Giorgio Armani- History
What he really did was take away the restrictions and confinements of stiffer styles that had
gone before it.
He made it appropriate in the workplace for women to wear trouser suits.
He made men feel sophisticated and perfectly tailored.
Changes in menswear happen incredibly rarely.
You have the rise of America in the early 20th century and that changed menswear.
You had the Industrial Revolution in the 19th and that changed menswear.
And what Armani did in the 70s changed menswear as well and it's affected the way that every
suit in the world is made.
Giorgio Armani was born in Piacenza in Northern Italy in 1934.
You do get a sense when he's talked about his upbringing that the war was very evident.
There's a story that he and one of his friends were playing with an unexploded shell in the
streets and the shell went off, it killed his friend and it severely burnt Armani.
Armani's family were a middle class family and like others during the Second World War
suffered great hardship financially and Armani has said that even finding food was difficult
at this period of time.
After the war and after studying medicine and being in the army, Armani went to work
for a Milanese department store.
He always said that that for him was his introduction to knowing about fabric but more importantly
it was an introduction to customers.
This was a really extraordinary step because it was a very forward thinking pioneering
store and he had suddenly access to really creative, extraordinary people and he rose
through the ranks very, very quickly.
So he started doing buying soon after joining which I think is a very interesting kind of
career path because extraordinary from others who have either other designers who have learnt
their craft from their mothers or have studied in a sort of art school setting.
He really didn't, he studied on the department store floor.
There's lots of pictures of him from around then and he was always kind of incredibly
well presented.
He was a very precise child.
When he wound up meeting Mino Chiruti who offered him his first kind of fashion job
after working at the department store, Chiruti's first comment to him was that he looked respectable
and then he tossed a bunch of fabrics across to him and asked Armani to pick his favourites
and Armani said it was lucky that he picked the same favourites as Chiruti and that's
why Chiruti took him on as kind of part of his company.
The first thing that Chiruti did when Armani started there was send him to the textile
mills that Chiruti still owns and operates to look at how cloth was made and Armani said
really at that point there was, that kind of imbued a certain passion for textile in
him, the fact that he was able to see how fabric was constructed, able to experiment
with a huge variety of fabrics.
Obviously as a designer, that's something that's proved incredibly important.
It's something that he's still known for now, his use of textile in tailoring and how he
was able to kind of soften tailoring and revolutionise it by using all the fabrics that he was introduced
to under his work at Chiruti.
Chiruti has a very similar aesthetic to what Armani then went on to in his own brand.
Chiruti had this really extraordinary way of using different fabrics to tailor menswear
and so Armani ended up working on Chiruti's menswear line called Hitman and this is a
really, really exciting period of time where he kind of gained a language from being mentored
by Chiruti.
Really that whole way that the Beatles looked, the way that all of the mods looked in the
60s was Italian tailoring and that was all based on these kind of very neat, very precise,
very tight cuts and that was only possible through these incredibly fine fabrics and
new kind of techniques of tailoring.
Towards the end of the 60s, Armani met Sergio Galeotti, which marked the beginning of a
personal and professional relationship.
Sergio Galeotti was a friend of Armani, he became Armani's lover, but he was also the
person that really encouraged Armani to break out on his own.
He said to Armani, why are you designing these wonderful clothes for all these other people,
why aren't you designing them for yourself, why aren't you doing it under your own name?
And this spurred on Armani to take contracts as a freelancer, so designing for a range
of different designers and I think that that sets him on the path that we now associate with him.
Really it was off the back of all of this freelance and the money that Armani had made
from his freelance work and actually from selling his car, him and Galeotti sold the
Volkswagen that they owned together to get seed capital of $10,000 to start their own company.
There was only one table that Armani would be drawing on one side and Galeotti would
be trying to work out the business on the other side.
You know, it was an incredibly small company.
Don Mello actually said in one of his early collections that the lighting was so bad,
Armani ended up getting up and taking the shade off the lamp so it was a bare bulb so
she could see the colours of the clouds better and she bought the collection because what Armani
did at that time was to, in very broad terms, to soften menswear and to harden womenswear.
The first line, Spring Summer 1976, was really all about celebrating this craft of suppler lines,
slightly wider trouser legs in really, really delectable fabrics.
So it was really quite fresh but in a very kind of refined way.
This whole idea of adding a certain sensuality and softness to men's suits and creating
something that chimed with this kind of wave of femininity that was then affecting society as a
whole but actually not affecting high fashion to a great degree.
But what Armani did was to kind of work on perfecting a uniform for a new generation of
working women and in the 70s that seemed revolutionary and obviously what it actually
did was set the blueprint for the 80s.
In 1978, Armani signed an agreement with clothes manufacturer GFT.
In the history of the company, GFT gave them financial backing and this was really integral
because it meant that their production and textile manufacture was really, really supported.
They had done extraordinarily well, turning over two million sales in just the first few years of
being founded.
In the same year, the same group made an agreement with Versace to manufacture his clothes as well.
And really what that was seen as in fashion at the time was this rise of Milan as a competitor
to Paris and it was this rise of Italy as a commercial and a creative force in fashion
and a real challenge to the kind of supremacy of Paris at that period.
In the United States, Armani's designs were received really very, very well.
GQ referred to it in the late 70s as the total look.
In Armani coming to America in 1979, it's notable that that was the first time his clothes
were available in the country and by the end of the 80s, Armani had become the biggest
selling European designer in the whole of the United States.
I think after the 70s, the 80s really became a decade that was about designers,
more so actually than the clothes.
The interesting thing with when you look at Armani's designs for women's wear, especially
if you compare it to someone like Versace, he generally didn't make clothes that exuded
femininity in the same way that Versace did.
They weren't kind of clothes that were about women with enormous personalities, but for
a lot of women, they found a certain comfort in that.
They found that it was the way that they wanted to dress to feel confident, to feel secure
and to feel like they could compete in a man's world.
It was a really extraordinary kind of marriage with these women looking for things to wear
in this business corporate sense, but that really enhanced their elegance and their beauty,
but were appropriate in terms of getting confidence and feeling strong and independent.
The tailoring fabrics that were used were not the stiff and stuffy fabrics that had
been used previously.
They were soft and fluid.
The first Armani SPA store in Milan was in 1983.
Armani and Galliotto took their time to open this space, so really being super selective
about the way in which they sold their garments.
So really from the very beginning, it was one store in major cities that was selling
just a very limited stock, which added to this exclusivity.
Soon after, they opened on Madison Avenue in New York and then following with London.
And I think these shops really kind of helped to make them a global brand, but it was all
very considered.
The 1980s started well for Armani as he continued to find new ways in which to showcase his
brand to a worldwide audience.
And you were beautiful
Kind of concurrently, strangely, the things that happened were he dressed Richard Gere
for American Gigolo, he launched Emporio Armani, and he launched Armani Perfume.
In the early 80s, Armani partnered up with L'Oreal and created a line of fragrances.
This was very interesting in the sense that they were an extension of the brand, so more
in terms of the total look that his clothes could create.
Also, you're now playing into a scent that the Armani woman would wear.
The interesting thing with Armani signing the agreement with L'Oreal is first of all
that L'Oreal don't sign these agreements very often.
It was 20 years after Armani before they signed anyone new to collaborate with on a fragrance
line.
It's building this kind of idea that this is a lifestyle, but to fit in with the life
that you already have.
When they actually first approached Armani to dress American Gigolo, Armani said he would
do it because he knew he was launching Emporio Armani and he knew the publicity that it would
generate for him.
So he knew he was launching a lower price, more widely available brand, and he wanted
to be able to capitalize on the publicity that the film would generate for him.
I think it was something that really defined him.
I think it was something that really defined an era.
American Gigolo became this kind of classic film where these suits worn by gear, it was
just so perfect for the character.
Armani really understanding exactly the way in which clothes can tell a narrative within
this sphere of film.
I think when you watch that film, when you look at it, at times it's like an extended
advert for Armani.
You know, you look at the stills from it and they could be Armani advertising campaigns
from the same time.
And today it seems sort of commonplace, but then it was really unique, especially in menswear
to have that kind of vision presented cinematically.
And then also to suddenly have a lower price line that you could buy into, a perfume line
that you could buy into.
Commercially, it was incredibly savvy to kind of capitalize on the publicity that was generated
from that.
And I think that was probably what really established Armani's name in America.
You lured me in the sky.
Having found success with his work on American Gigolo, Armani continued to dress many of
Hollywood's biggest films.
After American Gigolo, Armani went on to design costumes for films, notably Batman, Pulp Fiction.
But the real big hitter, I think in terms of legacy, was Miami Vice, which was a TV
show, but really sort of defined the 80s in many ways.
The costumes in themselves, unlike American Gigolo, where the costumes were absolutely
the focus, the costumes aren't especially remarkable.
What I find remarkable is that certainly the later incarnations of that are for me a reflection
of Armani's relationship with Hollywood, which in the late 80s and early 90s really blossomed
into something beyond films.
Armani became the first designer that was actively petitioning to dress people for the
red carpet.
At a time when no other fashion houses were doing that, he offered to dress them in high
fashion that was desirable and low-key, which obviously is a major part of Armani's aesthetic,
is the fact that it is quite subdued.
It is elegant.
It is low-key.
It's minimalist.
It's simple.
And all of those things appeal to Hollywood stars.
It's so intertwined with this kind of Oscar season dressing that is reported by far and
wide and a real obsession in popular culture.
When Sergio
