attention constantly on the ability to fulfil current physical
ideals.
It was not just the obviousness of sexual provocation that led to minimalism
becoming an alternative to the Versace aesthetic. Designers wanted to move
away from ostentation and the perceived bad taste of the gilt logo, which
was seen as too blatant a symbol of wealth and excess. This represented a
turning away from the ethos of conspicuous consumption as the motivating
force when buying fashion. For the designers I will be concentrating on, a
much subtler, but no less powerful form of status assertion was brought to
play. This could perhaps be called inconspicuous consumption: wearing
clothes whose very simplicity betrays their expense and cultural value, when
quiet, restrained luxury is still revered as the ultimate symbol of both wealth
and intelligence. This contradictory consuming is apparently untainted by
slurs of vanity, and brashness, since its style seems so clearly to be about
restraint and abstinence.
Douglas Coupland’s satirical definition of the significance of Armani’s
appeal mocks the contained sophistication of the designer’s unstructured,
modern tailoring, but it betrayed the potential, covert meanings of this style,
‘Armanism: After Giorgio Armani: an obsession with mimicking the seamless
and (more importantly) controlled ethos of Italian couture. Like Japanese
Minimalism, Armanism reflects a profound inner need for control.’^3
While Armani appeared to snub the decadent extravagance that is such a
feature of high fashion, its focus on detail, on Armani’s desire to demonstrate
an intellectual distancing from trend-led fashion’s frivolous ephemerality, his
work constructed an alternative set of expensive obsessions. This was noted
in the Sunday Times Magazine in 1990: ‘Armani can measure his success as
a series of subtractions’.^4
An advertisement from his campaign of 1994 epitomized the unstructured
tailoring that is Armani’s signature. Both male and female models were clad
in muted fluid linen, their posture conveying a feeling of relaxed confidence;
even the collars of the women’s suits were smoothed away, reducing the
jackets to their most essential form. Nothing was allowed to distract from
this reduced silhouette – the models’ hair was swept back tidily from the
- Coupland, D., Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Generation. London: Abacus,
1997, p. 92. - Howell, G., ‘Giorgio Armani: The Man who Fell to Earth’,Sultans of Style, Thirty Years
of Fashion and Passion. London: Ebury Press, 1990, p. 122.