In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the protagonist Patrick Bateman often chides those who mislabel Armani. He is even offended when a lowly officer is wearing the same Armani suit he owns. So often referenced, the label almost becomes a character in the book. To Bateman – a man with a flashy Wall Street job who delivers sanctimonious spiels on progress while moonlighting as a killer – the brand lent a convincing air of taste. The suit made the man appear impeccable, even harmless.

For long now, Armani has been the sartorial choice for certain kinds of men – hustlers, tricksters, con‑men – and, only occasionally, the noble man. It is no accident that costume designers for films such as The Wolf of Wall Street, Inglourious Basterds, and The Dark Knight have scoured the label’s archives. How did Armani’s designs come to serve as shorthand for a carefully constructed ideal of masculinity?

It’s doubtful anyone meeting Giorgio Armani in the 1950s could have foreseen his place in haute couture. He wasn’t born in France, after all. Nor were his designs elaborate. His claim to fame rested on what was then a revolutionary idea – that a suit’s true elegance lay in how effortlessly it could be worn.

With no formal training to his name, Armani could ill afford the capricious whims of an artist and be indifferent to the demands of economics. He was a designer “conscious of the commercial need to accommodate as broad a segment of the consuming public as possible,” as art historian Christopher Breward observes in The Suit: Form, Function, and Style.

At a time when stars often dressed themselves – sometimes with disastrous results – Armani saw an opportunity to become a messiah in the world of film, and he seized it. He barnacled himself within Hollywood, changing how designers and A-listers collaborated, cultivating personal relationships with actors, directors, and sports figures, and even establishing an L.A. office to liaise directly with stars’ stylists. As one of his long-time employees told The New York Times, “[Armani] was far more interested in the world at large than the bubble of fashion.”

While Armani was finding a foothold in the world of 1970s fashion, modern masculinity was negotiating a tension much like that of his label, caught between a rising appetite for the new and an unyielding loyalty to tradition. In his 1974 book The Male Machine, Marc Feigen Fasteau identifies the new pressures frazzling an already fraught American masculinity in the 1970s and 1980s: sexual liberation, women entering the workplace, and gay visibility. “[T]he male machine is not a real person, but a stereotype, an ideal image of masculinity shared, with minor variations, by nearly every male…. No one fully conforms to it… but it is the most fundamental standard, the yardstick against which we measure ourselves as men,” he wrote. This static model of masculinity was beginning to change, which meant that modern men needed to look adaptable and stylish without appearing to abandon their traditional authority. With this dynamic model of masculinity to aspire to, men craved a uniform of selfhood.

It was Armani’s unswerving sameness that made him a designer for all. What he made obvious with his dalliance with Hollywood is that he didn’t care much for developing a couture trademark. It would seem, he cared about the prospect of democratised fashion long before it was considered mainstream. The fact that his label began with menswear, a rather staid affair for haute couture, only made him more of an outlier. In Made in Milan, Martin Scorsese’s 1990 documentary on Armani, he admits: “Anything that’s rigidly defined, that’s perfect and unchangeable irritates me… That’s a weakness of mine that affects both my life and my work.” Armani no doubt saw himself as an anti‑traditionalist. He avowed that fashion should forgo self‑importance, that it should care less for itself and more for the people wearing the clothes. Many decades later, this philosophy would be co‑opted by tech mavericks, who insist they care more for their users than for advertisers promising them wealth. What Armani has in common with them is the millions of dollars they have made from the business of playing noble men.

At his peak, Armani was called a “design conservative” – a reputation he earned by openly dismissing the “novel” clothes of houses like Gucci and Prada. What critics and tastemakers praised, he often reviled. The carping outsider was a position he relished. In 2014, when Anna Wintour skipped one of his shows, he retorted: “She is influential and powerful. But, perhaps, I’m influential as well.” By presenting himself – and, by extension, his designs – as aloof and above trends, Armani transformed disinterest into confident authority. This attitude was borrowed by all who wore him, including Ellis’s Bateman, who constantly tries to one‑up his peers by patronisingly instructing them on how to be fashionable. Even when he feels antagonised, Bateman maintains a composed exterior while the narration slips into a harried, insecure monologue. The key to being cool in Bateman’s – and, by large, the modern man’s – world isn’t thinking coolly but pretending to be unaffected by anyone and everyone. Armani made wearing this guise of impenetrable detachment more easily obtainable.

For the modern man, Armani ignored what was expected of a prudent tastemaker, which was to defer to tradition rather than redefine it. In Scorsese’s documentary, Armani gutted the traditional suit with his bare hands. In a few rapid movements, he excised the shoulder pads and canvas linings, revealing a raffish silhouette. Then he dressed models and actresses in the once-exclusively masculine suit, feminizing it and, some say, revolutionizing it by giving men the possibility not only to desire but also to be desired themselves. He then put this feminized suit on a man playing a gigolo. In American Gigolo, Richard Gere struts through a lavish collection of Armani‑labelled jackets, ties, and shirts; after selecting the right outfit, he inspects himself in the mirror. With this single scene, Armani became the perfect uniform for the sought‑after, often sleazy bachelor.

Sean Parker, characterised in David Fincher’s The Social Network as a Machiavellian troll with questionable sexual conduct, layered Armani’s tailored jackets over casual T‑shirts and jeans. The cuts of these designs, bereft of the inflexibility of suits past, created the look of a genius who couldn’t care less about what others thought of him. (Even though they did, in fact, care.) When Justin Timberlake signed on to play Parker, his first act was to arrange a fitting at the Armani store in Beverly Hills. Indifference too needed to be styled carefully.

The tech bro’s fascination with optimisation – of both his products and himself – had long been mastered by Armani, whose cult of personality became part of an ensemble of masculinity. Wearing his clothes was to speak a language of discipline, and Armani played along. “He operates with what those who know him describe as extraordinary focus,” writes Mead, one of many journalists who detailed his exercise routines and diet. The clothes he wore – what he described as a “uniform” of jackets, pullovers, often blue, and trousers – were part of his regimented celebrity. He implied he did not have time for something as trite as maximalism, citing his “[insistence on] rigorous simplicity.” This performance of restraint lent credibility to designs that required little from their wearer. In short, Armani’s sameness was its novelty.

Before American Gigolo, Armani posted modest sales of about $90,000; after the movie, they rocketed to $135 million. A decade later, Women's Wear Daily dubbed the Oscars “The Armani Awards.” Everyone who was anyone wore his menswear. Scandalously enough, this included the women. That he was the one designer allowing it made him unconventional, even if the concept of gender‑neutral suits itself was borrowed from his mentor, Nino Cerruti.

While Armani did not invent male vanity, he made it operable, predictable, and saleable. His legacy is double‑edged: he liberated men from stiff formality and, in doing so, supplied a cosmetic language of selfhood that required no inward reckoning. Armani taught a generation how to look complete and, as Ellis reminds us, looking complete can be the most efficient way of concealing what is empty inside.