The Black Power Suit is back for Fall 2013…Are You Prepared? @eriktampa

It’s back.  Suits are back, are you prepared.

Repost of wsj.com

Twenty-three years after Vogue magazine declared the era of power dressing over, the power suit is making a return.

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Giorgio Armani launched his line of suits for women in the 1970s.

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Armani dressed fashionable clients like Lauren Hutton in the 1970s.

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Conservative, menswear-influenced power suits like the one worn by TV host Jane Pauley (left) with Bryant Gumbel in 1985, were a corporate uniform for women in the 1980s.

Giorgio Armani

Jerry Hall modeled a striped suit in Armani’s spring 1980 runway show.

Those strong jackets, made iconic in the 1980s, returned in force to fall 2013 runways. Fashion magazines this month are full of ads from Christian Dior, Gucci and, naturally, power-suit pioneer Giorgio Armani, showing the new power looks that are about to hit stores. At more affordable prices, you’ll find suits from Ann Taylor to Banana Republic.

This is an about-face from the casual-Friday-all-week habits of many professionals. What’s more, it may signal the end of a fashion era in which the matchy-matchy suit has been frowned upon in favor of the dresses and belted cardigans popularized by Michelle Obama.

The new power look, as in the ’80s, consists of a jacket and long tailored pants—or, in some versions, a skirt. The tailoring is knife-edge sharp, but the look is now narrower and often curvaceous, with slimmer sleeves, more flattering lines, and trimmer, more feminine shoulders than the football-player look associated with 1980s women’s suiting.

“Power once, and power now, are very different,” Mr. Armani said during a recent interview in Paris. “Now power can be feminine.”
Tomoko Ogura, fashion director for Barneys, says the luxury retailer is stocking up on “extremely polished” suiting. In the next few weeks, Barneys will offer a Theory Icon capsule collection of tailored jackets, slacks and skirts. “It’s all modernized versions of their original silhouettes,” says Ms. Ogura, who notes that other big suit labels for fall are Saint Laurent, which showed grunge on the runways but filled its showrooms with suiting, and The Row.

These days, there is greater leeway to experiment with the power suit. Pants can be cropped or flowing. The pieces aren’t always matched, though they are clearly coordinated. The one constant—the key to its power—is the strong jacket, which serves as a piece of armor, disguising and idealizing the upper body.

In one return to tradition, however, the colors are muted—a contrast with recent seasons’ brights and colorful prints. Black, gray and beige are still power colors, along with some newer pale, sometimes metallic neutrals. That new look of command appears in “Elysium,” the new Matt Damon-Jodie Foster film that opens Friday. Ms. Foster’s character literally rules the world in two pantsuits that Mr. Armani created for the film. The sleek suits exude authority, while their trim, tight tailoring and subtle colors heighten the shock of the character’s icy outlook.

The latest suits are appropriate for the head of the boardroom table, but the early adopters of this trend were younger consumers—who had no experience with the first era of power suits. Young men began buying suits as fashion statements two to three years ago. Sales of women’s suits, which had been falling, surged 12% just in the past 12 months, according to NPD Group.
Roughly $3.9 billion of new women’s suits will wend their way into American closets this year. The biggest spike has come from matched separates—where the jacket and bottom can be purchased in different sizes, which makes it easier to find a good fit. Sales of suit-separates rose 27% during the 12 months ended May 2013, according to NPD’s consumer tracking service.
The advent of the power suit was a seminal moment in modern womenswear. Paul Poiret dispensed with the corset in the early 20th century. Coco Chanel adapted men’s pants and sweaters for women. Yves Saint Laurent tantalized fashionable women by adapting the tuxedo with “Le Smoking” in 1966, but the menswear look didn’t gain footing for a decade.
A young Giorgio Armani was making deconstructed men’s suits in the early 1970s, at a time of “hippie” fashions, he says, when he noticed that his sister Rosanna was struggling to find clothes to wear professionally. So he made her tailored suits, exaggerating the shoulders but using softer colors than menswear, such as dove gray and beige.
He launched his own womenswear label in 1975, and the suits were a hit. “The reaction was something! I thought, ‘This is my road,’ ” said Mr. Armani.
The suits came out at a time when working women were trying to figure out what to wear in offices. The first power suit appeared in Vogue in Sept. 1976, according to the magazine’s online encyclopedia, Voguepedia, in a 14-page fashion spread showing more than a dozen suits for work. Armani, already known in fashion circles, became a household name when the designer made the costumes for the 1980 movie “American Gigolo.”
In the 1980s, Armani suits became akin to a uniform for thousands of other women who wanted to convey their substance. Actress Glenn Close first wandered into Armani’s Madison Avenue boutique while shopping for clothes to promote the film “The World According to Garp.

The black double-breasted jacket “was the most serious piece I’d ever bought,” Ms. Close says. Ms. Close went on to wear Armani to meet President Ronald Reagan for the Kennedy Center Honors, to accept her Oscar nomination for “Fatal Attraction,” and to give an honorary Oscar to Deborah Kerr. “I’m an unadorned person,” says Ms. Close. “I wasn’t consciously creating an image. I was choosing clothes that I felt comfortable in.”
Softening the lines of the power suit, Donna Karan established her line in 1984. By 1988, when the corporate-era film “Working Girl” came out, the power suit epitomized workwear for women. In the film, Melanie Griffith’s character is ready to succeed when she dons her female boss’s power suit.
   
But in January 1990, in a fashion editorial styled by well-known creative director Grace Coddington, Vogue declared the era of power dressing to be over as fashions turned more fluid and feminine. “The message of competence and confidence sent by the woman in a gray pin-striped suit has been received and the majority of designers feel it’s time to move on,” it said.

The suits lasted in offices for another decade, but gradually, casual workwear, feminine dresses, and even jeans took over offices. Mr. Armani moved on too, designing dresses and even introducing evening gowns (which he says were initially “a flop”)
Now, as fashion moves on once again, some women may tempted to pull their old power suits out of mothballs. This may not be as easy as it seems: Big shoulder pads, bulky silhouettes and old-fashioned, heavy fabrics may be difficult to modernize.

Still, Ms. Close is tempted to take a second look at her “closetful” of power suits. “You can just put on those suits,” she says. “It’s such a strong statement.”

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