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Iconic Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani passed away yesterday morning at his home in Milan. According to Armani’s company, Armani Group, Giorgio Armani worked up until his final days.
Armani built a fashion empire by taking Neapolitan male tailoring techniques, softening the internal structure, removing shoulder pads, and canvas linings, thus making a more relaxed approach to men’s suiting. After establishing his namesake company in 1976, Armani became a household name after actor Richard Gere showcased his character’s style in the 1980 film hit “American Gigolo” donning Armani loose-fit jackets and well-tailored suits.
“All the women of my generation, including Hillary Clinton, were wearing jeans in the 1960s,” said Deborah Nadoolman Landis, a costume designer and historian and founding director and chair of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design at the University of California, Los Angeles, as detailed in nytimes.com. “But where do you go from Woodstock? How do you professionalize that look when those women start entering the work force? You professionalize it by wearing a feminized suit from Armani.”
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“Armani is one of those, like Coco Chanel with the little black dress, as important for what he contributed socially through dress as for what he specifically designed,” said Harold Koda, a former head curator of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who was a curator, with Germano Celant, of an Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000.
As noted earlier, Armani was one of the first fashion designers to align himself and his brand closely to celebrities, gifting garments to celebrities for events and red carpets. “Giorgio started the whole thing of giving clothes to celebrated people, public figures,” said the model and actress Lauren Hutton, who portrayed a senator’s wife in “American Gigolo” (1980), as reported in newyorktimes.com. “Designers really didn’t give away clothes back then.”
“I was one of the first designers to dress stars on and off screen,” Mr. Armani told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2013. “They didn’t always have a particular style, or the dress sense to know what to wear for an occasion. I helped them feel more confident and relaxed.”
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Giorgio Armani garments would be seen of celebrities on and off-screen with a list including Sean Connery and Robert De Niro in “The Untouchables” (1987); by Christian Bale and Michael Keaton in separate iterations of the “Batman” franchise; by Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013); and by Don Johnson in the television hit 1980s police drama “Miami Vice.” Who can forget Philip Michael Thomas and Don Johnson in laid-back, casual Armani jackets and suits with rolled-up sleeves or simple tee shirts and relaxed slacks with no belts.
Armani’s ascent in the fashion world was meteoric. In just six years after launching his eponymous brand, Armani appeared on a 1982 cover of Time magazine. The first time a fashion designer had graced the cover in 40 years.
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Though Armani received praise from people in and outside of fashion, there were detractors. The great fashion editor Eleanor Lambert in the early 1980s said that Armani had “destroyed fashion.”
Armani reaped the rewards of his talent and fashion empire evidenced his vast accumulation of luxury properties, included by not limited to an immense 18th-century Milanese palazzo, a penthouse on Central Park West; a cliff-hanging retreat in Antigua; a chalet in St. Moritz; a Provençal farmhouse; a sprawling compound on the rocky Sicilian island of Pantelleria; a villa in Lombardy; a 48,000-square-foot museum devoted to his archives; and a custom 213-foot yacht.
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Sergio Armani was 91 years old and is survived by his sister Rosanna.
—William S. Gooch
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