Giorgio Armani’s Touch in Cinema

Giorgio Armani’s hand is on GoodFellas, Casino, The Untouchables, The Social Network, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the suits Bruce Wayne wears in The Dark Knight. Most people know the name from a perfume bottle or a storefront. That the same man spent forty years inside the movies is known to almost nobody, and the almost is the point: his job was to disappear into other men’s stories. It began in 1980, when his soft, unlined suits went onto Richard Gere in American Gigolo and audiences left the theatre asking about the clothes. Armani called it his crucial moment.

In GoodFellas, the costume designer Richard Bruno marked the moment a boy becomes a gangster with a suit, and the suit was an Armani. Five years later, when Scorsese ran Robert De Niro through some seventy costume changes for Casino, Armani came to the set himself to walk the wardrobe rails. How many of the seventy are his was never formally settled. The photographs of him among the racks exist all the same.

The Social Network gave him a stranger job. Sean Parker, the internet millionaire Justin Timberlake plays, had bought his own suits in real life at the Armani shop in Palo Alto, cut from patterns the house had since retired. For the film, Parker’s screen wardrobe was cut from those same retired patterns, Giorgio himself helping see it done. The fiction was fitted from the real man’s paper.

In The Wolf of Wall Street, Sandy Powell dressed Jordan Belfort’s rise as a ladder of tailoring: cheap suits off the peg at the bottom, full bespoke at the top, and on the rung between them, an Armani. There are only two Armani suits in the whole picture. They are the ones that mean he is climbing.

Inside the jackets Christian Bale wears as Bruce Wayne there is a label, stitched the way Milan stitches them for living clients: Giorgio Armani, for Bruce Wayne. The suits were made to measure for a man who does not exist: cut, fitted, finished, as though he had stood for them. The audience never sees the label. It was sewn in anyway.