Giorgio Armani dressed all of us. Whether or not you ever had the money for a jacket with an Armani label, you wore a jacket that he invented. He was the mastermind of contemporary style, the architect of how we dress now. If you have worn an unstructured suit with a T-shirt to a wedding; if you have worn muted neutrals to work; if you have thought it might be chic to paint your living room grey: that was Armani.
Armani was working until his final days. Invitations had already been sent out for his next show, to be held on 28 September in the 14th-century courtyard of Milan’s Palazzo Brera. A spectacular party to accompany the show was planned as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the brand, which he founded in the summer of 1975.
On my phone I have dozens of videos of Armani taking catwalk bows at the end of his Milan ready-to-wear and Paris haute couture shows. For the past decade, everyone in the audience at each of his shows has been aware of being in the presence of a living legend. Each brief catwalk appearance has felt like a moment to capture, because even legends don’t live for ever.
Those videos tell the story of a dignified, determined man, who even a decade ago, at 80, was taking bows in fitted navy T-shirts that showed off an impressive physique. In his last few years the walk became slower, the wave less muscular, but he was still immaculate.
At his January haute couture show in Paris, he wore a double-breasted black velvet tuxedo, smiling as he walked on the arm of a favourite model, blue eyes still piercing. In June and July this year, he was absent from his menswear and haute couture shows for the first time but oversaw fittings via video link from home, and corresponded with reporters over email.
Newspaper house style requires that we refer to him as Armani, but he was always Mr Armani, not just to the industry at large but to close colleagues. The fashion industry has long been a first-name-term world, even at the highest levels – backstage, Donatella is Donatella, and Karl was Karl – but the most commercially successful European fashion designer of the past century was never Giorgio, or even Armani, but always Signor or Mr Armani.
His persona was elegant, detached and a little unknowable. On the occasions when I interviewed him – at his home in Milan, at Paris haute couture fashion week, and on his yacht, Mariu – he was courteous and polite, an impeccably gracious host, but always with a note of reserve.
The Armani story begins with a suit. In the late 1970s, Armani took the trousersuit, filleted out all the stuffiness and tradition, and replaced it with a veneer of urbane sophistication and a spritz of louche sex appeal. In doing so, he reinvented power dressing for the late 20th century.
More than that, in fact: he redefined what it meant to look modern. Armani intuited how the once pin-sharp divisions between a starched world of work and a warm-slippered domestic bubble were already beginning to soften, in the 1970s and 1980s, even before the internet came along to annihilate them. His supple tailoring appealed to a generation who aspired to a different kind of success, who wanted to make it big but without losing their soul. They didn’t want to get stuck in the same office until they earned their carriage clock, but rather to prowl and preen around the city.
As lifestyles shifted, Armani tailored a new silhouette to fit. “Style for me is a mood that can be applied to everything,” he once said. “I’ve always thought fashion is much more than just clothes: it is a way of being.” An Armani suit made a new generation feel like big beasts of the urban jungle. If you aspired to be an architect or an actor or a media hustler or an agent, this suit spoke to who you wanted to be. He took the suit, which had been stuck in the 9-to-5, and gave it both street smarts and bedroom appeal.
Armani was fond of saying that “the essence of style is a simple way of saying something complex”, a quote he borrowed and altered from Jean Cocteau (“style is a simple way of saying complicated things”). What he did: he took a man’s suit, and he took out the shoulder pads.
He removed the lining, which changed the way the fabric hung: it was less taut, with a certain carefree swagger. He lowered the buttons of the jacket, and made the trouser legs a little fuller. He perfected the silhouette during the 1970s, and when the world saw it on screen on Richard Gere in American Gigolo in 1980 it seemed to capture something about modern life. In an Armani suit, a man looked primal and hungry, but somehow sophisticated and urbane at the same time. It was a heady mix of power and sex, money and ego.
Armani was an outspoken critic of the rampant overproduction of modern fashion, criticising other designers for making too many collections. “It doesn’t make sense for my collections to stay in the shops for three weeks before they become obsolete,” he wrote in an open letter in 2020. “I don’t work like that and I find it immoral.”
For the first two decades of the 21st century, Armani’s refusal to engage with trends – he never fundamentally changed either the clothes he designed or his own style – led to him being criticised as behind the times and out of touch. It turned out he was, once again, ahead of his time.
A shift to sustainability has meant his point of view that clothes should be both designed and constructed to last has come back into fashion. He once said: “Elegance is not about being noticed, it is about being remembered.” He is gone but will never be forgotten.
