by Dana Thomas
IN THE 1950S, following the advent of television and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as the Hollywood Anti-Trust Case that forced studios to sell off their theater chains, the industry suffered a financial slump and changed the way business was done. Actors and technical staff—including costumers—were gradually released from their studio contracts; many costume departments were shut down. To make matters worse, films began to take on a more realistic tone, with actors in more everyday, normal clothes—no ermine-trimmed peignoirs or sequined siren gowns required. By the mid-1960s, movie costumer designers were nearly an extinct breed. “They closed their workrooms down, they got rid of their designers,” the designer Bob Mackie, who started as an assistant in the early 1960s for Jean Louis and Edith Head, told me. “Paramount got rid of Edith Head; it was all changing at that point. I had always wanted to be the designer at a studio but when I got into the business I realized it was over.”
With no more Edith Head or Helen Rose or Jean Louis to provide glamorous wardrobes gratis, stars were forced to shop themselves for premieres and awards shows, including the Oscars. They’d frequent local designers such as Don Loper or James Galanos, department stores such as Bullock’s and I. Magnin, and a trendy European-style fashion boutique called Giorgio Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive. For most of the twentieth century, Rodeo Drive was an unpretentious street, with pharmacies, bookstores, and a few good restaurants, including the Brown Derby and Romanoff’s. In the 1950s, there were handful of haberdasheries where actors such as Tyrone Power and Cary Grant shopped, and a divine lingerie boutique called Juel Park, where Beverly Hills’ most soigné ladies, including Joan Crawford and Gene Tierney, would have their silk and lace negligees made to measure. But in general, “Rodeo Drive wasn’t a fashion street,” Fred Hayman told me—at least until he arrived.
The only way to understand Hollywood dressing, or in fact luxury retail in the United States today, is to talk to Fred Hayman, the man who introduced modern luxury shopping to Americans with his fashion boutique Giorgio Beverly Hills. In October 2004, I rang Hayman’s office in a five-story building with his signature yellow and white striped awnings on Canon Drive, two blocks east of Rodeo. In his early eighties, Hayman is retired now but still goes to the office a couple of days a week to manage his store’s legacy. He immediately proposed we lunch at Spago next door a few days later. When I arrived at the famous Beverly Hills eatery at the appointed time, I was ushered to what was obviously Hayman’s regular table. He had arrived early and was busy receiving good wishes from other patrons. Dressed nattily in a perfectly pressed shirt, trousers, and a jacket—a rarity in Los Angeles, especially at lunch—Hayman stood to greet me. He is a small, elegant man with silver hair parted neatly on the side, a crisp continental accent, and gracious manners, all of which indicate not only his upbringing but also the secret to his success.
Born in 1925 and raised in Saint Gall, a small textile town in Switzerland, Hayman immigrated as a boy to New York with his mother and stepfather. At seventeen, he went to work as an apprentice in the kitchen at Conrad Hilton’s famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and over the years rose through the ranks to become banquet manager. In 1955, Hilton asked Hayman to move to Los Angeles to oversee the dining rooms of the new Beverly Hilton. Hayman brought with him a staff of fifty, primarily from the Waldorf, and demanded of them what would become his signature managerial style: personalized service, impeccable manners, quiet perfection. Soon the Beverly Hilton became the place to be, with stars such as Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, and Irene Dunne dropping in regularly for drinks or dinner.
In the late 1950s, Hayman invested in a building on Dayton Way just off Rodeo Drive that housed a women’s clothing boutique called Giorgio. Surprised to find out how much he enjoyed retailing, Hayman quit the hotel, bought out his partners, and took over the store. He acquired the shop next door, number 273 Rodeo Drive, connected the two, dressed them up with cheerful yellow and white striped awnings, and put in a pool table and an oak bar “with a few bottles of booze,” he told me. Uniformed barmen served complimentary tea, cappuccino, wine, and cocktails to customers as they shopped. There was a denlike corner with a fireplace, comfortable chairs, and a newspaper rack. Hayman’s third wife, Gale, was the store’s buyer. Hayman chatted up customers such as Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, and Natalie Wood, while Gale and her pretty salesgirls modeled the latest creations by Halston, Diane von Furstenberg, Oscar de la Renta, and Christian Dior. The modus operandi at Giorgio, as at the Beverly Hilton, was personalized service. “We wrote thank-you letters when customers shopped at our store,” Hayman told me. “We had files on all the customers, thick files, and if they hadn’t bought anything in a while, we followed up,” usually with a handwritten note that would be delivered by a Silver Wraith Rolls-Royce with the license plate number 273. Giorgio “wasn’t a ladies’ store,” Hayman explained. “It was like a home.”
The Haymans’ only true competition was Gucci, the first European luxury brand to open its own boutique on Rodeo Drive, in 1968. Aldo Gucci, son of the founder and head of the company at the time, sensed that Rodeo Drive was going to evolve into an important luxury shopping street. The Gucci store was impressive: an imposing glass-and-bronze door gave way to a spacious main salon with Gucci green carpeting and eight Renaissance-style Murano glass and Florentine bronze chandeliers. Upstairs there was a couture salon called the Galleria that VIP shoppers accessed via a glass elevator. Gucci had a good celebrity following: Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, and John Wayne were regular customers. Frank Sinatra so loved Gucci loafers that he sent his secretary over to the new Rodeo Drive store buy a pair even before it had opened to the public. By the late 1970s, celebrities, locals, and tourists were snapping up Gucci handbags—ranging in price from $100 for basic leather to $11,000 for eighteen-karat-gold-trimmed lizard—so fast that the store manager complained, “Our biggest problem is shortages.” “Gucci was as hot as could be,” remembers Hayman. “There were lines around the block.” Beverly Hills became so “Guccied out” that students at nearby Beverly Hills High School raised a faux Gucci flag on campus.
Within a few years, Giorgio and Gucci had turned Rodeo Drive into a destination address for luxury shopping, attracting not only wealthy customers but also other brands. Ralph Lauren opened his first Polo store there in 1971. Yves Saint Laurent, Céline, Courrèges, and Fred Joaillier soon followed, replacing local merchants and even a gas station with their expensive, exclusive boutiques. The superrich flocked to the street, and spent voraciously. Hayman was once forced to close Giorgio after an Arab client arrived with his harem and bought every evening gown in the store. In 1977, Giorgio Beverly Hills grossed $5 million, which meant that it sold four times more merchandise per square foot than Bloomingdale’s flagship in Manhattan, then the country’s most successful department store, according to Anthony Cook, who charted the rise of Rodeo Drive in New West magazine. “The times were good and we were right for the times,” Hayman said with a laugh. In 1985, Chanel opened its first store on the American mainland on Rodeo Drive. Its decor lived up to the street’s growing reputation of ostentatious luxury: crystal shelves, suede walls, and a skylight inspired by the crystal stopper of the Chanel No. 5 perfume bottle. Writer Judith Krantz, who set her best-selling 1978 novel Scruples on Rodeo Drive, called the street “the most staggering display of luxury in the Western world.”
It only could have happened in Los Angeles. L.A. was a young, liberal city, settled by people who fled their conservative roots to start anew. Its primary business—cinema—was new. Its money was new. There was no pretension, no snobbism, no traditional class rules—yet. To shop in luxury boutiques, you didn’t have to come from a good family or dress well, as was the case in America’s old, traditional cities. If you had the dough, you could go.
Oscar time was the busiest, with stars crisscrossing Rodeo Drive from boutique to jeweler to beauty salon. “Stars would spend months deciding what they were going to wear to the Oscars,” remembers Gale Hayman. �
�Nobody sent them clothes.” The problem was, most stars didn’t have cultivated taste and they didn’t have the studio costumers to guide them anymore. L.A.’s reputation as a laid-back city accentuated the problem. Folks knew how to dress down, but no one knew how to dress up anymore. The society ladies such as Betsey Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan still had James Galanos to dress them in southern California couture, and Bob Mackie designed spangly getups for Cher and comedian Carol Burnett. But most other celebrities were on their own, sometimes with disastrous results. Who could forget when Demi Moore walked the Oscars’ red carpet in 1989 in a black cape and spandex bicycle pants?
They needed guidance, someone with good taste to dress them as elegantly as their predecessors. And Giorgio Armani was happy to oblige.
BACK IN THE MID-1970S, a new generation of Italian ready-to-wear designers emerged, turning the industrial city of Milan into an important fashion capital almost overnight. Among them were Gianni Versace, who came from the southern town of Reggio di Calabria, and made his name with sexy sequin and leather clothes that were inspired by hookers; Gianfranco Ferré, an architect by training who made highly structured clothes; and Giorgio Armani, a handsome, quiet man who invented what has become known as the soft suit.
To understand Giorgio Armani, and the austerity of his clothes, you have to go back to his childhood. He was born in 1934, the middle child of three, in Piacenza, an industrial town forty miles outside of Milan that was bombed relentlessly by the Allies. “Sometimes I would find myself with my little sister, who was three years old, hiding in a hole while a plane tried to gun us down,” he remembers. Often, when he was out playing with his friends, the bomb alerts would sound and they’d scurry into shelters. But one day, he wasn’t with them—he had something else to do, he doesn’t remember what—and “they died and I lived,” he told me during an interview in his office in Milan. “It was just good luck.” Another day, he wasn’t so lucky. The neighborhood boys were playing with gunpowder from an Allied cartridge they had found, and it exploded as Giorgio bent over to look. He was covered in flames. He spent forty days in the hospital, where he was submerged in vats of pure alcohol. He still carries a scar on his foot where the buckle of his sandal burned into his skin. “Those were disagreeable times,” he says in his understated way, “and their memory remains.”
But even as a child, with the world coming down on his head, Armani’s talent for visual aesthetics emerged. One Christmas shortly after the war ended, his mother set the table for the holiday feast of roast chicken. Little Giorgio looked on with displeasure—he did not approve of her arrangement. “There were too many things—the centerpiece, with flowers, and then small flowers everywhere. I remember telling my mother, ‘Do one of these things, not both.’” His mother reeled at first, but after her son left the room, she removed the centerpiece. “She understood that there was something different about me, that I had a sensitivity for certain things, for aesthetics, for exteriors,” he says. “She realized that I could tell if something was beautiful or ugly.” From then on, she asked his opinion on decor. Looking back, Armani says that she was the only woman “who really influenced the direction of my work and my life…with her way of being, so simple but rigorous and severe at the same time. She spoke very little but with words that counted.”
In 1955, Armani enrolled in medical school in Milan, but he soon realized he was not suited to be a doctor and returned to Milan, where he got a job at a local department store called La Rinascente. During his eight years there, Armani worked as a photographer, a window dresser, an assistant men’s wear buyer, and the fashion coordinator. It was a good job, but a lousy fashion job. Men with money and taste had their own tailors in Italy back then. Those who didn’t had to buy off the rack from the sorry selection of baggy, saggy suits churned out by manufacturers in few sizes. Armani was appalled by this and decided to do something about it. He went to work for Cerruti as an assistant men’s wear designer for a collection drolly named Hitman, and learned the essentials of suit construction and manufacturing. He came up with several new approaches to men’s suits, including dabbling in deconstruction. After a few years, Armani left Cerruti to launch a freelance career. “I was ready to pursue my own path,” he told me. “I wanted to discover my own aesthetic.”
In 1975, Armani and his boyfriend, Sergio Galeotti, scraped together $10,000 in start-up capital, rented a two-room office on Corso Venezia, and launched the Giorgio Armani fashion company. Galeotti handled the business; Armani designed. For his first men’s wear collection, which he presented to buyers in a first-floor apartment in the building where he and Galeotti lived, Armani introduced his new silhouette: the unstructured suit. Armani abandoned the traditional stiff English wools and flannels in navy, black, and charcoal in favor of lighter, pliable fabrics such as linen, wool jersey, and woven textiles in muted tones such as olive, mauve, slate blue, and a gray-beige dubbed “greige” that later became his signature. Three months later, he did the same for women in traditional men’s fabric. “This was the time of feminism,” Armani told me. “Women needed clothing that went much further than the little dress or a tight little suit—clothing that provided strength and power. Yves Saint Laurent did it, and it worked well, but I thought it should be translated into things that were easier to understand, more adaptable to a greater number of people. So I tried to alter this spirit a bit, with the help of women in my office who saw men’s clothing and said, ‘Why can’t we have this, too?’”
Fred Pressman, the visionary owner of the New York men’s wear store Barneys, thought Armani’s suits were genius and, according to Joshua Levine in The Rise and Fall of the House of Barneys, Pressman flew to Milan in June 1976 and offered $10,000 to sell Armani’s clothes—an enormous amount for a fledging company. In return, Armani gave Barneys exclusivity to sell the brand in the New York market. “That meant Saks won’t get it, Bloomingdale’s won’t get it, Bergdorf couldn’t get it, the specialty stores couldn’t get it,” Barneys executive Ed Glantz told Levine. “It was a real coup.” Armani’s early American customers were the in-the-know sorts, like director Martin Scorsese, Columbia Pictures president Dawn Steele, Top Gun producer Don Simpson (who, since Armani had limited L.A. distribution, would order twenty black suits at a clip from Barneys in New York), and Bob Le Mond, a talent manager who represented John Travolta, star of the recent hits Saturday Night Fever and Grease.
In 1979, when Travolta was hired to play a high-end Hollywood hustler in director Paul Schrader’s film American Gigolo, Le Mond told to Schrader that Giorgio Armani’s suits would be the perfect look for Travolta’s character: a suave, vain male prostitute in Los Angeles. Schrader and Travolta met with Armani in his studio in Milan and put together a wardrobe for the role. Days before shooting was scheduled to begin, Travolta pulled out to do Urban Cowboy and was replaced by the little-known Richard Gere. It was a perfect fit. Armani’s soft suits swayed with Gere’s swagger, his tight shirts sculpted Gere’s buff torso. Gere was casually formal and heart-stoppingly sexy. The movie lifted Armani’s fashion reputation, but his distribution was still limited to Barneys and a few other department and specialty stores. When Time put Armani on its cover in 1982, only the second designer after Yves Saint Laurent to receive such an honor, his U.S. sales were close to $14 million, a mere 10 percent of his worldwide total. Armani wanted to dress more than Hollywood and Wall Street hotshots. What about the rest of America? They needed great suits, too.
In 1985, Sergio Galeotti died of AIDS. Armani was bereft and poured himself into his work. Not only was he now in charge of design, but he had to come up with and implement the company’s business strategy as well. Looking back at the impact that American Gigolo had publicity-wise, Armani realized that the best way to reach that middle-American audience was to dress its stars. In 1987, he designed the retro-1930s costumes for Brian De Palma’s gangster flick The Untouchables, and suddenly crowds of Americans poured into Armani’s Madison Avenue store, his first in the United Stat
es. The following year, Armani opened a thirteen-thousand-square-foot, glass-front luxury emporium on Rodeo Drive and inaugurated it with a splashy, exclusive benefit at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art for three hundred of Hollywood’s most powerful and famous, with Spago catering and Peter Duchin’s orchestra playing. The tone was set. There was just one thing missing: “I needed to have the right people wearing my clothes the right way,” he said.
For New York, Armani hired Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as his “special events coordinator.” Radziwill wore Armani everywhere she went—the ballet, the opera, charity galas—and soon enough, her much-photographed socialite friends were wearing Armani, too. But what about the West Coast, what about Hollywood? Radziwill told her sister’s niece, Maria Shriver, who lived in Los Angeles, about the job, and Shriver told her friend, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner society editor Wanda McDaniel, who had served as a bridesmaid in Shriver’s 1986 marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. McDaniel, it seemed, had just the right mix of conservative smarts and Hollywood savvy for Armani. She was born and raised in Macon, Missouri, attended the University of Missouri’s famed journalism school, and had worked as society editor first for the Dallas Times-Herald and, since 1977, for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “I remember my first week here I went to an event at the Beverly Wilshire and there was Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, and Gene Kelly,” McDaniel told me over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m so out of my league here.’ I mean, in Dallas it was the Cowboys’ football coach Tom Landry and quarterback Roger Staubach. Those were the big stars. So I walk up to Cary Grant and said, ‘I just want to say hello because I don’t think I’m going to last past the first week of this job.’”