Giorgio Armani

Medicine, Photography and a Department Store Window

Giorgio Armani was born on July 11, 1934 in Piacenza, Italy. His path into fashion passed through two other callings and a shop floor. He originally trained in medicine, then gave it up to pursue photography, before being called up for national service in 1957. He then worked in a department store, La Rinascente, as a window dresser. Window dressing is an overlooked apprenticeship for a clothing designer: it is the discipline of presenting garments to strangers in a few seconds, choosing what is shown, how it is combined and how it is lit, and it teaches what makes a passer-by stop. From 1961 to 1970 Armani worked as a designer in the well-known fashion house Nino Cerruti, nine years inside an established house, after which he left to pursue freelance work. The sequence is long and cumulative — medicine abandoned, photography abandoned, national service, window dressing, nine years designing for Cerruti, then freelance work — so that by the time Armani founded a company under his own name in 1974 he was forty years old and had seen the clothing business from the window, the design room and the freelance desk.

1974: A Menswear Label First, Ladies' Wear a Year Later

In 1974, with assistance from his partner Sergio Galeotti, Armani established his own company, Giorgio Armani S.p.A., with a menswear label, introducing a ladies' wear line in 1975. The order is central to his definition: he is particularly noted for his menswear, and menswear is where the company began, with womenswear added once the men's label existed. His sister Rosanna Armani joined him in the company, and Galeotti died in 1985, eleven years after the founding. Armani is known today for his clean, tailored lines. Clean and tailored together describe a recognisable discipline: tailoring supplies the structure of a jacket or a suit, and cleanness strips away whatever does not serve that structure, so the garment's effect comes from cut and proportion rather than decoration. That the same description covers both his menswear and the ladies' wear that followed from 1975 shows a single design language applied to both, rather than two separate styles under one name.

American Gigolo and the Measure of Success

Armani achieved his international breakthrough by tailoring for numerous Hollywood names, and especially for Richard Gere in the title role of American Gigolo in 1980/81. Film carried his tailoring further than a runway could: a title role puts a designer's clothes on screen for the length of a feature film, worn by a character whose appearance is part of the story, and audiences in many countries saw the same suits at the same time. That the breakthrough is dated 1980/81, six years after the company's founding, shows how quickly the menswear label founded in 1974 reached an international audience once Hollywood took it up. The later honours measure the result. In 2001 Forbes magazine named Giorgio Armani the most successful designer out of Italy, estimating his net worth at $1.7 billion. In 2002 he was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Those two dates, 2001 and 2002, close the record a year apart, first with a magazine's commercial ranking and then with an international appointment beyond the fashion industry itself. A designer who began as a window dresser at La Rinascente thus ends the record with two different kinds of standing: commercial, in the Forbes judgement and the fortune attached to it, and public, in a United Nations appointment that uses the name built by the tailoring for purposes beyond fashion.