ADVERTISEMENT As final tributes are being paid to Giorgio Armani following his death of Thursday, many terms are being used to describe him, such as ‘the king of fashion’, ‘the creator of Made in Italy in the world’ and ‘the icon of a style that will never fade.’
Ironically, for his collaborators and those he met in his favourite places such as Versilia and the Sicilian island of Pantelleria, he was just ‘Mr Giorgio’.
A man whose career spanned exactly 50 years, he was surrounded by a few companions and family members in life and in business, starting with his sister Rosanna. He was somewhat reserved, choosing to let his work and not his character do the talking.
For Armani, his fashion shows always spoke loudly and had something to say – and that is surely the indelible mark he leaves behind in Italy and abroad.
Who was Giorgio Armani for Milan
One of the most famous faces on the catwalks, Naomi Campbell, recalled her beginnings as a model with the designer when she first landed in the city in 1987 and saw a huge Armani billboard at Linate airport.
The brand, founded in 1975 with Sergio Galeotti, marked an era and a city that led Italy out of the black and white of political violence and into the world with its best weapons, namely taste and tradition.
Over the decades, the first location in Milan’s Corso Venezia has multiplied into boutiques, shops and cultural spaces for the various brands of the Armani empire including clothes, perfumes and home accessories.
The story is retraced by the company itself in a beautiful chronology, as glossy as the magazine in which Armani first evolved the classic clothes catalogue.
From Piacenza where he was born, the third son of a clerk and a housewife whose hand-sewn clothes the designer remembered, Milan became Armani’s adopted home. He returned the affection, by rescuing the city’s basketball team, Olimpia, sponsoring them with his EA7 brand and then purchasing the squad in 2008.
The last tribute will be the great celebration of his half-century career, set for 28 September in the Palazzo Brera.
From tailors to stylists, the invention of Made in Italy
The breath and depth of tributes from across the world are testament to Armani’s impact beyond art, fashion and sport. Donatella Versace recalled how her brother Gianni and Armani brought “Italian fashion to the world first”, one with an abundance of colour and the other with essential elegance.
In the shops of La Rinascente where he started by setting up shop windows, and in the years of being an undergraduate at the Faculty of Medicine and then in the service of the stylist Nino Cerruti, the order and essence of his collections had begun.
“I am neither a couturier nor a tailor, but I feel I am someone who creates a style, a stylist,” Armani said of himself in 1975, in an interview with the historic Milanese daily newspaper the Corriere della Sera.
This is how the designer from Piacenza came to transform the traditional suit into a new symbol of power for career women, to deconstruct men’s jackets by removing their stiff innards to soften their shapes. The ideas fed his reinvention of masculine elegance that entered popular culture via Hollywood as Richard Gere smouldered on the screen in Armani apparel in American Gigolò (1980).
Time magazine also contributed to the consecration of Made in Italy in the United States, then the fulcrum of world power and wealth.
The magazine put the stylist on its cover in 1982, three years before the death of his partner Galeotti from AIDS, the disease that cast a shadow over a decade that seemed to hold only extraordinary promise.
Armani would go to adore the silver screen again, in many other films including The Untouchables (1987) and two of Christopher Nolan’s Batman’s in The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises (2008 and 2012) and at Oscar ceremonies.
From Jodie Foster to Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman, many actresses chose his creations for major showbiz events and their weddings. But King Giorgio reign didn’t only impact wealthy stars and the elite, his passion for movies was match by his love of sport.
First with Milan basketball, his first love, and then with the uniforms he designed for many football teams: Piacenza, Chelsea, the English national team and most recently Serie A champions, Napoli.
Since 2012, the Armani style has also ended up on the shoulders of the Italian Olympic team, even going beyond the death of its creator. Italian athletes will also wear his uniforms at 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina.
