Giorgio Armani

Giorgio Armani is an (born 11 July, 1934 in Piacenza, Italy), particularly noted for his menswear.

Armani trained in medicine, giving it up for photography, but was called up for national service in 1957. Afterwards, he got a job in a department store, La Rinascente, as a window dresser. From 1961 to 1970, Armani worked as a designer under Nino Cerruti, whom he left in order to do freelance work.

In 1974, with assistance from his partner, Sergio Galeotti, he established his own company, Giorgio Armani S.p.A. with a men's wear label, introducing a ladies' wear line in 1975. He is known today for his clean, tailored lines. He achieved his international breakthrough by tailoring for numerous Hollywood names and especially for Richard Gere in the title role of American Gigolo in 1980/81. His sister Rosanna Armani joined him in the company; Galeotti died in 1985.

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Even as a small boy, growing up in the ancient city of Piacenza in northern Italy, he used to long for physical intimacy, Armani says. This was partly conditioned by the times. He was born in July 1934, at the height of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship and one year before his army invaded Ethiopia - an action that ultimately precipitated Italy's disastrous entry into the second world war on the side of the Nazis - "that war that was so dreadful for everybody". It was a time of pervasive insecurity - bombs in the night that meant, as children, they would be led from their beds into shelters. Two of his young friends were killed in one of these bombardments. After the war he was seriously injured himself when he and a group of teenage friends found a bag of explosives, which they threw on to a lighted brasier. "Before this I'd had curly hair. It went dead straight and remained straight, as you see." He risked losing his eyes and had to lie in a shaded room for 20 days with both eyes closed. (Until he told me this, I had thought his insistence on wearing sunglasses in the merest light was an act of vanity. It is not.) "My eyes were never as good again."

But the need derived also, he says, from his personal circumstances. He was the middle child of three; his brother Sergio was four years older. And though they were close, there was, inevitably, a rivalry between the brothers, in which Giorgio knew he could never be the victor. "He was the favourite of my mother. He was tall, he had girlfriends. He looked a lot like Joseph Cotten." (Interestingly, a close colleague of Armani told me that one of his strongest character traits is that he has no envy. "Competition fuels him but he is not eaten up by it. He is the least envious person I have ever known.")

His father worked as an accountant for a transport company - "He made the money" - but his mother was the dominant influence. "That's how it is a lot in Italy. The father behind the mother." And, though he stresses that she was not unkind, he says, "She was very hard, very exigent. I don't remember her cuddling me except once: I was three, she took me in her arms and sang me a song." He is not being mawkish. The war imposed all sorts of constraints, he says. "We were hungry often. We had nothing ..." Truly, there was barely time for emotion. But it is to this lack that he attributes his first professional instinct, which was to be a doctor. "I was fascinated by anatomy, by proximity to the human body, even when I was very small. I lived by my hands. I would make dolls out of mud with a coffee bean hidden inside." Which he would then excise with a kitchen knife, giving himself marks out of 10 for surgical precision.

Following school, he spent three years studying medicine at the university of Piacenza, interrupted by two years' compulsory military training, after which he did not return to medicine. He says the reason was that he was no good at studying. "I had trouble at that time synthesising ideas." But he also felt a need to earn his own money, not to be a burden on his parents - he lived at home until the age of 25. And his family's never very propitious circumstances received a blow when, after the war, his father was imprisoned for his fascist sympathies. "He was implicated in fascism ... like almost everyone at that time." He spent nine months in prison - Armani remembers visiting him there. "I remember his distress and that he cried, I remember that ... I can't remember all of it ... but the feeling of it, certainly." At the same time his brother Sergio had to go into hiding, also "for some months". "He was in uniform but then everyone was in uniform ..." Soon after this, the family left Piacenza for Milan.

So, to answer the question, 'Where did the Armani revolution originate?', it came of course from his aesthetic - his desire to break open structures, to make everything fluid. But it must also have come from his ethics. A reaction against hierarchy, a distrust of conformity and rigidity in all its incarnations. As a child he had seen first-hand the perils of a uniform - he must have understood the psychological comfort and equally the danger in such conformity. I asked him if he could sum up the essence of his style. "To give confidence but not to define the personality," he said.

Armani's rise to become the most commercially successful designer in postwar European history began in the late 1950s when he was employed at the department store La Rinascente, first as a window-dresser and later as the buyer's assistant. In 1961 he was spotted by Nino Cerruti and hired as the designer for his new menswear line, Hitman. He went freelance in 1970, starting his own label in 1974.

Saturday December 11, 2004
The Guardian