We are sitting in a room adjacent to the garden, with his
assistant Paul and translator Anoushka. At one point, Armani says he likes my
accent (“Australian-British” he calls it, only 1300 miles off). “It makes me
really suffer that I can’t speak English. I would have loved to learn it.” But
I’ve always been struck by how direct he is in interviews, and I assume that’s
because he is able to express himself with complete clarity when he is speaking
in his mother tongue. On the wall is a massive work by the Italian artist
Silvio Pasotti. It’s a surrealistic melange of fashion history, designers,
models, magazine covers collaged with iconic images like the Helmut Newton
photograph of Karl Lagerfeld in a black bathing suit. He sprawls insouciantly
across the bottom of the painting. That’s not the only time he’ll appear in
this story. Next to him, in the left-hand corner, Armani sits looking back over
his shoulder at the artist. He’s shirtless, sexy in denim shorts and Pasotti
has tattoo-ed a Lacoste crocodile on his shoulder. “Because that was the time
of Lacoste,” the designer laughs.
We happen to be talking a week before Armani shows his
Spring/Summer 2023 collections for Emporio and his own line. His workload
remains unchanged. I ask him how each season starts for him. “With a blank
piece of paper, and my hands in my hair,” he says ruefully. “Then I take away
what wasn’t good in the past. And I look at what’s happening at the moment. I
look at my colleagues’ work. Sometimes I’m positively surprised, many times
negatively.” Armani is notoriously judgemental. At the moment, he’s not
positively surprised. What does he look for? “Where the novelty is, what exists
of the fashion of the time that still can be right for today.”
But when “today” is defined by a war, a pandemic, rampant
political and financial instability and, overriding everything else,
environmental catastrophe, what exactly is “right”? The war in Ukraine has hit
Armani hard. He has his own childhood experience of WWII as a reference. He
grew up in Piacenza, a small city to the south-east of Milan, and he has vivid
memories of taking refuge in the local movie theatre during Allied bombing
raids. When he was nine, he and his friends found a bag of gunpowder. While
they were playing with it, it exploded. He spent six weeks in hospital on the
brink of death. Legend has it that the skin on one foot still bears the imprint
of his shoe buckle.
Giorgio Armani making adjustments in model fittings in 2001. (Roger Hutchings)
“When I look at the news and I see the images of suffering,
it feels like what I’m doing doesn’t make sense nowadays,” Armani says. “This
is where it’s difficult for my job, but I need to beat this feeling, this sort
of brake that I have that doesn’t enable me to create. I have an example, the
recent women’s show, the one I decided to show without music. It was just a few
days after the war had started, I did a press conference in this room. I was
asked about fashion and in that moment, I just couldn’t speak about it.”
Anoushka interjects, “I was there so I can honestly say, Mr. Armani started
crying.”
I doubt Giorgio Armani sheds tears very often. For nearly
50 years, his major motivation has been this: “It’s important to not live off
nostalgia, to not be doing anything gratuitous, and, most importantly, to
innovate, but always keeping in mind that you need to try and make men and women
comfortable, feel good in the clothes. Never forget that’s the prime purpose. I
can help better my customers’ lives in this way.” That’s also been his
consolation through the most difficult periods of his life.
It is a challenge to appreciate how a proposal which sounds
so benign now was so radical at the beginning, Armani recalls, “that not
everybody understood, because even then, fashion was trying to do something
explosive, not necessarily to be comfortable. But then slowly, people
understood that my proposal to make fashion more acceptable was the right thing
to do.” It’s almost as if he was more reactionary than revolutionary, taking a
stand against the extreme proportions, the extreme hairstyles, the extreme
everything of the late 60s and early 70s. And then, ironically, reaction bred
revolution.
The Pasotti painting on the wall behind us dates from 1978.
Armani’s business was barely three years old at that point, but the artist
already saw fit to include him in the fashion pantheon alongside Chanel, Dior,
Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and the other immortals. He instantly became part of
history when he de-stuffed fashion as radically as his idol Coco Chanel had
done half a century earlier. But that same history has a tendency to rub the
edges off a revolutionary and seal him in the aspic of his past achievements.
Armani says he’s happy I think of him as a radical, even happier that I don’t
call him nostalgic. “My big fight is with time,” he says, and when time is the
enemy, you don’t want to indulge it.
And yet, he can make it sound like there is something
vaguely liberating about time passing. He talks about feeling more detached
with age, less anguished, maybe more cynical. “I find certain things absurd.
Sometimes I think the designer is just too much in his own world of trying to
propose something which has to be on covers or that needs to shock, rather than
really thinking of the purpose of his job. When I see fashion trying to be in
the news just for novelty, I find myself quite shocked, so I become even more
cynical. I don’t believe in it. Even when they talk about my things, when I
make something a bit outrageous and they say they sold it, I don’t believe
them. You know, there may be one hundred people around the world that like
something extravagant, but in normal life, I don’t believe in it.”
What about Armani’s use of the word “novelty.” Does he
believe it’s possible for anything to be really new in fashion? “No, but maybe
you can find a new way to adapt something that has already existed to today’s context,
so you find a new way to propose something.” What he really hates is the
determining force of “fashionability.” Again, I wonder if such a thing still
exists. “Si, certo,” he says instantly. “You just have to look around you and
see how some people dress, and they are all following a certain thing that’s of
the moment. They all look the same.”
A samurai-inspired design by Giorgio Armani for Autumn/Winter 1982. (Giorgio Armani)
Armani describes himself as isolated, not social, a slave
to his job. “But it’s different to before. Now there’s a real empire behind me
that I need to preserve for later when I won’t be here anymore.” This is, of
course, the succession plan that drives the fashion industry crazy with
speculation, because it is so shrouded in mystery. Not to mention that
Armani-branded products generated €4 billion in 2021. Rumoured overtures from
Bernard Arnault’s LVMH, the Agnelli family’s Exor and Mayhoola, the Qatari
investment fund that owns Valentino, are maybe just that. Rumours. “Forgetting
what’s happening in the rest of the world, that’s how I plan,” Armani says
cryptically. “That’s why I’ve isolated myself. To know what’s the right thing,
not following the road that I don’t like. You know, it is very simple. Say no.”
One thing that is telling is how much Armani values his independence. And
that’s something he would really like to guarantee.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his personal net
worth at $9.5 billion, making him the richest fashion designer in the world,
and he has clearly sacrificed for that success. Armani often maintained that if
he could live his life over, he would do things differently. “Yes, I would
still change certain things,” he says today. “I realised I don’t really have
friends, aside from my close family and people in the company. With friends,
you need to cultivate them, you need to provoke them.” In other words, he has
done neither. Years ago, Armani told me he never wanted kids because he thought
he would be “an envious father.” I assumed he meant he’d be over-protective.
But I’m wondering if he feels like he missed out. I’m telling him something
Karl Lagerfeld said towards the end of his life — how he’d found he could feel
real love, for his cat Choupette, for Hudson, the young son of model Brad
Kroenig — and Armani suddenly sparks up. “Yes, incredibly for me too. It’s
different now, you’re absolutely right. For two years, there’s been a little
child running around these offices, the daughter of one of my close
collaborators. She has become love, and for the first time I have found a
vulnerability. I’ve never had this sort of love. It has made me different. I’ve
found my tender side.” In a coincidental twist, Armani is also very attached to
his cat.
Giorgio Armani, happy at last. But he learned a long time
ago not to trust that feeling. When he started his company, there were two:
Armani and his partner Sergio Galeotti. They met at the beach in 1966, when
Armani was designing menswear for Nino Cerruti. Galeotti, 11 years younger, had
the innate sense of superiority all Tuscans possess (according to other
Italians) and it was his drive that pushed his older lover to go solo. He made
him sell his Volkswagen for money to seed the fledgling business. Armani
remembers those early days, creating something with someone he loved, as
“indescribable joy. There was a thrill and an enthusiasm. Sergio was explosive,
he was much more courageous than me.” He laughs as he looks back. “Sometimes he
forgot his conscience, sometimes he was a little bit too much.” He considered
Galeotti his alter ego. That’s how people remember him, ferocious, sardonic,
very driven, but also very entertaining. “It was a nice balance between me
being more held back and Sergio being more brave. And maybe it happened because
we weren’t even really aware of what we were building together.”
Giorgio Armani and Sergio Galeotti, co-founder of Giorgio Armani S.p.A, in their studio in Milan. (Giorgio Armani)
In 1984, Galeotti was diagnosed with AIDS. He moved to
Paris, to be near the Pasteur Institute, where Luc Montagnier was making early
breakthroughs in the understanding of HIV. For 12 months, until Galeotti’s
death in August 1985, Armani shuttled between Milan, Paris, New York, and
everywhere else their rapidly growing business needed him. “I had to go on with
the job, I had to design, but I had to be close to Sergio. It was the worst
year, though actually, at the time, it was step by step. I didn’t really think
what was going to happen. I definitely didn’t think I could make it by myself.”
And neither did anyone else. It was widely assumed within
the industry that Armani would simply retire. But he is a Cancer and “a crab
gathers everything to itself,” he says. He found a new self-determination after
Galeotti’s death, absorbing his alter ego, moving forward with sole control of
the business. When I suggest that the whole Armani edifice is a monument to
Galeotti, he agrees. “In a certain sense, yes, because he gave me the strength.
Everything really started with Sergio, and if I didn’t have the strength to
react as I did, this company wouldn’t exist. So, yes, it’s due to him.” Does he
ever wonder how it would have looked if Galeotti hadn’t died? “I think Sergio
would maybe have made Armani a little bit more revolutionary, a little more
explosive,” he muses. “I’m very practical, he was a dreamer.”
Giorgio Armani and Leo Dell’Orco, head of Giorgio Armani’s men’s style office, in 2000. (Giorgio Armani)
But then, Armani interrupts his chain of thought. He wants
to acknowledge another individual, Leo Dell’Orco, who has worked for the
company since 1977, and is currently head of the Men’s Style Office. (Armani’s
niece Silvana is his counterpart in the Women’s Office.) “After Sergio’s death,
he has been the closest person to me,” Armani says. “He gave me an incredible
psychological support, practical as well as workwise.” Primo Sergio, poi Leo.
Successionists might want to file that name away for future reference.
But his acknowledgment of Dell’Orco also validates that
vulnerability Armani was talking about. He seems more open. He looks more
relaxed in photos. Remember all those moody monochrome press shots from earlier
decades, with Armani idealised as if by George Hurrell in Hollywood’s Golden
Age. They actually made sense, because one of his ambitions was
acting. Paul Newman was an inspiration. It’s an irresistible notion that he’s
been playing a role all these years: Giorgio Armani, superstar designer. “Yes,
a little dose of acting is part of my job as well, isn’t it?,” he agrees. “It’s
not that I’m not natural, I stay true to myself. But I have to be a bit more.
The people around me expect me to be a certain way, so I do have to act a
little.”
Elements of the act have attained a certain notoriety over
the years: Armani, the hard taskmaster, so demanding that former employees
still wake up years later in a cold sweat thinking they haven’t finished
something they were supposed to do. Is it an act or an extension of his own
conflicted dissatisfaction? Armani himself insists that he tries not to let
himself be seen as “a usurper, someone who takes advantage of people”. He hopes
that his reputation is as “a kind man.” But he also once told me that his
reputation was like handcuffs. And, professionally at least, his opinion hasn’t
changed. “People think of me in a certain way and doing a certain type of
fashion.”
Which rather begs the question of how Armani would like to
be remembered. He takes a long pause before he answers, “…as a sincere man. I
say what I mean.” That seems like a humble response from a man who rules a huge
fashion empire. “Unfortunately,” he says with another easy laugh. “I am an
emperor who doesn’t feel like one.” It must mean something that the part of his
empire that Armani still finds most engaging is his fashion shows. “When what I
decided in my head comes out on a model, and it corresponds to what my idea
was, it’s very gratifying. No one else exists in that moment. It’s very
intimate. It’s not a contract, it’s not signing something.” A few days later,
I’m backstage at Emporio, and I witness the astonishing sight of Armani working
his way down a lineup of models, minutes before they go onstage, hands on to
the very last second as he adjusts the eye makeup on every single young woman
to create a scintilla of light.
For years, Armani’s clothes were so identifiable by their
neutral tones he became known as the King of Greige. The sobriquet riled him.
Then his collections became as distinctive for their evocative shades of blue:
sea and sky. More recently, light is the key ingredient. Armani called his last
haute couture collection Petillant, “sparkling.” The weightless fabrics of his
ready-to-wear collection for Spring/Summer 2023 shimmer with gold and silver,
counterpointed by luminous evening shades of blue and purple. It may well be
more a reflection of my own needs at the moment, but I’m detecting a spiritual
thread in this glimmer of the great beyond. Armani gives this some thought.
“With age comes a certain detachment from the materiality of things, but also
from the hustle and the bustle of work. I care less about other people’s
opinions, and never cared about trends. I keep doing what I do, and I keep
purifying the output. Would I call that spiritual? Probably not. Spirituality
is something very private, while clothes are objects. But for sure, everything
I do now is pure and it has more light. It reflects my condition of existential
lightness, which of course hides a certain gravitas.”
Giorgio Armani backstage at his Spring/Summer 2023 show. (Tim Blanks)
That very much sounds to me like the musings of a lion in
winter, in light of which my last question is obvious. Does Armani ever think
about what happens next, not for the business but for himself? I don’t actually
expect him to answer, but he does. “For the time being, I keep thinking about
work and life, not fantasising too much about the afterlife. That is something
that I keep for the deepest recesses of my thoughts. I am sure that, when it
will happen, it will be a surprise.”
Decades ago, Armani bought a house in his hometown
Piacenza. It was near a park filled with beautiful trees, and he once told me
that he wanted to give a name to every single tree in that park. “And when a
tree dies, something in me dies too.” Now that was a surprise. His connection
with nature felt so poignant to me that I have to bring it up again, while
we’re sitting looking at his beautiful Japanese maples. “No, I don’t remember that,”
Armani says. “It’s nice. It could have happened.” I guess anything can happen.
And it will always be a surprise when it does.