Giorgio Armani: The Icon GQ+A

Armani the brand turns forty years young this year. Armani the man is in his eighties. Both of which are impressive facts. but what's really kind of remarkable (and inspiring as hell to anyone who dreams of his own second act) is that when you do the math, you realize that Giorgio Armani was once a completely unknown forty-something striver, still trying to figure out who and what he wanted to be. GQ's Michael Hainey sits down for a rare in-depth interview with the godfather of fashion
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Giorgio Armani didn't accomplish anything until his forties.

Everything you see now: the globe-spanning business empire, the personal fortune that  Forbes calculates to be north of $7 billion, the name that has come to connote the larger idea of style itself? None of that existed when the man turned 40.

In the early 1970s, Giorgio Armani was just another middle-aged man, a onetime medical student, wondering if his best days were behind him. He was in Milan, having started out as a window dresser at a department store. He displayed some skill at that, got promoted, became the menswear buyer, eventually moved on to work as a designer for Nino Cerruti. "I was fine," Armani says of his life then. "Fine."

Forty and..."fine." It's a feeling many men know too well. A feeling that sends a shiver through their souls when they confront themselves in the mirror. That moment when men often pack away their youthful ambitions. The time of resignation, of settling.

Armani chose not to settle. In July of 1975 he was in a relationship with a man named Sergio Galeotti. It was Galeotti, seeing Armani's potential, who encouraged him to start his own company. To fund their start-up, Galeotti persuaded Armani to sell his Volkswagen Beetle. They took that money and opened an office. Two employees. Galeotti running the books, Armani the creative.

"It was Sergio who believed in me," Armani tells me one day in Milan, before he mounts what he estimates to be his 120th men's show. "Sergio made me believe in myself. He made me see the bigger world."

Today, at 80 years of age, Armani is so completely identified with success, with Italy, with glamour and luxury, that it is almost impossible to perceive the ordinary personhood of him; he seems more like an avatar of the brand he created. In his four decades as head of Giorgio Armani S.p.A., he has been heralded as an innovator and, in recent years, sometimes criticized for no longer innovating. Yet through all the high points and lulls—this is fashion, after all—his company endures and expands.

The afternoon before I met him for the first time, I took an hour-long train ride to Piacenza, the town on the Po River where Armani was born in 1934, the son of a civil servant. The day I traveled there, northern Italy was suffering its usual midwinter gloom: gray skies, shadowless light, a damp chill that settles over the region and seems to seep into your bones. Piacenza is, in many ways, an undistinguished, provincial place. During World War II, when Armani was a young boy growing up here, large parts of it were crushed by Allied bombers, and Armani's childhood home was damaged. When he was 9, Giorgio and some friends discovered a bag of gunpowder and, boys being boys, set about screwing with it. It exploded. Armani, severely burned, spent six weeks in a hospital recovering from his wounds. At one point, his family feared he might lose his vision.

I ended up speaking with Armani—or as everyone in his orbit unfailingly calls him, "Mr. Armani"—on three days, spread out over a week, observing him backstage at his men's shows in Milan and visiting his workspace in Paris. His handlers claim their boss speaks no English. I say "claim" because it's clear that Armani understands English, but perhaps due to vanity or a lack of confidence in his abilities, he does not speak it. As a result, just about all of my conversation with him was through a translator.

How do you not age? Look at you.
A well-maintained physique is a great business card. Ideas and intelligence are what matters, but if you have a well-maintained physique, it's better. People are always more willing when it comes to beauty; there's not much to be done about it. It's a classic ideal: healthy mind, healthy body. And, at least for me: discipline. Keeping the body in shape requires effort. It's the antidote to laziness, which is what I hate most of all. And it is an antidote against the passage of time.

Armani at work in Milan, 1986. Photo: Archivio Alfa Castaldi

What is the biggest misconception that people have about you?
That I'm a melancholy person. In reality I'm more cheerful and ironic than it seems.

Italians see you as distant and aloof—an emperor, alone in his castle. Why?
You should ask them this rather than me. I'm a very private person, and perhaps this can be mistaken for aloofness.

If you could change something in the fashion world, what would it be?
The excessive speed of today's fashion. We are required to churn out ideas and collections with enormous speed, but invention and quality take time. My solution is continuity: I evolve at my own pace, because the women and men I dress expect this from me, not just ideas that are only good for the catwalk. Fashion once again needs to find a more human and real rhythm.

Take me back to your childhood, to Piacenza. What do you remember?
Very little. [pause]

You look like you just went somewhere in your mind. What are you thinking about?
My bedroom, as a boy. I was remembering the blanket on my bed. It was cotton and there were little flowers on it. [another pause, then he shakes his head]

And you didn't like the blanket?
[laughs] No. I remember there was a stove in the hallway, in the entrance. It was the only heat we had in the house. We lived through a lot of hardship there. I remember, too, the theater there. My grandfather was a wigmaker for the theater. And every so often he would bring me. I was little. It fascinated me. One time, he brought me to the premiere of La Bohème, which is set in winter in Paris. The snow. The windowsills, lit up. Candles. And while I was watching the scene in the theater, outside it was snowing like crazy. It was as if, with the snowing, the theater had become reality. [His expression turns wistful.] I want to go back to Piacenza.

Didn't you do puppet shows as a boy?
My brother and I did puppet shows with puppets that we made of wood and clothes that I fashioned out of scraps of cloth that I scavenged. We were very poor, but we had a lot of enthusiasm.

In a way, you are still the puppet master, backstage, dressing dolls, pulling strings…
[laughs] Yes. I am too much the puppet master. Once, my brother and I were going to stage a puppet show in a town near Piacenza, where there was a priest, Don Pietro. This priest was a little bit in love with my mother. Platonic love, mind you. He never did anything. But one day he asked my brother and me to put on a little puppet show. He said he would give us a big space in a grand hall. My brother, sister, and I made the tickets—150 of them. But this was at a time when the war was advancing on our town. So at the last minute, the show had to be canceled. [pauses] I still remember all the work that went into making this show, a show that never happened.… My brother and I shared a room, and at night, before we fell asleep, he would create a show for me, all these different characters with different voices. He was great. [laughs] But every night, at a certain moment, when he wanted to go to bed, he'd stop the show and say, "And now, good evening. The show will continue tomorrow."

Top: With Sergio Galeotti, his partner in business and life, at Milan's Linate Airport in 1980. Photo: Archivio Alfa Castaldi. Bottom: With Richard Gere at an L.A. party in 1988. Gere's Armani wardrobe in American Gigolo marked the start of my relationship with cinema, Armani says. Photo: Courtesy Of Art Streiber/WWD.

A true cliff-hanger.
Yes! And I would run around the bedroom, so pissed off that it was over!

I can't quite articulate why, but you still seem like a boy from the provinces in the big city.
Very much. Like a boy from the country, out in the world.

And you seem like a shy man.
I am. I've dealt with things I never thought were possible. The public, the press, the echoes around the world. And the pretense that I had to sustain. I had to fake being up to the challenge. Apart from the painful things I had to overcome. It was very heavy. Very heavy. Not only for love, but because there were people missing from my life. Like Sergio. But also there is a painful period after. [Sergio Galeotti died in 1985. Just over a decade later, Armani lost his brother, also named Sergio, when he died in 1996.]

What would you say to Sergio [Galeotti] if he were here now?
He'd be crazy with joy. I think principally for me. But also for him.… After Sergio died, it was painful. I also had to learn so much about the company, to keep it going. Many people didn't think I could do it. They didn't believe in me. It was disappointing to discover—even within my own company—that there were people who thought I would not be able to do it. So there was an exodus. And I had to roll up my sleeves and learn to speak to lawyers, to publicists.

Now, I could decide today to leave this business. But I look in the faces of everyone here. The mailman who has children. The young woman who has finally made it to a job at Armani. Or the people who have been here for thirty years. All of this prevents me from making what is, in the end, the self-centered decision to stop. [pauses] I think sometimes maybe I should not have done fashion. Maybe I should have done something where I could express myself more, without any conditions. Like a writer. A writer who gets to write what he thinks. End of story. In the fashion world, you have to make clothes to sell, you have to make clothes for the press, you have to make clothes for yourself. What I mean is, everything is an obligation. But a writer? A pure artist? Maybe he doesn't make one lira, but: He does what he wants.


Armani's breakthrough as a designer came almost immediately after he and Galeotti started the company, when Armani took a traditional men's suit and literally ripped the guts out of it. Until Armani, most "business suits" were boxy and stiff. Armani, wanting a softer profile, sliced out the shoulder pads. He cut the pants fuller. Everything was looser. And then there was his palette of dusty gray and green and brown—the earthy colors, I noticed on my train ride, of the sky and countryside and stone buildings around Piacenza. There was a new sexiness to all of it, and the unstructured, soft jacket revolutionized men's fashion. If, in the 1980s and early '90s, you were a man in the creative industries (or aspired to look like you were)—media, architecture, acting, maybe even the coach of an NBA championship franchise based in Los Angeles—you wore one thing: Armani.

I met Armani for the first time on the morning of one of his men's shows in Milan. It was early, not yet 9 A.M., and his show was not scheduled to begin until eleven. I found him in the deserted backstage dressing area. If you didn't know who he was, you could mistake him for a pensioner who had wandered astray from some tour: He sat quietly at a folding table, reading a newspaper. He was dressed in his uniform: navy wool pants, a navy cashmere hoodie, and white sneakers. His skin was the color of tobacco and his hair was so white it seemed to radiate. Fashion houses are often powered by drama and thrive on chaos, never more so than in the hours leading up to a runway show. That's what was so weird about this scene. It was nothing but serenity.

A couple of hours later, Armani stands backstage, staring at a monitor that shows the stage and runway. "Dai, dai," he mutters. He's impatient with how slow the editors and buyers are to fill their seats. Armani hates slowness. While some designers are often delayed in starting their shows, Armani has the models dressed and ready a good hour before the show starts. Over the past sixty minutes he has been everywhere in the backstage area, inspecting every model and giving "last touches"—adding a hat, removing a jacket. He is never not noticing, not evaluating, not editing. (Indeed, as one employee told me, he also remembers everything: "He is more than happy, if he has to prove a point to you, to bring up that time seven years ago when you screwed something up.")

He returns to the monitor and then, to keep the screen's glow from bleeding onto the runway during the show, he pulls a blackout curtain around himself; his assistant, Paul; and the producer of the show. A moment later, Armani pulls me in and draws the curtain closed behind us. There are now four of us in a space not much larger than a bathtub. Pitch-black except for the faint blue of the monitor. Lights are cued. Music is cued. The first model enters our cloistered staging area, and then something surprising and sweet happens—a brief series of gestures that are repeated with each model as he sends them forth. Armani puts his hand on the model's shoulder or forearm, and as he watches the monitor to track the previous model making his way down the runway, he turns to the young man facing him and steadies him. Then he gives him a gentle squeeze of the biceps, followed by two firm pats on the shoulder. No words. In the moment, it's hard not to see Armani as a grandfather, attempting to instill his own sense of confidence in the model who—for the next thirty seconds, anyway—will be responsible for representing Giorgio Armani to the world.

You did not start your business until you were 40. If you had a son and you were going to give him advice on creating his second act, what would you tell him?
Be faithful to your ideas. Unless they are idiotic. [laughs] But: Have courage for your ideas. Try not to have a complex about your work, or to pressure yourself to find some mythic, divine, or exceptional craft. Be humble. Once the decision to do the job is made, consider the job as the director of a bank would. That is to say, with the same precise rules. Having thought this way has helped me arrive at where I am today.

Do your critics hurt you? People who say you are not relevant?
I have many enemies. Many people who belittle me. "This Armani is boring! This jacket is boring!" Well, at least I have a jacket. I made the jacket unstructured because I wanted to accentuate the body. See the sensuality.

You made your name with an unstructured jacket, but you like structure.
It is who I am. I crave it. I have a very rigorous attitude. For example, I make fashion, but I don't dress fashionably, because I know that fashion does not work for me. For my physique, my manner. I would be grotesque. In my atelier, around models, they can't see me as divine. I am a manager who chose a way—like the banker chooses finance or a politician chooses his craft. My craft is fashion. It's a beautiful craft, very demanding. And one for which you sacrifice a lot of your life.

Is that why you are successful? Because you sacrificed?
I always had a burning ambition to realize my potential. [Forty years ago] fashion had only arrived at a certain point. I saw that I could express my vision in full. That I could be bigger than a designer. I could be more like a director—of taste, of lifestyle. But I understood, too, that success like this requires total commitment, if it is going to take on a life of its own. I'm disappointed that many times I had to give up relationships for work. In reality, though, I have no regrets. I did what I wanted. And I have learned along the way, while finding myself as an entrepreneur. I don't have a formula to pass on. I always did it my own way. Even today I hold my independence close. It's what's most precious to me. Passion. Risk. Tenacity. Consistency. This is my professional history.

What is "style"?
It's not easy to define the creative process. Instinct is an essential component. I'd start with the fact that, perhaps due to my family's experience—we had very little, but my mother didn't let us go without—I've always appreciated the ability to do more with less. I like everything that's simple. That isn't loud. That can be appreciated up close. My creative process is a continuous re-invention of this basic idea.


Top: Armani calls Inglourious Basterds "one of the most bitter, and most amusing, films made in recent years. Brad Pitt wears my dinner jacket in the final sequence." Bottom: Armani dressed Christian Bale in The Dark Knight, stitching "Giorgio Armani for Bruce Wayne" into the labels of his suits. "Even when hidden," the designer says, "details still make the difference."Photos: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

The last time I met with Armani was in Paris. It was early on a Sunday morning, and he was preparing for his women's couture show. Unlike many of the French designers who work in light-soaked ateliers with cinematic views of the city, Armani toils in an almost windowless postwar building near the Arc de Triomphe. Armani and I sat at a small folding table; black curtains cordoned us off from the young models and old seamstresses who waited for him.

In the few days since I had seen him, I had been thinking about Armani's prolific wardrobe work in Hollywood (The Untouchables, Duplicity, The Dark Knight). He entered the pop-culture vernacular in America when he dressed Richard Gere in American Gigolo, and he possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of film. When I asked him at one point about Il Sorpasso, a 1962 classic about a road trip that holds a special place in the hearts of Italians of his generation, his face lit up. "This movie is heartrending," he said. "It takes me back to my youth." In a way, it makes sense that Armani loves film so much. The medium combines two of his passions: creating beautiful moments, and silent observation.

You strike me as the kind of man who, as we say in America, is "alone in a crowd."
Yes. Everything has its purpose. This business helped me overcome my shyness. There's an example I want to give you: Clint Eastwood. He moved from being a fantastic actor to being a director of films. I feel more like Clint Eastwood than some director who aims to be spectacular, who wants to follow the wave of the moment.

Both you and Clint did not find your true work until your forties.
Your forties are the moment when you start to become aware. It's just the beginning. I've always believed that to confirm your way of thinking takes time. It takes experimenting. You have to confront different chapters of your life. Maybe I could reproach myself for not thinking enough about the people I had around me. My family. Loves. Memories. I was always here [points to his head], in my work. I guess I didn't think life was so short.

Would you have done anything differently, looking back now?
I would have had less fear. Less fear of making a mistake. It only takes a second to make a mistake, so it's a choice you have to make many times a day.

Did fear hold you back?
Sometimes fear made me lose time. But, in reality, there's not much I haven't done. [laughs] As a young man, at one point, I wanted to be an actor. I was a good-looking guy and probably would have had some luck.

Do you wish you'd sold your company?
No. So long as I am here, I am here. There will be plenty of time for others later. As long as I am here, I am the boss.

Do you believe in Louis XV's immortal line, _"Après moi, le déluge" _?
I find it a bit exaggerated. In these years I've surrounded myself with skilled collaborators, people that I trained and helped develop while thinking of my succession. So I can assure you that everything is in place. When the time is right, my team will move on its own, standing strong against any "flood."

When is the last time you cried?
Last night. I cry often. All I have to do is think, and my eyes water. So, I can't hide it. That's why I hide from relationships, from confrontations. And this sensitivity that grows with age comes from when I was a child. But I'm not ashamed of it. I don't fight it. I think now, at this point in my life, I manage maybe to be more myself than I have ever been.

What changed? When did that happen?
Well...the death of Sergio [Galeotti]. In general, every loss of a person gave me a kind of shock to my system. The death of my brother... Love, and its effect on us. Love that is born, and then dies. I cannot live without love. I need to have a person to depend on. Not in bed. I mean complicità—that deep connection. _[He makes the motion of hugging someone.] _We need physical contact. Not kisses. Kisses with the arms. My mother rarely hugged me. There was not much of that. There was a modesty among our family. It was a different time. There was no direct rapport between parents and children. There were only obstacles.... But the relationships I have had in my life, I have always had encounters that have never left me bitter. The relationships always ended for the right reasons. Maybe my age always made me resemble more of a father figure. Or maybe it is a role I sought out.

Do you wish that you had become a father?
Yes. _[pauses] _ A lot. _[Tears form in his eyes.] _ I wish I had many children.

What would you have wanted to teach your children?
First and foremost, respect for others. And for oneself. The only thing that I am insistent on is respect. Someone can be born intelligent, rich, poor, with a good aesthetic or not, but I demand you respect them. And discretion. It slays vulgarity.

Do you believe in heaven?
Well, I _should _say no.... [smiles]

Do you believe you will see Sergio in the next life?
I can't believe... I have to be pragmatic. When I travel, I bring his photograph. There is something that remains. His spirit lingers. For sure. He lives on. I see Sergio everywhere, and I am sure he sees me. And I have hope that whatever I have done, he knows about it. But it's the _form _ I don't know; I don't know how it will work in the future.

You must believe we all go on in some way.
Always. It just all goes so...fast.

Michael Hainey (@michaelhainey) _is GQ's editor at large and the author of the memoir _After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story.