MILAN — “I haven’t got any complaint yet, so it may all be OK,” said Italian journalist Giusi Ferre’ at the presentation of the book she wrote on Giorgio Armani, referring to the designer’s reaction.
Published by Marsilio, the book features a provocative, unexpected title: “The radical sex,” and hits stores today [Nov. 26].
“I really wanted to use the word sex but I wanted to define it,” explained Ferre’. “Through his fashion, Armani communicated a precise sexuality, controlled but strong at the same time. And it’s radical because he put the accent on a liquid convergence of the two genders.”
The journalist better clarifies this idea in the preface of the book, where she draws the cultural scenario which served as backdrop for Armani’s revolutionary approach to men’s and women’s fashion.
“It was Giorgio Armani’s fashion to express, almost unwittingly, the idea of gender when between the Seventies and the Eighties gender studies were starting to flourish. These were taking the steps from a wave of the feminist movement and were finding ideas in the analysis of both the post-structuralism and French deconstructionism, especially Michael Foucalt and Jacques Derrida,” Ferré writes in the preface.
The book, which is the first of a new fashion-focused series curated by expert Maria Luisa Frisa for Marsilio, is organized in 12 chapters, analyzing through both texts and images specific aspects characterizing Armani’s work.
For example, the first is dedicated to the jacket, which can be considered Armani’s signature items and which was protagonist of the “Made in Milan” documentary filmed by Martin Scorsese in 1990.