Giorgio Armani turned the Hollywood red carpet into a runway.
The iconic fashion designer, whose death was announced Wednesday at the age of 91, is synonymous with awards-show fashion: Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Demi Moore, Beyoncé, Denzel Washington and Sean Penn have all worn Armani to the Oscars.
But he first turned the Academy Awards into a fashion show in 1990, when he dressed Julia Roberts, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange, some of the hottest young A-listers of the moment. He also pulled off a coup by dressing 85-year-old Jessica Tandy, who won Best Actress for “Driving Miss Daisy.”
Before that, star style barely registered. “Stylist” was not a job. Formal wear tended to come off the rack, not from fashion designers, or be provided by the wardrobe departments of movie studios.
“A lot of the looks were really gaudy or over the top,” Nancy MacDonell, fashion historian and author of “Empresses of Seventh Avenue,” told The Post. “It was Bob Mackie or Nolan Miller or costume designers who do film and Broadway.”
Armani, though, put Foster — who, the year before, attended in what looked like a taffeta prom dress — in a chic silk trouser suit. Roberts, still a starlet, wore an understated, earth-toned tank dress. Pfeiffer showed up in body-skimming black with long sleeves.
“These women looked powerful,” Clare Sauro, a fashion historian and curator at Drexel University, told The Post in 2016. “They stood in contrast to the big poufy skirts of the time. They had an understated glamour. It was the transition from ’80s opulence to ’90s minimalism.”
It prompted Women’s Wear Daily to dub the evening the “Armani Awards.” And after that, designers clamored to claim celebs as their red-carpet models.
“The whole Armani thing is refined and sophisticated,” MacDonell said. “It let people present themselves very differently. He transformed the way these people are seen on red carpets.”
But Armani was hardly an overnight success. While Diane Keaton had accepted her 1978 Best Actress Oscar, for “Annie Hall,” in an oversized Armani jacket her character might have loved, Michelle Pfeiffer famously responded to his first offer of formal wear with: “I can dress myself, and who is Giorgio Armani?”
Instead, the designer really got his start in Hollywood on the big screen. Before the 1980 release of “American Gigolo,” starring Richard Gere and directed by Paul Schrader (his next movie is “Basics of Philosophy“), Armani was largely a secret of Italy’s well-dressed.
“It was a perfect match,” Schrader, who flew to Milan to meet with Armani after seeing his designs in Uomo Vogue, told The Post. “He wanted to branch out and we wanted to go high style, high profile.”
The goal was to imbue Gere’s character, an expensive male escort in Los Angeles, a “European sheen — formal suits with the unstructured look.”
The movie blew up and so did the designer. Suddenly, every studio executive in Hollywood, not to mention every stockbroker in Manhattan, wanted an Armani suit to make them look like a power player.
And the designer dove right in to the glamour of Tinseltown — opening a shop on tony Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and hiring society journalist Wanda McDaniel to handle VIP outreach.
“[Armani] was very smart,” said MacDonell. “He created a VIP dressing room in his store and a lot of relationships were facilitated” with celebs who made him look as good as he made them look.
“You can do 12 years’ worth of ad campaigns and it won’t add up to Angelina Jolie getting photographed in your dress,” MacDonell added.
Gere, Foster and Pfeiffer all quickly became associated with the coolly sophisticated look of the Armani brand. So much so that, his employee McDaniel once said Foster “would call us up and say, ‘Just tell me what to wear.'”
Of course, that kind of success inevitably inspires jealousy.
Aramani once recalled competitor Gianne Versace telling him, “I dress sluts. You dress church ladies.”
He grew up a world away from Hollywood, geographically and psychologically. Born in 1934 in Piacenza, Italy, Armani initially pursued a career in medicine before enrolling in the army in his early twenties. His first stint in fashion was as a window dresser at the Milan department store La Rinascente in 1957.
In the 1960s, he worked for a number of fashion houses, including Nino Cerutti, before launching his namesake brand in 1975 with both menswear and womenswear collections.
As Schrader remembers Armani, he indulged the old-school Italian way of drinking wine with lunch — but his ambition kept him from overdoing it.
“He poured a couple fingers of wine into his glass and filled the rest with water,” Schrader said. “So it only looked like he was drinking wine.”
Armani also worshiped the movies and had a “great knowledge of it,” director Martin Scorsese told Harper’s Bazaar. The two worked together on “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” with Armani elevating the modern-gangster look. (For his part, Scorsese said, “I have a weakness for Armani’s blue blazers. My closet is overflowing with them.”)
Among the other films on which Armani collaborated were “The Untouchables” as well as Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” — perfect, because an Armani suit is exactly what an aspiring macher like Jordan Belfort actually would have worn in the ’90s.
Celebs even used Armani as a secret weapon.
When Sharon Stone auditioned for her career-catapulting role in “Basic Instinct,” she has said, “I had bought this Giorgio Armani suit, which for me at that time was every last penny I had. They had these sheer blouses and so I bought this very sheer, almost nude color blouse, and wore nothing under it … I got the job.”
It’s hard to say if Armani would have approved. He certainly didn’t always love the way stars wore his clothes.
“One thing these stars don’t know how to do at all is hold their purses correctly,” he told Harper’s Bazaar in 2007. “And have you seen how these girls are walking on the red carpet? Walking properly in heels is incredibly important; it’s a clear sign of your birth. Not that I was born noble myself, but … You know what’s missing? The old profession of a Pygmalion, just like ‘My Fair Lady.'”
He called Madonna “very difficult” when the Material Girl asked to replace the hook on a cape with a tie.
McDaniel, his right-hand woman for decades, once recalled delivering five dresses to an actress only to discover she also had garment bags from a host of other designers. When she explained it to Armani, McDaniel told Harper’s Bazaar, he instructed her to walk away and bring his dresses with her: “I don’t audition.”
True to form for a perfectionist, Armani may have come up with the ultimate epitaph for himself: “I’ve never taken drugs; yet for me the surge of adrenaline I get from my work is better than any hallucination or artificial high,” he wrote in “Per Amore,” a book about work. “It’s a kind of orgasm.”