Legendary Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani has died, the Armani Group announced on Thursday. He was 91.
“With infinite sorrow, the Armani Group announces the passing of its creator, founder, and tireless driving force,” the company said in a statement provided on behalf of Armani’s family and employees.
“In this company, we have always felt like part of a family,” read another statement provided by the brand. “Today, with deep emotion, we feel the void left by the one who founded and nurtured this family with vision, passion, and dedication. But it is precisely in his spirit that we, the employees and the family members who have always worked alongside Mr. Armani, commit to protecting what he built and to carrying his company forward in his memory, with respect, responsibility, and love.”
As Yahoo Entertainment reports, Armani’s designs are known for their elegance and modern Italian style. He is credited with revolutionizing men’s fashion in the 1970s and 1980s, combining the sharp look of a businessman and the flair of a fashion designer with unstructured jackets and muted color palettes. His work also extended beyond the runway, as he elevated Hollywood celebrity wardrobes and fashion on the red carpet.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani paid tribute to the iconic designer, who he described as “a timeless talent and ambassador of Made in Italy in the world” in a translated post on X. “A visionary of fashion, a refined interpreter of the elegance and beauty of our Country. [He] represents an extraordinary story of success,” he added.
In June, Armani was forced to drop out of his company’s shows at Men’s Fashion Week in Milan, Italy, marking the first time in his career that he missed one of his own fashion events. At the time, the company released a statement without specifying his health condition, saying only that Armani was “currently recovering at home.”
Armani cofounded the luxury fashion house bearing his name in 1975 in Milan. He was known as “Re Giorgio” (King Giorgio) and oversaw every detail of his collection and every detail of his business, including ad campaigns and fixing models’ hair before they walked the runway. But Armani was hardly an overnight success.
The Early Years
He grew up a world away from Hollywood, geographically and psychologically. Born in 1934 in Piacenza, Italy, Armani initially pursued a career in medicine before enrolling in the army in his early twenties. His first stint in fashion was as a window dresser at the Milan department store La Rinascente in 1957.
In the 1960s, he worked for a number of fashion houses, including Nino Cerutti, before launching his namesake brand in 1975 with both menswear and womenswear collections.
As Schrader remembers Armani, he indulged the old-school Italian way of drinking wine with lunch — but his ambition kept him from overdoing it. “He poured a couple fingers of wine into his glass and filled the rest with water,” Schrader said. “So it only looked like he was drinking wine.”
Armani also worshiped the movies and had a “great knowledge of it,” director Martin Scorsese told Harper’s Bazaar. The two worked together on “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” with Armani elevating the modern-gangster look. (For his part, Scorsese said, “I have a weakness for Armani’s blue blazers. My closet is overflowing with them.”)
If Hollywood Won’t Come to You, You Go to Hollywood
Armani made his celebrity Hollywood debut at the 50th Academy Awards with actress Diane Keaton in April 1978. He styled her in a beige jacket with a long skirt, and she was the first actress to wear his designs on the red carpet. Even though Diane Keaton had accepted her 1978 Best Actress Oscar, for “Annie Hall,” in the oversized Armani jacket her character might have loved, Michelle Pfeiffer famously responded to his first offer of formal wear with: “I can dress myself, and who is Giorgio Armani?”
The designer really got his start in Hollywood on the big screen. Before the 1980 release of “American Gigolo,” starring Richard Gere and directed by Paul Schrader (his next movie is “Basics of Philosophy“), Armani was largely a secret of Italy’s well-dressed. The goal was to imbue Gere’s character, an expensive male escort in Los Angeles, a “European sheen — formal suits with the unstructured look.” The movie blew up and so did the designer. Suddenly, every studio executive in Hollywood, not to mention every stockbroker in Manhattan, wanted an Armani suit to make them look like a power player.
And the designer dove right in to the glamour of Tinseltown — opening a shop on tony Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and hiring society journalist Wanda McDaniel to handle VIP outreach. “[Armani] was very smart,” said MacDonell. “He created a VIP dressing room in his store and a lot of relationships were facilitated” with celebs who made him look as good as he made them look. “You can do 12 years’ worth of ad campaigns and it won’t add up to Angelina Jolie getting photographed in your dress,” MacDonell added.
He Transformed Red Carpet Chic
As Time magazine reports, perhaps no outfit encapsulates the impact he had on his era better than the champagne-and-silver suit Jodie Foster wore when she won the 1992 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in TheSilence of the Lambs. While it doesn’t make it onto all of Armani’s best-of lists, it represents much of what made the Italian designer and the label he founded so successful.
Foster’s embrace of the label was not an accident; Armani had set up a specialist VIP dressing room on Rodeo Drive in the late ‘80s that stars could visit to be styled. He understood the power of Hollywood, having had a huge bump in popularity and exposure after providing all of Richard Gere’s suits for American Gigolo.
His strategy was working: in 1990, Julia Roberts caused a stir by wearing an off-the-rack Armani suit when she won a Golden Globe, and so many celebs, male and female, wore the label for the Oscars that year that Women’s Wear Daily dubbed it “the Armani Awards.” Up until that point, Oscar gowns had often been the purview of costume departments and more theatrical designers (save an occasional visit by a Givenchy). Armani was the first to take the Oscars seriously as a fashion event.
Gere, Foster and Pfeiffer all quickly became associated with the coolly sophisticated look of the Armani brand. So much so that, his employee McDaniel once said Foster “would call us up and say, ‘Just tell me what to wear.’”
Foster’s outfit, and the many photos of it that were published when she won, cemented the symbiotic relationship between contemporary designers, stars, and the Oscars, which began to change the nature of the event. Fashion became a feature of the ceremony. The celebs knew that a well-styled outfit would get them publicity even if they didn’t win—and a bad outfit would too. Designers loved the attention. As the arrival of decked-out stars proved to be as entertaining for viewers as the distribution of awards, the broadcast grew longer, attracted more viewers, more attention, more advertisers, more money, and then more stars and more designers.
t was the big public event in which none of the bold names were telling red-carpet interlocutors that were wearing Armani. This association helped him with brand extensions: the perfumes, sunglasses, and handbags that finance many labels’ high-fashion lines. Other designers—Valentino, Versace, Oscar de la Renta, to name a few—also successfully courted celebrities, but few had as much success as Armani.
Foster’s pantsuit ensemble was classic Armani: the tailoring was impeccable, but it was in service of a more relaxed silhouette than the Bob Mackie and Arnold Scaasi confections that had been in vogue the prior decade. The silk faille jacket was not quite white but a pale blush, and the loose pants and top beneath had an intricate pattern of silver beads. Foster looked like a million bucks, but she also looked like she wasn’t trying too hard. Her star rose enough as a result that she was on the cover of People’s Most Beautiful People issue that year.
That suit, with its flowing lines and subtle color palette, also marked a pivot away from the louder, bigger, bolder ethos of the ‘80s and toward a quieter definition of sophistication. Armani, who had already introduced unstructured jackets for men and women, was part of the generation of designers who ushered in a less formal fashion era, one that would allow men and women to look refined without looking stuffy. Foster proved it could be done.
As the New York Post reports, when a young Julia Roberts had just burst on the scene, she attended the event wearing a classic Armani understated, earth-toned tank dress. Pfeiffer worked the red carpet in body-skimming black with long sleeves.These women looked powerful,” Clare Sauro, a fashion historian and curator at Drexel University, told The Post in 2016. “They stood in contrast to the big poufy skirts of the time. They had an understated glamour. It was the transition from ’80s opulence to ’90s minimalism.”
It prompted Women’s Wear Daily to dub the evening the “Armani Awards.” And after that, designers clamored to claim celebs as their red-carpet models. “The whole Armani thing is refined and sophisticated,” MacDonell said. “It let people present themselves very differently. He transformed the way these people are seen on red carpets.”
Celebrities Came Calling
But it wasn’t just the Oscars. Armani became associated with celebrity: Lady Gaga at the 2010 Grammys, Cate Blanchett at the 2014 Oscars, and Zendaya at a movie premiere. Celebrity fans ran the gamut, including Rihanna, George Clooney, Demi Moore, Austin Butler, Glenn Close, LaKeith Stanfield, Pierce Brosnan, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway. He also pulled off a coup by dressing 85-year-old Jessica Tandy, who won Best Actress for “Driving Miss Daisy.” Before that, star style barely registered. “Stylist” was not a job. Formal wear tended to come off the rack, not from fashion designers, or be provided by the wardrobe departments of movie studios.
Celebs even used Armani as a secret weapon.
When Sharon Stone auditioned for her career-catapulting role in “Basic Instinct,” she has said, “I had bought this Giorgio Armani suit, which for me at that time was every last penny I had. They had these sheer blouses and so I bought this very sheer, almost nude color blouse, and wore nothing under it … I got the job.”
But Armani didn’t always love the way stars wore his clothes. “One thing these stars don’t know how to do at all is hold their purses correctly,” he told Harper’s Bazaar in 2007. “And have you seen how these girls are walking on the red carpet? Walking properly in heels is incredibly important; it’s a clear sign of your birth. Not that I was born noble myself, but … You know what’s missing? The old profession of a Pygmalion, just like ‘My Fair Lady.’”
He called Madonna “very difficult” when the Material Girl asked to replace the hook on a cape with a tie. McDaniel, his right-hand woman for decades, once recalled delivering five dresses to an actress only to discover she also had garment bags from a host of other designers. When she explained it to Armani, McDaniel told Harper’s Bazaar, he instructed her to walk away and bring his dresses with her: “I don’t audition.”
Savvy in Style and in Business
In a 2017 interview with How to Spend It, he credited his success to his ability to stick to his signature style, forgoing fads. “I have never been interested in being trendy for the sake of it,” he said. “I have my own vision and ideas and am not afraid to go countercurrent. Fashion tides change constantly, after all. There are times when fashion drifts away from my aesthetic beliefs, and there are times when it gets close. I just don’t care.”
What he told the Business of Fashion is that he cares about making clothes that are relevant to everyday life. “If you make clothes that are not part of the world we live in, they will be meaningless,” he said. “This is very important and it is the real reason why I’m still here after 40 years, the reason why I get upset when things are not done the way I want.”
Another aspect of his longevity and success as a designer boiled down to a very simple equation: “Eighty percent of what I do is discipline,” he told How to Spend It. “The rest is creativity.”
Armani was one of the few luxury designers to remain the only shareholder of his company, which made $2.7 billion last year. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index indicates the fashion designer’s net worth to be $9.43 billion.
The fashion world Armani just departed is different from the one he entered when he started his label in 1975. It’s more atomized, less orderly, more enmeshed in the culture of fame and of never-ending updates. But at least in part, it’s a world he helped build.
The Armani Group said a public funeral chamber will be set up on Saturday and Sunday in Milan. A private funeral will be held at an unspecified date.
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