Sam Claflin Walks the Vogue World 2026: Milano Runway in a Piece of Fashion (and Hollywood) History
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Sam Claflin just made history at Vogue World: Milano.
The Daisy Jones and the Six actor walked the Vogue World: Milano runway wearing one of the most iconic pieces in fashion and Hollywood history: Richard Gere’s original costume from the movie American Gigolo, which was designed by the Italian great Giorgio Armani, just five years into his career. Costuming the film was considered by many to be the thing that helped crystallize the designer’s growing power and helped broadly change the direction of men’s fashion. As Radhika Seth wrote at the time of Mr. Armani’s passing, “The film brought Armani international acclaim and revolutionized men’s tailoring, transforming the suit from a boxy workwear staple into something loose, light and decidedly elegant.”
As Mr. Armani himself told The Guardian in 2013, the costumes for American Gigolo “succeeded in displaying the sensual, natural feel of my style and the new relationship between the garment and the body it represented.”
It is no great secret that Giorgio Armani’s menswear designs reset the way men dress in the 1980s and into the ’90s, and that his influence would then extend to womenswear and beyond. In his obituary for the designer, our own Luke Leitch wrote that designing the film’s costumes was “the coup that has lived largest in Armani mystique.” Mr. Armani himself called his costumes “a sensation: everybody wanted to know what Gere looked so great wearing. So it gave me a sudden positive notoriety.” The rest, as they say, is history.
And what a history it was—for 50 years Mr. Armani built an empire, one that he owned and oversaw independently, even as other labels were hoovered up into conglomerates, and made him a billionaire and a name with household recognition across the globe. Say just that lilting surname—Armani—and you can instantly picture something deeply Italian; perhaps an elegant, soft-shouldered suit, a woman in glamorously understated shades of greige, or, most of all, Richard Gere looking low-key and sexy in his Armani furnishings. By marrying craftsmanship to innate style and an unerring business acumen, Mr. Armani became a symbol of Italian might within the global fashion industry.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.