LONDON, 28 September 2003 — Giorgio Armani’s cat, like everything else in the designer’s Milan apartment, is a neutral shade. Its thick fur has been trimmed into a style usually sported by show poodles at Crufts. Serendipitous or not, wherever charcoal-gray Charlie pauses — beside the low, Japanese-style stools; on the generously proportioned pale-gray couch; next to the pair of life-sized black ceramic panthers; or by a wall hung with Bruce Weber and Man Ray photographs — the effect is of utter tone-on-tone harmony. But who would expect anything else from its owner, the man the Italians call Il Signor Beige? More than any other fashion designer working today, Armani can claim to have taught us how to dress well. In the early 1980s, he initiated a revolution in the wardrobes of both men and women. When occasion requires us to steer a course between heavy formality and abject casualwear — toward that prized state of “relaxed elegance” — Armani is our mentor.
While other designers might adopt red, say, or fuchsia, as their signature shade, Armani invented his own — the neologistic “greige”. His influence has penetrated every level of fashion — from the Oscar-night column dresses worn by Gwyneth and Sharon, to well-turned out likely lads in Emporio shirts, to career girls who invest in his suits. What’s more, while the names of other designers might show up on the popularity radar for achievements somewhat distanced from their primary craft — a bestselling perfume, say, or being BF with Madonna — Armani is genuinely known for his greatest innovation: The softly tailored suit jacket.
Today, however, Armani is wearing a skin-tight navy blue T-shirt that announces on its reverse, somewhat unnecessarily, “EMPORIO ARMANI”. He wears clingy jersey very well. In fact, such is his devotion to the gym, that a man a quarter of his 69 years might find his figure to be the object of envy. The post-holiday version of his signature look extends into loose-fitting navy synthetic crepe trousers and white, quite possibly box-fresh, trainers. In common with the rest of the Italian fashion firmament, he is deeply tanned; in contrast to them, he wears discreet jewelry — two fine silver chain bracelets on one wrist. Despite being modest in height, he’s authoritative and his pale blue eyes have an insistent gaze. He can gesticulate with the best of his countrymen, his brown arms moving in a constant, upward breaststroke action. He talks animatedly and answers most of my questions in a practiced manner — and only in Italian. His press officers are perhaps overly keen to emphasize their boss’s accessible side, but they needn’t bother. He may describe himself as “extremely, extremely demanding”, but he appears as warm as any non-multimillionaire success story.
Despite this relaxed, approachable manner — and befitting a designer of his stature — Armani doesn’t miss a beat when asked to describe his contribution to Italian culture.
“I gave Italians an alternative way of dressing, a way of being elegant that wasn’t excessive. I gave them something to feel comfortable in. I think that’s how I made so much of an impact. When I started, there was nothing else.” Giorgio Armani was born in Piacenza, 50 miles south of Milan, in the summer of 1934, into a family with little money. His earliest memory is of his mother singing to him, aged three, an old Sicilian folk song she knew from a film: “Parlami d’Amore, Mariu”. “It’s the name of my boat, Mariu, by the way,” he adds, rather pleased, “A big boat!” (Despite being one of the richest designers of all time, Armani isn’t particularly flash, waiting until almost his thirtieth year in business before splashing out on every fashion mogul’s favorite trophy.) Although she was dedicated to raising the three Armani children under the privations of wartime Italy, his mother, Maria, was a major stylistic influence on the designer. “She didn’t have the opportunity to experiment with fashion,” he recalls. “But she had a strong personal style, a sense of taking things away, of being, if you like, minimal. She didn’t wear make-up; she wore lipstick for the first time when she was 45.” Despite her instinctive style, the boy Armani would rearrange his mother’s table decorations and now, to the disorientation of his employees, he still likes to amuse himself by regularly shifting around his tasteful furniture and objects. As a teenager, Armani developed a passion for cinema, but instead of training as an actor, he embarked on a degree in medicine, because, he has said, “I wanted to dedicate my future to helping others — a very romantic vision.” In the third year of his Milan-based studies, however, Armani became disenchanted and abandoned the course. In 1957, in need of paid work, he began his fashion life with a job first as a window dresser and then a menswear buyer, at La Rinascente, a large Milanese department store. He had found his forte.
By the mid-1960s, he was honed in the art of choosing a fine pinstripe; Nino Cerruti, a designer known for his luxurious textiles, soon poached Armani to design a new menswear line. Over the next 10 years, Armani worked as a freelance designer, working on as many as 10 different labels at once. He doesn’t remember the designer fashions of the 1960s with much gusto. “It was really horrible,” he says, with a grimace. “Stiff. Everything was like a box.” It was at this time that Armani met his partner in business, Sergio Galeotti, who persuaded him to start designing an eponymous collection. In 1975, the pair established Giorgio Armani SpA, Armani selling his car to help pay for a desk in their tiny office. The way he tells it, in the early days, Armani didn’t face much competition: “When I started, there wasn’t very much around. I had a lot of space. Paris was a long way away. It’s different now.” His first and greatest innovation, as seen in his collections for spring/summer 1976, was to tear apart the traditional suit jacket: Out came the glued linings, the padding and the associations with class and formality. What’s more, Armani, who says that he admires Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic tuxedos more than any other garment, proposed his “unconstructed” jacket design for both women and men.
“The shape of the jacket that I first did — the famous jacket — wasn’t something that had been available. Everything on offer was terribly rigid. Women wanted something that they felt comfortable in, that would follow the line of their body but that wouldn’t show if they were too thin or too big.” Like Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel before him, he borrowed the man’s jacket to create an authoritative, functional piece of womenswear. Unlike those two other great designers, Armani’s androgynous look was not reserved for the high-society customers of Parisian fashion. As Milan’s status as a fashion capital became cemented in the late 1970s, Armani harnessed the manufacturing might of the Italian textile mills to produce his ready-to-wear elegance.
From his first collections, Armani was on course to be the outfitter to the highest-flying working women. “I think I was there at the right time. In the 1970s, women were changing — their lives and what they were doing. They wanted to have a different way of dressing. So I took these elements and made them work.” It was also the first branded example of his impulse to simplify and understate. “At the time, everything was very flowery. So I always tried to eliminate the things that made women appear like a caricature of themselves. I think another secret was the colors — you have to be very careful of colors, they can tire you easily. “Armani’s preference for restrained shades of gray or oatmeal — all right, griege — along with his simplicity of line and androgyny made his clothing the status symbol for a generation that was financially successful but saw themselves as non-conformist: Architects, serious-minded actors and actresses, media players.
While the era of his definitive creations may have passed into fashion history, his influence is still enormous. He’s not too modest to recognize that his shadow casts over younger designers: “It’s very hard for them to design anything that’s entirely new. There’s the Armani style, the Versace style, the Chanel style — it’s inevitable that these young designers are going to refer to one of these.” However, his effect over the more avant-garde reaches of fashion is often overlooked. The Armani signature of neutral-colored, ungendered, tailored pieces forms the basis for the modern, urban collections presented by those who are the inheritors of minimalism. Over and above his achievements in the design studio, Armani has, of course, created a brand and a multinational business to be reckoned with. He is chairman and sole shareholder of his empire, Giorgio Armani Group, which has a global value of $4billion (£2.8billion).
When Galeotti died in 1985, many industry observers predicted that Armani would cease working. Instead, he assumed control of the financial and marketing aspects of the company himself. “I had never studied anything to do with business, so from the day that I had to take the company into my hands, I was learning, day by day.” Recently, the question of who will assume control of his empire when Armani chooses to retire, has become a vexing one. “Obviously, the company is very tied to me and its independence is very tied to my name and it would be very selfish of me to think, ‘OK, tomorrow I’m not going to be here, so, that’s it. That’s the end of everything.’ So I do have to think about it. There are different solutions and one could be to associate myself with a [luxury goods] group — in some way which could guarantee a certain continuance to the brand.” The Armani name now adorns, besides his distinctive jackets: Jeans (since 1981, no less), scatter cushions, chocolates, lipstick, sunglasses and knickers. And while it may now be a hoary cliche of fashion marketing, lifestyle is as key to Armani sales as fashion. His homeware collection — lamps, towels and cutlery, all with that East-meets-Bauhaus flavor — are sold in special Armani Casa shops.
In Italy in particular, Armani’s fame is such that, this summer, on one occasion when he disembarked from his treasured Mariu on to a Sicilian beach, he was mobbed by hundreds of admirers. Fortunately, he enjoys his fame. Armani has also discovered that his first love, cinema, is the perfect way to extend an understated brand into overblown fantasy. He’s provided wardrobes for over 100 movies, from 1980’s American Gigolo, in which Richard Gere famously fondled his collection of Armani suits and ties with more affection than he did his co-star, Lauren Hutton; to the latest collaboration, De-Lovely, a biopic of Cole Porter. Earlier this month, Armani’s contribution to Hollywood (both on-screen and at awards ceremonies) was given a glitzy tribute by his Beverly Hills friends, complete with a fashion show routed down the center of Rodeo Drive. And now he is also the first fashion designer to be honored with an exhibition at the Royal Academy, one of London’s most haughty art institutions. Giorgio Armani: A Retrospective, which was first held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000, opens next month at the Academy’s new galleries at Burlington Gardens, the grand Victorian building which formerly housed the esoteric collections of the Museum of Mankind.
If all goes to plan, the show, which has also visited Bilbao and Berlin, could pull in some 250,000 visitors — a projection that is only 50,000 short of the Academy’s most successful and infamous contemporary show, Sensation. Over the past couple of years, fashion and fashion-related shows have proved themselves to be wildly popular attractions, particularly those with some golden connection to celebrity: Gianni Versace at the Victoria and Albert, Manolo Blahnik at the Design Museum and Mario Testino at the National Portrait Gallery have all been ticket-office successes.
Less an art than a high craft and possessed of both arch glamour and real cultural import, fashion is a controversial subject for an exhibition. In fact, only two years ago, the Academy’s exhibitions secretary, Norman Rosenthal, announced: “I personally wouldn’t do an Armani exhibition.” The Academy’s acquisition of a new venue — set at one remove from the galleries that have played host to Monet and Picasso — seems to have been decisive in changing his opinion. “I’m happy to eat my words,” he says. “When I said that, I hadn’t seen the exhibition.” Despite the “reservations” of some Academicians, Rosenthal has managed to convince them of the advantages of staging the 400-piece show. “Some people will not like the idea, they’ll think that it’s not the Academy’s business to be in the world of fashion,” he sighs, before adding, a little disingenuously, “But the fact of the matter is, that the boundaries of fashion and art have become ever more blurred.” He offers less lofty justification for what will be no doubt one of the most popular sections of the show: A host of Oscar-night frocks. “I suppose there’s a Madame Tussauds aspect to it as well,” he says, mischievously.
“And why not? If it’s done in a classy way.” Fortunately for Rosenthal — and Armani — acclaimed theater and opera designer Robert Wilson is on hand to ensure that the show is not only “classy”, but ingeniously staged. Red lacquered walls, stainless-steel flooring and a Philip Glass soundtrack will attempt to distract visitors from the commercial imperatives of fashion. “I tried to achieve a sense of choreography by arranging the mannequins in a way that makes you move your eye,” explains Wilson. “Of course, it’s different from going to an Armani boutique — people will be paying attention to details, in the same way they look at fine art.”
Armani himself appears to view the retrospective as an opportunity to prove that his contribution to fashion history goes beyond the innovations usually accredited to him. “I think you’ll find some surprises, because not everything that I’ve done is so understated — there are things I’ve done which are spectacular.”
At the show’s debut in New York, some critics complained that Armani’s truly groundbreaking and unique work, the re-configured tailoring he began in the 1970s, has been sidelined by curators, in favor of rather more attention-grabbing, but atypical, eveningwear from recent years.
Armani is sensitive to these criticisms, and by way of explanation, states that, “For the first 10 years, I didn’t keep an archive. Maybe people would like to see more from the early years. But, obviously, being an exhibition, it has to be slightly theatrical and it wasn’t so interesting to have different jackets.” He adds, quickly, “Although, don’t worry, you will see a lot of jackets!” It is perhaps the nature of the fashion industry’s constant demands for renewal that causes one of its past masters to feel dissatisfied by his popularly perceived and well-defined heritage.
