In the 1970s, the fashion designer Giorgio Armani, who has died aged 91, anticipated two permanent and interdependent cultural shifts: the rise in the cult of the gym, which made every man’s physique his own responsibility, rather than a tailor’s; and the end of constriction in men’s clothing.
Even before he showed his first collection, in 1975, Armani had been challenging ideas about the male suit and overcoat as they had been constructed since the 1790s – on a basis of stiff canvas, interlining, padding and special stitching, so as to reshape a man’s torso to look as much as possible like a classical statue. He discarded this armature that helped hide imperfections. And when he draped a fluid suede jacket on the toned body of Richard Gere in the 1980 movie American Gigolo, he finally knocked the stuffing out of tailoring. It has never quite returned.
