Fashion has no shortage of eminences in their own minds, but one man was unquestionably a maestro: Giorgio Armani.
Mr. Armani, as he has been known for decades now, died on Thursday at 91. The Armani Group, which, unusually for global fashion houses, he owned independently, sold billions of dollars of clothing, accessories, fragrance, furniture and much else last year. His was one of the most remarkable ascents in the 20th century.
I was lucky to watch it from the very first. Mr. Armani, or as I always knew him, Giorgio, was one of the many star designers discovered, nurtured, imported and grown by my father, Fred Pressman, at Barneys, his Seventh Avenue store.
Fred joined Barney’s, as the discount men’s wear shop owned by his father was then called, shortly after World War II. By 1975, when Mr. Armani, a former window dresser for the Milanese department store La Rinascente, founded his own company, Fred was busy bringing a better quality of goods to the shop.
I will never forget watching a Knicks game in my father’s den in Harrison, N.Y., as he paged through a copy of L’Uomo Vogue, the Italian men’s fashion magazine. I just wanted to watch the game; he never stopped working. It was an advertisement for Armani that caught his eye.
By that point, Fred had been sending deputies to Italy to bring back the best of Europe. One of his most stalwart employees, Ed Glantz, had brought home for his wife a raincoat that Mr. Armani had designed for the Italian company Montedoro. Now Mr. Armani had a label all his own. Soon after, Fred asked Glantz’s wife, Gabriella Forte, who worked at the Italian Trade Commission, for a favor: to ring up Mr. Armani and ask for a meeting.
She dialed his number from a Milan telephone directory, forgetting that her early evening was Mr. Armani’s Italian 11 p.m. Didn’t matter. Mr. Armani’s partner, Sergio Galeotti, was soon on his way to New York, and with Ms. Forte as translator, he and Fred hammered out a deal not only to have Barneys carry his label, but also to secure a 10-year exclusive on a special collection to be carried only at Barneys.
When it arrived in 1976, it was not an immediate success — Mr. Armani’s elegant, unstuffy tailoring was a world away from the sack suits American businessmen were used to buying at Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart on Madison Avenue.
But Fred stuck with it. He commissioned a television commercial featuring matinee-idol-handsome Mr. Armani in his Milan studio. “Even though Barneys may not understand his Italian,” a voiceover said, “they fully understand his fashion.”
Soon enough, others began to, also. Store staff members from those days remember the young cast of “Saturday Night Live” (which began in 1975) coming to browse for it, and before long, so did people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. In 1978, we — I had joined the company in the early ’70s, and was by then working in merchandising — threw Mr. Armani’s first American fashion show, in a big-top tent erected atop a parking lot we owned across the street from the store on Seventh Avenue and 17th Street. (One of my grandfather Barney’s eureka innovations was to offer free parking for shoppers.) Mr. Armani allowed men to see themselves as fashionable.
His work with fabric was unparalleled, and his eye for color unmatched. A sea of blue and gray workaday suits was suddenly supplemented with unstructured jackets that swung like sweaters, their proportions altered just so to lend drape and ease.
As Barneys (as it would soon be renamed, no apostrophe) positioned the brand Armani on the East Coast, Hollywood soon stepped in to do the same on the West, and Armani’s designs for Richard Gere in “American Gigolo” made cinema history. (Not many people remember now that the role was originally meant to go to John Travolta, who flew to Milan to be fit for a whole bunch of Armani clothes before ultimately dropping out of the film.)
After that, there was no stopping Mr. Armani. I used to await his new collections and shows the same way I would each new Beatles’ album back in the ’60s. And when I would visit Mr. Armani in his showroom to buy the collection in Milan, he was never anything other than courtly. He once gave me the jacket I admired off his back.
For many years, Mr. Armani’s fate and that of Barneys were intertwined. He was a calling card for the store among fashionable and savvy shoppers, helping to elevate it beyond my grandfather’s discount emporium; and the store, which the press called the biggest men’s store on earth, was a showcase for him. By the 1980s, his suits were flying out the door — a former Barneys buyer I spoke with recently recalled seeing all the benches and sofas in the Grey Room (the gray-flannel-covered section where Armani and our other prize collections were stocked) covered with Armani suits that had been sold, tagged, and altered, ready for their waiting customers. Wall Streeters would come in and buy six suits at a time. “I’ve never seen anything like that again,” the buyer told me.
Ours wasn’t always an uncomplicated relationship. Mr. Armani eventually expanded distribution to include other retailers, a process that wasn’t easy for us. There were challenges and arguments, hurt feelings and the occasional legal battle. But Fred never forgot Mr. Armani, and Mr. Armani never forgot Fred. Fred Pressman respected no brand as much as he did the ultimate brand: quality. And that, Giorgio delivered in spades.
Mr. Pressman is a former co-chief executive, creative director and head of merchandising and marketing of Barneys New York.
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