Giorgio Armani: Thank you, king Giorgio, for the suits and the style

Giorgio Armani, a designer who rewrote the rules of fashion not once but twice in his lifetime, died Thursday at his home in Milan. He was 91.

His death was announced by his company, the Armani Group, which said he had been working "until his final days."

A reluctant designer but an instinctive empire builder, 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, Armani devised what in the early 1980s became a new male uniform, the easy and almost louche sensuality of which soon found favor among a female clientele.

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.

The fashion press was initially magnetized by Armani as much for his cinematic good looks -- piercing blue eyes, a mahogany tan and an athletic physique he would enjoy displaying well into his 80s -- as for the assured yet ascetic aura he projected at a time when fashion designers had begun to emerge as pop culture celebrities. 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 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. In recent years, the pendulum swung back to the styles of the 1980s, and Armani was once again lauded as a style prophet.

In certain ways, it was his passion for cinema, and for a constantly changing roster of the genetically favored, that would result in what is generally considered Armani's most durable contribution to his field and his second recasting of fashion's canon. Sooner and perhaps better than anyone else in the industry, he aligned himself with movie stars and their glamour, in the process making his name all but synonymous with red-carpet dressing.

"Giorgio started the whole thing of giving clothes to celebrated people, public figures," said model and actor Lauren Hutton, who portrayed a senator's wife in "American Gigolo" (1980), the film often credited with introducing Armani's designs to a mainstream public. "Designers really didn't give away clothes back then."

Yet Armani did so, with the result that movie stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer, whom he referred to as an early muse, could be relied upon to appear at awards shows in clothes that boosted their currency in the emerging realm of fashion as mass entertainment.

Fittingly, it was through film that Armani first entered mainstream consciousness as a designer, when critics and audiences thrilled to a scene in which a bare-chested young Richard Gere selects his evening's wardrobe from an array of sensual earth-tone suits and knit ties in Paul Schrader's noir tale "American Gigolo."

"Thanks in part to that film, my label rapidly became a household name," Armani told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2013.

Armani's designs would be seen on screen as well as off, worn by stars such as Sean Connery and Robert De Niro in "The Untouchables" (1987); by Christian Bale and Michael Keaton in separate iterations of the "Batman" franchise; by Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street" (2013); and by Don Johnson in the hit 1980s police drama "Miami Vice," in which a pale Armani jacket over a T-shirt created another new template for casual attire.

And he would prove himself an instinctive and canny industrialist, one whose name would be attached to multiple clothing lines, fragrances, cosmetics, shoes, watches, jewelry, hotels and restaurants; as many as 250 movie, opera and theater productions; and uniforms worn by Alitalia flight attendants and English and German soccer teams -- and whose business model (20% of the products earn 80% of the profits) became a standard element of training in fashion academies.

Giorgio Armani was born July 11, 1934, in Piacenza, a town on the Po River about 45 miles south of Milan. He was the middle of three children of Maria Raimondi and Ugo Armani. His father was employed before and during World War II as a clerk in the offices of the local Fascist party.

Armani was severely injured shortly after the end of World War II when a live mine detonated on a street near his home and set him ablaze. He was not yet 10.

He eventually recovered, the single visible reminder of the incident a scar where a shoe had burned into his foot. As a result of the experience, he would later set his mind on pursuing a career in medicine.

Educated initially at the Liceo Scientifico Respighi in Piacenza, Armani moved with his family to Milan in the late 1940s and, after high school, studied medicine at the University of Milan. After a brief stint there, he broke off his studies to join the army; owing to his medical training, he was assigned to work in an infirmary.

It was largely happenstance that led Armani to fashion, and a temporary job at the Milan department store La Rinascente in 1957. Employed initially as an assistant photographer and window dresser, he was rapidly promoted to buying supervisor, charged with purchasing goods from India, Japan and the United States.

His talents as a stylist quickly came to the attention of menswear designer Nino Cerruti -- scion of a family textile business -- and so in 1964, with no formal fashion training, Armani found himself at the helm of Hitman, a Cerruti line of men's clothes.

He remained at that job until 1970, when, nearing 40, he impulsively struck out on a career as a freelance designer. In that pursuit, he was encouraged by Sergio Galeotti, an architectural draftsman he had met in the 1960s and soon became his lover.

"It was Sergio who believed in me," Armani told GQ in 2015. "Sergio made me believe in myself. He made me see the bigger world."

Using the proceeds from the sale of their Volkswagen Beetle, Armani and Galeotti formed their own company and label in 1975. Soon after that, the designer introduced his career-defining unlined jacket, a design that signaled a definitive turn away from traditional male business attire. He then went on to introduce a woman's version whose sexy though sober styling was a welcome contrast to both the dull separates then available to executive women and the frothy concoctions featured on many runways in an era of pouf skirts and giddy excess.

So rapid was Armani's rise that by 1982, he had appeared on the cover of Time. He was the first fashion designer to be so featured since Christian Dior four decades before.

With this early phase of his success at its peak, Armani received the news that Galeotti, his partner, was infected with HIV. At the time, there was no effective treatment for the virus; Galeotti died at 40 in 1985. Although news accounts attributed the death to a heart attack, the cause was widely understood to have been complications of AIDS.

"During that dreadful year I lived as though I were holding my breath, without thinking about the inevitable, working day in and day out," Armani wrote in his autobiography, "Giorgio Armani" (2015). Compounding his grief was the burden of taking on the business side of the company.

The Armani empire at his death was a high-octane machine, with a globally legible brand name and outposts in most major cities throughout the world.

Although by his own account, Armani never entered into another partnership as intimate and significant as that with Galeotti, he maintained a decades-long relationship with Pantaleo Dell'Orco, an Armani executive and board member of a charitable foundation the designer created in 2017 to forestall future takeovers of the multibillion-dollar, privately held company.

In addition to Dell'Orco, Armani is survived by his sister, Rosanna. His brother, Sergio, died in 1996.

Until the very last, Armani remained resolutely tight-lipped about his succession. "There will be plenty of time for others later," he told GQ. "As long as I am here, I am the boss."