All about Giorgio Armani – A brief history of Georgio Armani and his clothing lines.
Georgio Armani, the self-titled “suit king”, bronze-skinned, immaculately coifed ruler of a fashion empire worth 3 billion, got his start from selling his old Volkswagen and borrowing money. Scrabbling together $10,000, Armani and his late partner Sergio Galeotti launched the Georgio Armani line in 1974.
Armani, who once famously said, “I like beautiful things,” did not have a particularly beautiful early childhood. Born in Piacenza, Northern Italy (near the fashion conscious Milan) on July, 11, 1934, Armani spent a significant portion of his youth experiencing the devastation of the Second World War as it ripped through his country. He has said he didn’t have a happy childhood and once described to an interviewer how he had lost two friends to a bomb and how, machine gunned from an airplane with his little sister, he lay over her in a ditch to protect her.
Despite his difficult beginnings, Armani pulled himself together and began attending medical school after high school. Two years into his studies, however, his turn for compulsory military service came and he left school. After completing his service, he turned away from medicine and, at the age of 20, got a job as window display designer at La Rinascente department store. They must have liked his touch because he was soon promoted to buyer for the store. In this position he began to buy quality materials and products from India, the US, and Japan and introduced many Italians to foreign tastes in clothing.
His next career step, on his way to becoming a fashion mogul, was a significant one. Without a day of formal training in the field, Armani landed a job designing clothes for famous designer Nino Cerutti’s Hitman brand. After a few years learning the tricks of the trade, he decided to go freelance, hiring out his designs to the highest bidder. In 1974 he launched his first men’s clothing line under his own name and followed a year later with a women’s line.
Armani’s biggest break came in 1980. After designing the clothes for Richard Gere’s famous fashion conscious Julian Kaye in the wildly popular film American Gigolo, Armani began to be noticed by a wider audience. He became the fashion designer to the stars as Hollywood luminaries lined up to be dressed by this fashion icon.
Armani lit up the eighties. His retelling of the simple sport coat almost defined the fashion generation. He took away the lining of the plain men’s sport coat and turned it into a sleek, understated statement of cool. Think Don Johnson Miami Vice kind of cool. That cool made Armani rich. With his post-Gigolo success, he seized the momentum and launched two new brands, Emporio Armani and Armani Jeans. The new brands had the same stylish understatement as his earlier creations but were more affordable. Now everyone who was anyone was wearing Armani. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1982, becoming the first designer to do so since Christian Dior in the 1940’s.
It was also in the eighties that Armani changed the way women dressed by coming up with a slightly androgynous look. He put them in suits and tuxedos. He also created the “power suit,” which was to become the symbol of yuppie power, for both men and women.
The Armani holdings have come to include at least 13 separate clothing, perfume, and fashion accessory lines which rake in upwards of $1 billion per year. Armani was feted by the stars for 25th anniversary as an independent fashion designer. As part of his anniversary, the prestigious Guggenheim museum put together their largest ever exhibit on a fashion designer on Armani.
What’s his secret to being able to design clothes so successfully for men and women? In a Vanity Fair article Armani identified his openness as one of the reasons, “I have had women in my life. And sometimes men… to do this work, one must have a free mind.”
Armani lives the rich life of suntans and beautiful people. He has houses in Broni, Forte dei Marmi, and Pantelleria (Italy), and in St. Tropez (France). However, his life has not been entirely smooth. In 1996, despite maintaining his innocence, Armani pleaded guilty to bribing tax inspectors and received a suspended sentence and a $64,000 fine.