The Fashion Businessfaces, their sunglasses added to the air of rational anonymity of their figures.
Their natural surroundings reinforced ideals of simple, authentic design,
echoed in the organic unforced lines of their clothes. This aloofness offered
a protective sense of security to the wearer, who was well dressed but never
calling out for attention, never a spectacle of display. Armani’s clothes were
at once anonymous in their simplicity yet recognizably expensive when
inspected up close, their fabric and cut betraying their elite status.
Armani’s need to strip designs to their most basic form expressed not only
an admirably modernist aesthetic, but also his desire to police definitions of
‘good’ taste. Indulgence in clothing is allowed only within the realms of those
knowledgeable enough to appreciate the subtlety of a well-cut jacket, the
sensuality of luxurious, yet deceptively plain, fabrics. Financial and personal
indulgence is as much a part of consuming the sleek trouser suits made by
Armani, as it is in the purchase of a sparkling Versace outfit, but the former
wear the mask of puritan abstinence, of rational, functional design and the
longevity of the ‘classic’. Such clothes are, Rosalind Coward commented,
‘designed to make a statement about what they feel like. They are designed
to connote a sophisticated sensuality, that enjoys touching itself all the time.’^5
Designers like Jil Sander whose signature style is pared down, minimalist
design is seen as producing clothing for women with careers, women too
busy, and too powerful to wish to dress in the decorative or the spectacular.
Abstinence from such traditionally feminine pursuits is perceived as a sign
of this power, perhaps because it has for so long been seen as a masculine
trait. This essentially is what designers like Armani, Jean Muir and Nicole
Farhi have sought to do: to give women a sense of ease and confidence in
their clothing, a rational anonymity that belies the quality and expense of
their garments. This modesty and understatement provides a ‘neverending
dialectic of status claims and demurrals,’^6 at once ascetically simple, yet
decadently expensive.
Minimalist fashion is concerned with more than its surface simplicity, which
is really an inscrutable mask presented to the world as a feint, belying the
undercurrents of sensuality hidden in the soft fabrics which shift against the
skin. This mask also disguises the wearer’s aspirational desires, their search
not just for tactile experiences, but also their wish for legitimate status, valid
unquestionable identity, which is traditionally associated with ‘old money’,
stability increasingly hard to find in the fluid job market of the late twentieth
century. As Bob Colacello noted in an article on Sander in Vanity Fair in
1996, ‘As with [Ralph] Lauren behind all the restrained good taste is a
- Coward, R., Female Desire: Women’s Sexuality Today. London: Paladin, 1984, p. 31.
- Davis, F., Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994, p. 64.