Giorgio Armani, a designer who rewrote the rules of fashion not once but twice in his lifetime, has died. He was 91.
His death was confirmed on Thursday in a statement by Armani Group.
A reluctant designer but an instinctive empire builder, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 the University of California, Los Angeles. “But where do you go from Woodstock? How do you professionalize that look when those women start entering the work force? 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, Mr. 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 and a co-curator with Germano Celant of an Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000.
Early to embrace and mythologize Mr. Armani, the fashion press was initially magnetized by him as much for his cinematic good looks — sharp featured, with piercing blue eyes, a mahogany tan and an athletic physique he would enjoy displaying well into his 80s — and 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 Mr. 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 ’80s and Mr. Armani was once again lauded as a style prophet.
A full obituary will follow.
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting.
Guy Trebay is a reporter for the Style section of The Times, writing about the intersections of style, culture, art and fashion.
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