Giorgio Armani

A workaholic’s drive coupled with a clarity of vision propelled Giorgio Armani from the small town of Piacenza, where he was born in 1934, to a global powerhouse. The designer, who died at 91 in 2025, was renowned for both for his innovative tailoring, which helped redefine what power looked like for men and women, and his prescient involvement with Hollywood.

An autodidact, Armani was the second of three children who knew the privations of war through bombings, food scarcity, and the temporary imprisonment of his father. At 17 he left home for Milan where he intended to study medicine, a profession he abandoned by inclination and necessity which came in the form of national military service. Having fulfilled that obligation, in 1954 he took a job at La Rinascente department store where he worked on window displays before becoming a buyer. Seven years later he joined Nino Cerutti’s menswear company Hitman. In 1974 Armani and his life and business partner Sergio Galeotti, sold their Volkswagen to fund the designer’s solo career. Armani showed his first menswear collection that year, and introduced womenswear the following year, in 1975.

The Armani universe is built on what Vogue described as his “un-constructed” tailoring. “I created all my work around the jacket. It was my point of departure for everything,” he said. The jacket, of course, has been a symbol of power for ages, worn by Dutch burghers and Gordon Gekkos alike. Armani broke with that history and created a new, iconoclastic uniform for the times. “They label me the classic designer, but if you look at my clothes, they break every classic rule,” he told the magazine in 1992. Armani’s was a neutral toned revolution that reflected changes in society.

The start of his career coincided with Milan establishing itself as a fashion capital to rival Paris, and America’s sportswear revolution. In the big, brash decade that was the ’80s, Armani’s clothing, for men and women, exuded a sense of ease, softness, and simplicity—in contrast to the prevailing fashions. “I’ve gotten rid of the superfluous, removed the bows, taken off collars,” he told Vogue in 1981. As women entered office spaces in ever greater numbers, they needed a corporate uniform, and his androgynous options let them have it both ways. Though his women’s suits were based on men’s tailoring, they were also soft.

As women’s roles shifted so did ideas of masculinity. That change was dramatically portrayed in the 1980 film American Gigilo in which Richard Gere, playing a male escort with expensive taste, has an enviable Armani wardrobe, which, Vogue asserted, “began the first modern designer relationship with Hollywood.” American Gigilo is the movie Armani is most associated with, but his reach in the film industry is unparalleled. The designer made the connection between celebrity and fashion before the rest of the world caught on. He played with cinematic tropes of elegance in ways that were anything but stiff, allowing for individuality, and granting an air of gravitas to the actors and actresses who wore his designs. Stars in Armani never look like they have adopted a method acting approach to red-carpet style.

“Whenever things became too much, Armani was the anti-too much,” wrote Jason Horowitz in a 2021 Vogue profile. That was certainly the case in the ’80s. His pared-back aesthetic was more in sync with the understated ’90s, though the designer resisted the idea that he was a minimalist. “It is about eliminating the superfluous,” he said in 2000. “What it is not is minimal. I see minimalism as a lack of ideas. For me, fashion has always been about designing clothes that are wearable, that help people feel good about themselves and feel comfortable.”

By the 2020s the designer was applying that philosophy via homewares and hotels, extending his reputation as a world builder. Sadly, he did not live to celebrate his 50th anniversary in Milan in late September of 2025.