On American Gigolo, Giorgio Armani, and the night the suit changed forever.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, something shifted in menswear.
Richard Gere stepped onto screens and red carpets in tailoring that didn't feel rigid. Soft shoulders. Fluid jackets. Pleated trousers with movement. Behind that shift was Giorgio Armani — the man who deconstructed the suit and, in doing so, redefined what it meant for a man to dress with power.
This is the third entry in our Anovair's Idols series. Where Steve McQueen defined the rebel and Ayrton Senna defined the champion, Gere defined something quieter and harder to pin down: the modern man. The one who had stopped trying to look hard, and started looking expensive without trying.
A boy from Philadelphia
Richard Tiffany Gere was born in 1949 in Philadelphia, the second of five children, raised in a Methodist family on a farm outside Syracuse, New York.
He played trumpet seriously enough to consider a career in music. He won a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, then dropped out before graduating. He moved to New York, then London, then back to New York again, working in regional theatre and waiting for the kind of break that most actors wait for forever.
It came in 1980. He was thirty years old. The film was American Gigolo. And the wardrobe — every piece of it, head to toe — had been designed by a then-relatively-unknown Italian tailor named Giorgio Armani.
Nothing in menswear was the same afterwards.
American Gigolo, 1980
The plot of American Gigolo is almost beside the point. Gere plays Julian Kaye, a Los Angeles escort who services wealthy older women, becomes entangled in a murder, and spends most of the film moving through the city in immaculate clothes while saxophones play in the background.
What made the film matter — what makes it still matter — was the wardrobe.
There is a now-famous scene, early in the film, in which Julian lays out his clothes for the evening on his bed. Shirts in cream, sand, and faded blue. Ties arranged like a colour wheel. A jacket, soft enough to look almost casual, draped beside them. He picks the combination slowly, deliberately, the way a man chooses a weapon.
It was the first time mainstream cinema had treated a man's wardrobe as the centre of the drama. And every piece in that scene — every shirt, every tie, every jacket — was Giorgio Armani.
The Armani revolution
To understand what Armani did, you have to understand what the suit looked like before him.
For most of the 20th century, men's tailoring had been rigid. Heavy canvassed chests. Padded shoulders. Stiff lapels. A jacket that held its own architecture whether or not there was a body inside it. The suit, in other words, was armour — designed to project authority by making the wearer look broader, harder, more imposing than he actually was.
Armani saw it differently. Beginning in the late 1970s, he started removing things. He took out the heavy canvas. He softened the shoulders until they almost disappeared. He let the lapels drape rather than stand. He chose lighter fabrics — wools that moved, linens that breathed, blends that draped. The result was a jacket that hung from the shoulders rather than building them up. A suit that revealed the man inside, rather than disguising him.
It was a quiet revolution. And it needed a face.
The face
Gere was that face — and not by accident.
He was tall, athletic, but slim. Soft-featured. He moved with a dancer's looseness rather than a leading man's swagger. He looked, in other words, exactly like the kind of body Armani's tailoring had been built for. The deconstructed jacket draped on him the way it never could have on John Wayne or Sean Connery. The pleated trousers moved with his stride. The unstructured shoulder line read as elegant rather than weak because Gere himself read that way.
After American Gigolo, the partnership continued for decades. Gere wore Armani on red carpets, in interviews, in Pretty Woman — where Julia Roberts famously said the line "You're late" to a Gere in charcoal Armani, and a generation of men decided that was the look they wanted at thirty-five. Armani dressed him for the Oscars. He dressed him for his second wedding. He dressed him for almost every public moment of the next forty years.
It was the longest sustained actor-designer relationship in the history of cinema. It still is.
The lesson
What Gere and Armani did together was not really about clothes. It was about a question that menswear had not asked seriously for a long time: what if a man didn't need to look strong to look powerful?
The answer they gave was the soft jacket, the pleated trouser, the loose silk shirt left open at the throat. Clothes that suggested confidence rather than performing it. Clothes that whispered.
Forty years later, that whisper is what most well-dressed men are still listening for. The current movement toward soft tailoring, neutral palettes, and quiet luxury — every Loro Piana cardigan, every Brunello Cucinelli blazer, every modern silhouette that prizes movement over structure — descends, directly or indirectly, from the night Gere laid those Armani shirts on a Los Angeles bed in 1980.
A final thought
Richard Gere is now in his seventies. He still dresses, almost without exception, in soft tailored jackets and pleated trousers — the same silhouette that made him an icon at thirty.
That is, in the end, the test of real style. Not whether you can carry a look at the peak of your fame, but whether the look still makes sense forty years later, on the same man, in a different world.
The Armani jacket still makes sense. The pleated trouser still makes sense. The open collar, the soft shoulder, the refusal to perform — all of it still makes sense.
That is what Richard Gere, more than almost any other man of his generation, gave to the rest of us. A way of dressing that does not depend on being young, or famous, or anything in particular. A way of dressing that simply works.
— The Anovair Team
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