The purple carpet, if you happen to can consider it, was as soon as a trend useless zone, a sequin-strewn wasteland the place good style went to die. For years, many stars served as their very own stylist or whipped up their very own garments, with predictably patchy outcomes. In 1989, when Demi Moore confirmed as much as the Academy Awards in a spandex-bike-shorts-and-corset ensemble of her personal design, Girls’s Put on Day by day referred to as it an “Oscar Fright.”

However earlier this 12 months, Moore dominated awards-season best-dressed lists, profitable raves for a chic, metallic Oscars robe with a plunging neckline and a skirt that swept to the ground, pooling in a shimmering puddle. The costume was the work of the Italian designer Giorgio Armani, who died yesterday in Milan on the age of 91—and who was the rationale so many stars put on excessive trend within the first place. Throughout his 50-year solo profession, the designer reworked the purple carpet right into a runway, educating Hollywood how one can costume and harnessing the ability of movie star to construct his world trend empire—and his legacy.

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As a younger man, Armani studied medication and served within the army. He bought his begin within the trend {industry} “nearly by chance,” he informed Time in 1982, by taking a job on the high-end Milanese division retailer La Rinascente. There, he realized about cloth and buyer conduct, and his expertise finally led him to a job with the Italian designer Nino Cerruti. A relationship with Sergio Galeotti, an architect, helped Armani strike out on his personal; though Armani valued the soundness of a salaried job, Galeotti inspired him to create designs below his personal title. In 1975, the 2 of them based the Armani label in Milan.

From his earliest days working in Italy, the designer excelled in each menswear and girls’s clothes—an uncommon feat—and androgyny was a trademark of his work. He was identified for fits, and although they had been typically labeled “energy fits,” they had been the antithesis of high-finance stuffiness. Free and drapey, they evoked the Italian Renaissance supreme of sprezzatura, or “easy magnificence,” and each women and men had been seduced by them. Armani helped make pantsuits stylish for ladies at a time after they had been simply changing into broadly accepted as officewear and eveningwear.

His relationship with Hollywood took off within the Nineteen Eighties. On the time, the purple carpet was a website of chaos. Underneath the Hollywood studio system that had managed the movie {industry} because the late Twenties, in-house wardrobe departments usually served as each designers and stylists, dressing every studio’s steady of actors for premieres and events. That system collapsed within the Nineteen Sixties, liberating actors to decide on their very own initiatives and collaborators however leaving them sartorially adrift. Though some stars had long-standing relationships with A-list trend designers—Audrey Hepburn with Givenchy, Liza Minnelli with Halston—others turned to the Vegas-style glitz of homegrown Hollywood dressmakers comparable to Bob Mackie and Nolan Miller, or made their very own garments, as Moore did. The state of affairs grew so dire that at one level, the Oscars telecast supplied Academy-approved robes and tuxedos free to presenters. Because the present’s costume designer, Ron Talsky, defined to the Day by day Information in 1984, attendees “can be provided strategies on what to put on, however they only confirmed up and no person actually cared how they seemed.”

But Armani noticed a chance: He believed that he might win over American clients by way of the leisure {industry}. Diane Keaton was an early adopter of his designs and in 1978 wore certainly one of his jackets whereas accepting her Oscar for Annie Corridor. Simply a few years later, his profile exploded. He had jumped on the likelihood to decorate Richard Gere’s posh hustler within the 1980 movie American Gigolo, and in Armani’s slouchy, horny, unstructured fits, Gere “did extra for the reason for males’s fashions than any spiffy dresser since Cary Grant,” a trend editor on the Chicago Solar-Occasions gushed on the time. (The understated appears served as harbingers of in the present day’s stealth wealth and quiet luxurious.) Armani’s gross sales soared, and the designer went on to create menswear for a lot of films and TV exhibits, together with Miami Vice, The Untouchables, The Darkish Knight, The Wolf of Wall Avenue, and The Social Community.

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In 1988, Armani opened a palatial 13,000-square-foot boutique on Rodeo Drive, making a daring declare to his self-appointed place as Hollywood’s resident couturier. He put in a VIP showroom and employed a “director of entertainment-industry communications” to function a liaison between the boutique and the purple carpet. He took delight in not paying celebrities for entry, however he didn’t hesitate to supply his most well-liked shoppers free or discounted garments and all-expenses-paid journeys to Milan to sit down within the entrance row at his exhibits.

This was the opening salvo in a red-carpet arms race. Different designers rapidly imitated Armani’s techniques, however he was already an honorary member of the Hollywood elite. Julia Roberts wore an oversize menswear-inspired swimsuit (full with tie) to the 1990 Golden Globes, and Jodie Foster accepted her 1992 Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs in a pale-pink Armani swimsuit with refined silver beading. His clothes grew to become equally standard with Hollywood brokers and energy brokers, such because the director Martin Scorsese, the producer Don Simpson, the Columbia Footage president Daybreak Metal, and the dapper NBA coach Pat Riley. Armani’s relaxed silhouettes and light-weight Italian wools, crepes, and cashmeres labored as properly in Los Angeles as they did in Milan. In 1990, Girls’s Put on Day by day declared the Academy Awards the “Armani Awards.” Because the designer had predicted, by conquering Hollywood, he had conquered America.

Over time, nonetheless, not everybody has applauded the modifications that Armani ushered into Hollywood. Rita Watnick, the proprietor of the celeb-friendly Los Angeles vintage-clothing boutique Lily et Cie, didn’t like that girls had been sporting pants to the Oscars; she blamed Armani for dressing down Hollywood. In 1999, after extra designers had established relationships with celebrities and Oscar appears had turn into extra uniformly tasteful, Anna Wintour recommended that the occasion’s trend had additionally turn into boring, writing in Vogue, “It was sufficient to make you yearn for the memorable trend fake pas of years previous, or at the least a star safe sufficient to forgo designers and stylists and dare to specific herself.”

Armani, for his half, remained steadfast in his selections, and insisted that he maintained values of magnificence in his work it doesn’t matter what modified round him. On the similar time, he appeared to welcome the concept that what occurred on the purple carpet would possibly change once more. In 2018, in the course of the top of the #MeToo protests, when some stars turned clothes right into a type of solidarity—rows and rows of them dressing in all black on the Golden Globes—he appeared to marvel at simply how highly effective an emblem that trend on the purple carpet had turn into. However he additionally famous that he didn’t suppose it was essentially stunning. “The purple carpet,” he wrote in The Guardian, “was all the time a chance for growing new concepts and thus for progress.”