Armani broke barriers, yet remained old-worldly

Italian fashion icon Giorgio Armani, who died of an undisclosed health issue at the age of 91, has left an indelible mark in the world of Italian and global fashion for men and women. He will be remembered as perhaps he would like to be as the man who deconstructed the formal stiff male jacket, made it less stuffy, less formal and gave it a rakish touch.

He seems to have done for male fashion what the men could not have done for themselves. But this aesthetic onslaught on the jacket, the male bastion as it were, was however based on an intuitive and radical social insight. He told the Esquire magazine in 2024 on his 90th birthday, “I had the feeling of what actually happened – women getting to the forefront in the workplace, men accepting their soft side – early in my career, and that was the base of my success.”

He had foreseen the arrival of the 1990s buzzword, “metrosexual”, the male socialite who took to fashion accessories with unrestrained enthusiasm. And when designed for women, he was keen that it should be subdued and not too loud. He did not like to use fashion to make a woman the sexual object. It is a strange mix of discreetness and elegance. He saw elegance in discreet apparel.

Armani’s was in many ways a typical Italian upbringing. He was born in a lower-income family in a small town near Milan. His father was a member of the fascist party, his mother a homemaker. He recalls that his mother had dressed him, his brother and sister in such a fashion that they appeared to come from a well-off family background though in truth they were poor.

In Milan he found his calling in a rather roundabout way. He dropped from the medicine course after two years, served in the military, and came back to civilian life to work in a departmental store. One of his assignments there was to dress up the widows.

An Italian noir film twist in the tale indeed. Soon, he joined a fashion house and there was no looking back. He reworked the jacket of the 1940s and 1950s to suit the changing fashion sensibility of the 1970s. He won his stakes, and Armani soon became a byword for Italian fashion though the other competitors soon emerged.

Martin Scorsese, the iconic filmmaker from New York, made a documentary on Armani, “Made In Milan” in 1990. And it is in this film that Armani declared, “I cannot stand exhibitionism.” His fashion credo was simple. He felt that fashion should make people happy about themselves.

He also said that he was not in the business for money though he was literally rolling in money. He said that fashion helped him to express what he was thinking. Like a true Italian, he believed in family. His successors would be the two daughters of his sister and a son of his brother. Though a celebrity, he was not a socialite. He preferred exclusiveness and had few close friends.

The rise of Armani is mainly the story of 20th century ambition, aspiration and unimagined success. The society paid homage to him because celebrities became the touchstone of social pinnacle.

Armani became a celebrity par excellence. And he achieved it through real work in changing the contours of the jacket from its staid looks into a statement of elegance and abandon. Armani was not a trained tailoring genius. It was just his imaginative innovativeness that brought success to his door, raising him from a straitened childhood to a state of super wealth. But he seems to have retained his common touch till the end.