Giorgio Armani Says Gay Men Shouldn't Dress "Gay"

A collective sigh now, everyone: here we go again. In an ballsy interview with The Sunday Times, fashion designer Giorgio Armani said gay men shouldn't "dress homosexual."After the IVF debate heard 'round the world started by his countrymen colleagues Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, the last thing we need is another Italian firestorm filled with naive and arrogant opinions.

"A homosexual man is a man 100 percent," Armani told the paper. "He does not need to dress homosexual. When homosexuality is exhibited to the extreme — to say, 'Ah, you know I'm homosexual,' — that has nothing to do with me. A man has to be a man."

Sure, he prefaced it by saying that a gay man is still a man "100 percent," but that's kind of like saying "with all due respect" to someone and thinking you're immune from the consequences of whatever rude thing you're about to say. Um, doesn't work that way, Giorgio.

I don't know where the line is between what Armani considers gay dressing and straight dressing, but fashion is supposed to be about personal expression in whatever way you want it to be, and someone so highly thought of in the fashion community would do well to keep that in mind. There's no "right" way to dress based on your sexuality, and people use their style in different ways. It's pretty judgmental to tell a large group of people that dressing a certain way is wrong.

Although I appreciated his comments on aging as a woman ("With time, a woman's body is better. As a woman goes to work, has babies, she is strong. She has character," he said), I still think he needs to step away from the judge-y fashion guy persona. He criticized Miuccia Prada in the interview for creating "snob fashion," but she's not the one sounding uppity here.