In the 1970s, the fashion designer Giorgio Armani, who has died aged 91, anticipated two permanent and interdependent cultural shifts: the rise in the cult of the gym, which made every man’s physique his own responsibility, rather than a tailor’s; and the end of constriction in men’s clothing.
Even before he showed his first collection, in 1975, Armani had been challenging ideas about the male suit and overcoat as they had been constructed since the 1790s – on a basis of stiff canvas, interlining, padding and special stitching, so as to reshape a man’s torso to look as much as possible like a classical statue. He discarded this armature that helped hide imperfections. And when he draped a fluid suede jacket on the toned body of Richard Gere in the 1980 movie American Gigolo, he finally knocked the stuffing out of tailoring. It has never quite returned.
Armani said of the film’s core, man-chooses-what-to-wear sequence: “The magical moment, where the shirts are on the bed and Gere throws the ties on the shirt, was so right for the time. It was about his choices, his muscles; it was throwing away the whole story of the way men dress.”
Armani was just as revolutionary when he offered female professionals the same boneless structure as men, at a time when a suit, trousered or skirted, was becoming an almost obligatory uniform for working women. His gentler power dressing was the easiest female working gear since Coco Chanel invented her tweed suit in 1954. He explained: “I always tried to eliminate the things that made women appear like a caricature of themselves.”
Armani’s success was particularly Italian, a product of the city of Milan, where he worked with textiles for years before he used his knowledge of them for design. The Italian clothing industry could weave, cut and sew high-quality products, but it had lacked international prestige, and was willing to support designers who might supply that. Armani took its cloth and leather, and tapped its skills, especially new ready-to-wear manufacturing techniques that could simulate the flexibility in movement of handwork. For the rest of his life he reinvested in Milan, where his base and heart remained, as its duke of fashion.
He was not to the palazzo born, although his taste for ascetic luxury was evident early; he attributed it to his mother, Maria (nee Raimondi), and her “sense of taking things away, of being minimal”. Materially, there was not much to subtract – as the wife of Ugo Armani, who worked for a transport company, she brought up Giorgio and his siblings, Sergio and Rosanna, in wartime Piacenza, south of Milan, doing without herself in order to dress them well in hard times. Armani remembered all her few dresses, and she remained his confidante into her 90s. He was intrigued by his grandfather’s wigmaking for the theatre, too, and developed his own imagination staging puppet shows and watching movies. So far, so Cinema Paradiso.
Armani left for military service, and studied at medical school, but outgrew his ambition to be a doctor. He got a window-dresser’s job in 1957 at the Milanese department store La Rinascente, then took charge of its fabrics. Ignorant of fashion, unable to draw, but simpatico with cloth, he was hired by the menswear firm Nino Cerruti to manage its textiles in 1964, then moved into design; he went freelance in 1970.
At Cerruti, he met Sergio Galeotti, who became his partner in love and business; together they set up a company in 1975, selling Armani’s old VW Beetle to fund their tiny office. “We didn’t have a lot of experience,” said Armani, “but we had energy.” Galeotti gave Armani confidence; he managed sales, flying to the US to dictate Armani’s terms, and all finances so completely that Armani did not even need to carry a wallet.
By the late 70s the cool crowd were collecting Armani’s pricey pieces, and he was asked to provide a sexy wardrobe for John Travolta in the lead role of American Gigolo; when the casting was amended to Gere, it proved fortunate for Armani. His clothes moving over Gere’s gym-honed body filmed so well that the director Michael Mann had him design outfits for the leads of the 80s television cop show Miami Vice: Armani did the linen tailoring, the actors added socklessness and stubble. Later, he lettered “Armani for Bruce Wayne” inside Batman’s civilian suits, and was even able to ameliorate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ripped muscles.
As showbiz red-carpet wear began to compete for attention with catwalk shows, Armani set up an LA office to deal directly with the stars’ stylists, and in 2005 Armani Privé, a label to handle year-round special couture orders not bound to collections or seasons. Yet he rejected supermodels for his own shows because he thought they obscured the clothes.
What Armani described as his “mad dash for glory” ended when Galeotti died at 40 in 1985. The industry expected Armani to close; instead the designer learned, mostly by error, to manage his business and to carry, if not cash, then a pen to sign the bill. But his firm refused outside investment, and resisted incorporation into the luxury goods conglomerates that financed many of his competitors. He retained control from thread to shopfloor – “It is all tied together, all this needs to be in your hands for it to be successful” – investing in Italian manufacture while others outsourced globally.
As chairman, chief shareholder and, from his 84th year, general manager, Armani did not have to publish accounts, but he enjoyed financial candour, and the value of the Giorgio Armani Group is more than £8bn – in Italy, only Gucci and Prada are bigger.
His clothes, chocolates, coffee and cutlery are sold along a “Via Armani” of Milanese shops, and the city has an Armani cafe, nightclub and hotels. Despite the proliferation of Armani outlets worldwide, he remained wary of mass marketing, and balanced it with his belief in a discretion that “slays vulgarity”. No naffness was permitted in the hotel with his name that opened in 2011 within the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, where he designed and styled interiors.
Armani disciplined himself with northern Italian rigour: non-smoking, teetotal, working from early-morning gym sessions to the meat-free late supper he might prepare himself. He swam daily in a water channel beneath the theatre within his town palazzo. Like all his homes, this had been minimalised: plain panels camouflaged its frescoes, except for a Tiepolo roundel too perfect to be hidden. Armani did not collect art, owning only one Matisse given to him by Eric Clapton; his first yacht, Mariù, was named after a song his mother sang, and its successor was Maín, her childhood nickname. His philosophy was “Un po’ Zen” (a little Zen): “You can add on to simplicity. You cannot add on to the baroque.” For years, the palazzo cat was a close-clipped greige Persian.
For all his shyness, Armani was a public figure, mobbed whenever he was spotted in his home country. His retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000 (which toured to the Royal Academy in London and the Bilbao Guggenheim) was staged as art rather than fashion, and he collected more than 50 awards including, in 2019, the outstanding achievement award of the British Fashion Council.
He is survived by his sister, Rosanna, two nieces, Silvana and Roberta, and a nephew, Andrea.
