News from Italy
The story of the timeless prince of fashion…
by Andira Vitale
Giorgio Armani… Italy’s shining star on the international scene… The symbol of timeless style and elegance… We will not only tell his life story… We will accompany his “rebirth“ process like a phoenix in this magnificent life story. We will witness facts and periods we believe lost open the door to glittering lives… We will be fascinated by the success of the person who fundamentally changed the industry he dedicated to and managed to be the best in his field… And it is assumed that the whole process cannot be achieved without “decisive work”.
Giorgio Armani was born in Piacenza, on the banks of the Po, on 11 July 1934. He grew up with his brother Sergio, his sister Rosanna, the very elegant father, Ugo and his mother, Maria. His childhood was very happy, but they didn’t have much money.
It was wartime. That’s why he had a hard time in his childhood. Among these were shelters one ran to in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, Armani’s childhood, between bombings and even injury from a bomb blast that forced him to stay in hospital for forty days, shapes his character and lays the foundation for the designer’s creative imagination. Maybe that’s why he gained the ability to imagine fantastic worlds through clothes, as many say… He says in many interviews that he started wanting to dream as a child. While the children of the gentlemen and the rich were travelling in difficult times for everyone, Armani was travelling in his dreams… Maybe that’s why he dreamed of
In 1949 he moved with his family to Milan, which was not the “fashion capital” at the time but was a crossroads of the Italian economic and cultural movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Milan was now to be where he lived and worked. The buildings were not as imposing and ostentatious as those in Rome. But behind the walls were filled with magnificent interiors. In small, extensive gardens, in very intimate, elegant atmospheres, Armani found himself. Maybe he felt the internalised elegance of his parents, whom he loved very much. Exquisite and elegant. Armani, who found it, became a part of Milan…
Armani grows up, graduating in 1953 and enrolling in medicine “without too much conviction”, as he has repeatedly stated. Military service, two years later, forced him to interrupt his academic career, providing him, in a certain sense, with some time to reflect on his future. In fact, after returning from military service, our protagonist does not return to the benches of the State University but begins to look for work and, through his friend Rachele Enriquez, begins to work in Rinascente, the Milanese department store specialising in clothing.
He did not start his medical education very willingly. He left his education halfway through his military service as an excuse. Nekehat was on leave in Milan, unemployed; He got a job at la Rinascente through his friend. He was helping architects deal with luminaires. It cannot be said that he loved fashion at first. He entered the fashion world by chance in such a conjuncture. There was no fashion designer figure at that time. Or he didn’t realise it… But he would find the question of what he wanted to do in life in Rinascente…
Thus began Armani’s life journey in fashion. It was challenging at first… Because it was a field and lifestyle opposite to his academic life. It required both hard work and talent. Those around him saw the talent that Armani was unaware of. This awareness was embodied in 1965 when collaboration with Nino Cerruti was offered to redesign the Hitman brand, the packaging company for Lanificio Fratelli Cerruti products.
“By chance, I came into contact with people involved in fashion in various industries: advertising, distribution… I discovered that I could give something creatively. I agreed to join a significant clothing company and deal with menswear. I learned everything from scratch there: painting, fabric… I only studied medicine, and I didn’t go to art school! When Cerruti asked me to do this job, it took me little time to love fabrics. I spent much time in the factory and learned to respect the technicians’ work: I understood that a sample of the fabric that had fallen to the ground must be collected, not moved with the foot. Even the humblest work must be respected”.
Thanks to the partnership with Cerruti, Armani gets to know this sector deeply, deepening the dialectic of fabrics and combinations and starting to conceive his idea of style and fashion that will remain indissoluble throughout the course of his creative career. Studying menswear in depth during the seven years of his stay in Hitman, he understands that the aesthetics of man needed a change of a revolution.
The corporate structure of Cerruti’s firm teaches him the trade and helps him to create a working methodology but, probably needing more than company logic, in 1973, at the age of forty, he decides to set up on his own. In this choice, a character, Sergio Galeotti, known by the stylist a few years earlier, has great weight. Galeotti is a crucial figure for Armani. The two establish a relationship of deep affection beyond the professional partnership which, as stated by Armani in 2000 to Vanity Fair, “to define love would be an understatement”.
Having rented a small office in Corso Venezia, the two began to deal with image and style consultancy, acquiring essential clients, such as Max Mara, Hilton, Allegri and Bagutta. The assumption of creative awareness came in 1974 when Giorgio Armani parades in the Sala Bianca of Palazzo Pitti as a freelance stylist amidst the approval of the insiders. Gratified by the numerous successes obtained, Galeotti and Armani decide to start collaborating on a new entrepreneurial challenge. It is 1975. Giorgio Armani S.p.A. begins.
Having rented a small office in Corso Venezia, the two began to deal with image and style consultancy, acquiring essential clients, such as Max Mara, Hilton, Allegri and Bagutta. The assumption of creative awareness came in 1974 when Giorgio Armani parades in the Sala Bianca of Palazzo Pitti as a freelance stylist amidst the approval of the insiders. Gratified by the numerous successes obtained, Galeotti and Armani decide to start collaborating on a new entrepreneurial challenge. It is 1975. Giorgio Armani S.p.A. begins.
Legend has it that the start of the business was financed by the sale of the designer’s Volkswagen, which earned him 10 million lire. With this capital, the first investments consisted of renting some premises in the centre of Milan and hiring a few employees. The beginnings of King George are complex. In his biography, he says the following:
“They have been years of sacrifices and effort. I no longer had time for myself. I often cried in despair at eleven in the evening in the factory, where I was left alone among thousands of meters of fabric. I went up and down from Milan to Biella with my fifth-hand camera in the fog and snow”.
Today the history of the Armani group is that of a fashion house that will go through the creation and production of prét-a-portér garments, couture, eyewear, leather goods, perfumes, but also objects for the home, flowers and sweets, children’s clothes, up to giving names to restaurants and luxury hotels in the heart of Milan and Dubai. His touch of style quickly became a worldwide boom: the women’s jackets designed starting from the men’s lines, the chic men’s clothes without being excessively formal. Like, for example, the deconstructed jackets with which he revolutionises the concept of lined jackets precisely because internal supports disappear (padding and linings, buttons are moved and traditional proportions are modified. Jackets become one of the emblems of the new course of Italian fashion. Inspired by the black and white cinema and the atmospheres of America in the twenties and thirties, his style chooses sharp and clean cuts in a range of cold colours: greys, the deepest shades, and greige, a cross between grey and earth-coloured, but above all blue, also combined with black in less conventional chromatic experiments. However, it does not exclude the timeless black and white dress, bringing it to a higher class than the common. And then the break-through under the eyes of a wider audience, from appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1982 to dressing Diane Keaton at the 1978 Oscars and with the dresses created for the film American Gigolo in 1980, where the handsome Richard Gere fascinates with the style of Armani suits.
Success, however, needed to be improved in coming.
