Giorgio Armani, Fashion Paragon of Sophistication and Success, Dead at 91

“Fashion is a serious job—and a wonderful one, for that matter,” Giorgio Armani said when I interviewed him in late 2021. At the time, Armani was 87 years old, his job not yet done. He remained deeply entrenched in the daily operations of Giorgio Armani Spa, the multibillion-dollar luxury business, spanning fashion, home, hospitality, sports, and philanthropy, that he built from the ground up and operated independently. He held the titles of chairman, chief executive officer, and creative director of his company until his death Thursday at age 91.

The Armani Group announced the news in a statement signed by his employees and his family, which read:

Mr. Armani, as he was always called with respect and admiration by employees and collaborators, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones. Tireless, he worked until his final days, dedicating himself to the company, its collections, and the diverse and ever-new projects both existing and in progress.

Over the years, Giorgio Armani created a vision that extended from fashion to every aspect of living, anticipating the times with extraordinary clarity and concreteness. He was guided by an inexhaustible curiosity and a focus on the present and people. Along this path, he created an open dialogue with the public, becoming a beloved and respected figure for his ability to communicate with everyone.

Always attentive to the needs of the community, he was committed on many fronts, especially towards his beloved Milan.

Giorgio Armani is a company with fifty years of history, grown with emotion and patience. Giorgio Armani has always made independence, both in thought and action, his hallmark. The company is the reflection, today and always, of this feeling. The family and employees will carry the Group forward with respect and continuity of these values.

“In this company, we have always felt part of a family. Today, with deep emotion, we feel the void left by those who founded this family and nurtured it with vision, passion, and dedication. But it is precisely in his spirit that together, we employees and the family members who have always worked alongside Mr. Armani, are committed to protecting what he built and to carrying on his company in his memory, with respect, responsibility, and love.”

Over the course of his monumental 50-plus-year career, King Giorgio, as he became known within the fashion industry, was synonymous with many things: his perennial tan, crystal blue eyes, and white hair offset by his studied uniform of navy crewneck, navy pants, and white sneakers; his soft and glamorously cut gray and beige tailoring that defined yuppie, power broker living in the ’80s and ’90s; his prescient cultivation of the Hollywood-fashion symbiosis, beginning with the outfitting of Richard Gere for American Gigolo in 1980; and his relentless work ethic and dedication to his business. After launching his company in 1975 at the age of 41, Armani built an empire, achieving a level of fame and success—including a personal fortune of around $12 billion, according to Forbes—to which few designers—Ralph Lauren aside—have ever come close. The name Giorgio Armani transcended the man to become a cultural shorthand for suave sophistication and success.

Under the Armani Group’s umbrella, there is the men’s and women’s designer collection Giorgio Armani; the younger, trendier Emporio Armani and its sport line, EA7, which outfits the Italian football club SSC Napoli; Armani Collezioni, the luxury department store staple; Armani Privé, the haute couture collection launched in 2005; and Armani/Casa, the home and furniture line launched in 2000 that creates a lifestyle best exemplified by the Armani Hotels. The first opened in 2010 in Dubai, where it occupies a number of floors on the Burj Khalifa. The second opened the following year in Milan. Everything is united by the Armani aesthetic, defined by a clean yet opulent architecturalism. Armani widely owns its own factories, production and distribution facilities, and retail stores, including one that occupies a full city block on Milan’s Via Manzoni.

Photo: David Lees/Getty Images.

Sartorially, the look that fueled Armani’s fame was one of relaxed, unstructured tailoring, specifically the jacket. Shortly after establishing his own label in the mid-1970s, he showed a men’s collection featuring a rumpled, unlined jacket that grazed and flattered the body and was a revelation in contrast to the stiff, constructed traditional suits that ruled common menswear. A few months later he reinvented women’s tailoring with a unique masculine allure by eliminating internal supports and padding. “I hope, sincerely, I do hope that [my jackets] have given them a relaxed feeling of security,” he once told an Italian magazine, according to a Vanity Fair profile from 2000, “and the salutary feeling of being unattackable.” In the 1980s the Armani “power suit” for men and women, with its exaggerated shoulders, widened lapels inspired by the 1940s, and monochromatic silhouette, became the radical signifier of a time of economic prosperity.

As influential and era-defining as Armani’s sensual suiting was his relationship with Hollywood. The dynamic of power and sexuality that Armani’s clothes represented was immortalized onscreen in Paul Schrader’s 1980 film American Gigolo, which features a shirtless Gere shimmying in front of a closet full of Armani suits, painstakingly selecting the perfect jacket, shirt, and tie in which to get down to business. But it was offscreen that Armani set a new standard, virtually inventing the modern epoch of red-carpet dressing and the fashion-celebrity industrial complex.

In 1988, Armani opened an LA office, hiring former journalist Wanda McDaniel, whose husband was Hollywood producer Albert Ruddy, known for The Godfather, as a liaison to the stars and everyone in their professional orbit—lawyers, managers, agents, producers, and directors. According to a 1995 story in The New York Times, it was McDaniel’s job to invite celebrities to Armani fashion shows and make sure flights, hotels, and of course, clothes, were paid for. “Since Ms. McDaniel’s arrival, Armani has been available at deep discounts to those who can further the designer’s cause in Hollywood, be they agents or celebrities,” reads the Times story. “Mr. Armani would like to dress you,” was reportedly how the overture was made.

His fascination with cinema dated back to childhood, and Armani began dressing actors long before the opening of the LA office or his store on Rodeo Drive. Diane Keaton was the first person to wear Armani on the red carpet, donning a beige jacket over a long skirt when she won the Academy Award for best actress for Annie Hall in 1978. In 1990, Julia Roberts wore an Armani suit to the Golden Globes. Jodie Foster collected her best-actress Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs in 1992 in an oyster Armani suit. Armani cemented long-standing relationships with Leonardo DiCaprio, Lady Gaga, George Clooney, and Cate Blanchett.

Over the entirety of his career, Armani was famously unflinching in his commitment to his core aesthetic, even when the tides of trends and taste ebbed from his current. His atelier and circle of influence was tight, loyal, and highly guarded, including Leo Dell’Orco, head of menswear design, and his niece Silvana Armani, head of womenswear. Rather than enlisting an outside stylist from fashion’s preferred roster of star image-makers for his runway shows and campaigns, Armani did it all himself, for better or worse. In the aughts and 2010s, critics complained that his collections were frozen in another time, with their predilection for funny hats and tricky pants.

Even more confounding and fascinating to the press was, first, the issue of a potential corporate merger; for years, rumors spun about an acquisition by LMVH or Kering. It never happened. “I have no associates. I am not in the stock market. I am beholden to no one in what I do. If I spend billions on a fashion show, I spend billions. It’s not public,” Armani told Vanity Fair in 2000. Then there was the question of succession, creative- and business-wise, within the Armani Group. During a 2013 interview with then New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn, she asked him if he thought about who would next take the reins. “Every morning,” Armani, then 79, said. But he didn’t see it happening anytime soon. “So the solution is to remain here while I can and create a group of people that I can trust, with one person by my side.” Eight years later, he told Vogue that he would pass down the business to family. He mentioned Dell’Orco and Roberta Armani—Silvana’s sister, who had worked at the company for decades, landing eventually in public relations as his most outward-facing lieutenant. But even as he approached his 90th year, Armani remained the undisputed boss of the company.

Photo: Rose Hartman/Archive Photos/Getty Images.

Giorgio Armani was born July 11, 1934, in Piacenza, Italy, where he grew up with his father, Ugo Armani; his mother, Maria Raimondi; and his older brother, Sergio, and younger sister, Rosanna. It was through his mother that Armani developed an interest in fashion. “Though we grew up in postwar Italy and were very poor, she always ensured that my brother, sister, and myself were immaculately dressed. She was herself an innately elegant woman,” he told The Independent in 2006.

Initially, Armani pursued a career in medicine, enrolling in the department of medicine at the University of Milan before leaving for a brief stint in the army. Afterward, he dabbled in photography and got a job as a window dresser at premier Milan department store La Rinascente, where he eventually took a buying and merchandising position in the men’s department. In 1965, Armani joined Nino Cerruti’s business, designing menswear for the Hitman line and freelancing for other Italian houses, including Allegri, Gibò, Montedoro, Sicons, and Tendresse. Shortly after starting his work with Cerruti, Armani met Sergio Galeotti, an architect 11 years Armani’s junior. Galeotti persuaded Armani to open his own design office in Milan and cofounded Giorgio Armani SpA in July 1975. The pair partly financed their venture by selling Armani’s Volkswagen Beetle.

Galeotti was Armani’s onetime lover, best friend, and business partner until his death, at age 40, in 1985. At the time, the cause of death was reported to have been a heart attack suffered after a yearlong battle with leukemia. “It was AIDS,” Armani told Vogue in 2021. Their partnership was so essential to Armani’s day-to-day operations, state of mind, creative decision-making, and business momentum that many thought the designer would be unable to forge ahead after Galeotti’s death. Instead, Armani threw himself into his work, making it his life’s purpose and greatest love. Nearly four decades later, he still named Galeotti as the biggest influence on his work.

Armani was known to be immensely private, keeping his tribe of confidants, many of them family, close and small. Within their ranks, he was always number one, ever dominant, competitive, strict, and regimented. He didn’t smoke, and he rarely drank. He had a reputation for a difficult temper. As he told Vanity Fair, “I must make decisions every five minutes and give the impression of being sure of myself! Sincerely, this is the cause of my verbal violence. And sometimes I even use words, Italian ones—stronzo or cazzo!” (Shithead, prick.) He also wasn’t afraid of firing shots at fellow designers. When Gianni Versace was shaking up Milan with his hedonistic, baroque sizzle in the ’90s, the hostility between Versace and Armani could hardly be contained. When a new wave of intellectual, conceptual fashion took hold in the 2010s, Armani let his thoughts be known, telling the Times, “It’s a defect that many designers have—Prada most of all.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic began spiking in Italy in February 2020, during Milan Fashion Week, Armani was among the first major designers to take action, holding his runway show without an audience to minimize exposure. During the course of the pandemic, he emerged as a decisive leader and industry elder statesman—in his cautious response to not only the virus, but also the state of the industry in general. He penned an open letter to Women’s Wear Daily in April 2020, lamenting a business model careening out of control with “the overproduction of garments and a criminal nonalignment between the weather and the commercial season,” and urging fashion to take stock and do better.

The letter was reprinted in full in Armani’s 2023 autobiography, Per Amore, in which he observed, three years after the pandemic’s onset, that instead of the industry undergoing a reset, nothing had changed. But the virus had opened his eyes to the ridiculous and endangering pace of fashion, and he pledged to do something about it.

Armani wrote, “At this point in my life and career, it is also a way to leave behind a personal legacy and a method on which the Gruppo Armani can base itself in the future, when I am no longer here. Care for the planet, people and the community are the cornerstones of this way of thinking. Without fanfare, without sensationalism. By doing, and nothing more, with the lucidity and the pragmatism that have always set me apart. The world is filled with words, but it is the actions, the facts, that speak.”