Giorgio Armani, fashion’s master of the power suit, dies at 91

Giorgio Armani, before a fashion show in New York, Feb. 2, 1993. Armani, a designer who rewrote the rules of fashion not once but twice in his lifetime, has died. He was 91. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times).

By GUY TREBAY

Giorgio Armani, a designer who rewrote the rules of fashion not once but twice in his lifetime, died Thursday at his home in Milan. He was 91.

His death was announced by his company, the Armani Group, which said he had been working “until his final days.”

A reluctant designer but an instinctive empire builder, Armani initially became a household name by adapting a custom from traditional Neapolitan tailors: softening the internal structure of a man’s suit to reveal the body inside. Simply by removing shoulder pads and canvas linings, Armani devised what in the early 1980s became a new male uniform, the easy and almost louche sensuality of which soon enough found favor among a female clientele.

“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 UCLA. “But where do you go from Woodstock? How do you professionalize that look when those women start entering the workforce? You professionalize it by wearing a feminized suit from Armani.”

Androgynous, luxurious, positioned somewhere between the stuffy establishment attire popular among male executives at the time and the prim skirt suits favored by many professional women, Armani’s designs offered an alternative form of power dressing.

For a time, in Wall Street corner offices, Madison Avenue boardrooms and the executive suites of many Hollywood talent agencies, an Armani suit was the default uniform of authority, an occupational armor rendered in crepe or cashmere and cast in a somber palette from which the designer would seldom stray.

“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.

Early to embrace and mythologize Armani, the fashion press was initially magnetized by him as much for his cinematic good looks — piercing blue eyes, a mahogany tan and an athletic physique he would enjoy displaying well into his 80s — as for the assured yet ascetic aura he projected at a time when fashion designers had begun to emerge as pop culture celebrities in their own right. In the Italian media, he was lionized as “King Giorgio.”

Eventually, the fashion flock would move on from a design vocabulary his critics occasionally derided as repetitive and out of step. Yet if this troubled Armani, he never let on, possibly because the colossal advertising budgets deployed by his family-held company (which in 2023 posted revenues of $2.65 billion) all but guaranteed his work would receive lavish and largely reverent coverage in the press. As it turned out, the unruffled self-assurance he maintained was validated when, in recent years, the pendulum swung back to the styles of the 1980s, and Armani was once again lauded as a style prophet.

Alliance with stardom

Although anything but camera shy, Armani nevertheless viewed himself less as a performer in what he once termed “the movie of life” than as its presiding spirit. And cinema, as he declared in “Made in Milan” (1990), a 20-minute documentary about him directed by Martin Scorsese, had always been his true love.

“I would like to have been a director,” Armani said in the film. “The passion is still in my blood.”

In certain ways, it was this passion for the movie world, and for a constantly changing roster of the genetically favored, that would result in what is generally considered Armani’s most durable contribution to his field and his second recasting of fashion’s canon. Sooner and perhaps better than anyone else in the industry, he aligned himself with movie stars and their putative glamour, in the process making his name all but synonymous with red-carpet dressing.

By now, the symbiosis of celebrity and fashion is so institutionalized that few are surprised to see stars stepping out for designers as glamorous and well-remunerated sandwich boards. But Armani was among the first to court them, going so far as to establish a corporate beachhead in Hollywood to identify and cater to the sartorial needs of the occupationally fabulous.

“Giorgio started the whole thing of giving clothes to celebrated people, public figures,” said model and actor Lauren Hutton, who portrayed a senator’s wife in “American Gigolo” (1980), the film often credited with introducing Armani’s designs to a mainstream public. “Designers really didn’t give away clothes back then.”

Yet Armani did so, and lavishly, with the result that movie stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer, whom he referred to as an early muse, could be relied upon to appear at awards shows in clothes that boosted their currency in the emerging realm of fashion as mass entertainment.

“I was one of the first designers to dress stars on and off screen,” 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.”

A household name

Fittingly, it was through film that Armani first entered mainstream consciousness as a designer, when critics and audiences alike thrilled to a scene in which a bare-chested young Richard Gere, portraying a high-end escort, selects his evening’s wardrobe from an array of sensual earth-tone suits and knit ties in Paul Schrader’s noir tale “American Gigolo.”

In that film, Gere “succeeded in displaying the sensual, natural feel of my style and the new relationship between the garment and the body it represented,” Armani told The Telegraph in 2013.

“Thanks in part to that film, my label rapidly became a household name,” he added, notwithstanding an ongoing debate about whether, in truth, Gere wore anything by the designer on screen.

Unquestioned is the effect Gere’s bristling, insolent sexuality in “American Gigolo” had on men’s fashion, and the shift it triggered in the rules of dressing. This was as true in the sports arena as in the boardroom, as witnessed by the elevation of Pat Riley, then head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, from the arena sidelines onto the cover of GQ.

Armani’s designs would be seen on screen as well as off, worn by stars such as 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 hit 1980s police drama “Miami Vice,” in which a pale Armani jacket over a T-shirt created another new template for casual attire.

And he would prove himself an instinctive and canny industrialist, one whose name would be attached to multiple clothing lines, fragrances, cosmetics, shoes, watches, jewelry, hotels and restaurants; as many as 250 movie, opera and theater productions; and uniforms worn by Alitalia flight attendants and English and German soccer teams — and whose business model (20% of the products earn 80% of the profits) became a standard element of training in fashion academies.

An interest in medicine

Giorgio Armani was born July 11, 1934, in Piacenza, a town on the Po River about 45 miles south of Milan. He was the middle of three children of Maria Raimondi and Ugo Armani. His father was employed before and during World War II as a clerk in the offices of the local Fascist party.

Movies were Armani’s first love. He often attended them with his father, finding in the darkened cinema his one reliable means of escape from the terrors of life in wartime Italy. Early in life, these were anything but remote abstractions; when Allied forces began a concerted bombing campaign in 1940, strafing Italy north to south from Turin to Naples, his family home was struck by a shell.

Although the family emerged unscathed, Armani was severely injured shortly after the end of the war when a live mine detonated on a street near his home and set him ablaze. He was not yet 10.

He eventually recovered, the single visible reminder of the incident a scar where a shoe had burned into his foot. As a result of the experience, he would later set his mind on pursuing a career in medicine, which he had come to view as a noble and selfless profession.

“A.J. Cronin’s books about being a country doctor made a deep impression on me,” he wrote in his autobiography, titled simply “Giorgio Armani” (2015). “I loved the idea of a person who saved the lives of the elderly and the young alike.”

Educated initially at the Liceo Scientifico Respighi in Piacenza, Armani moved with his family to Milan in the late 1940s and, after high school, studied medicine at the University of Milan. After a brief and unpromising stint there, he broke off his studies to join the army; owing to his medical training, he was assigned to work in an infirmary. There was little enough about his beginnings to suggest his eventual trajectory.