Giorgio Armani, 91, died at his home after 65 years revolutionising fashion and working to make a better world. His life was full of triumphs and tragedies, and his vision will be greatly missed.
Giorgio Armani was always an innovator. The Armani Privé Spring/Summer collection in 2007 was the first haute couture collection to be live-streamed online, as well as on MSN and Cingular-branded cell phones. The couturier was also a dedicated philanthropist, a partner with the global Product Red initiative, the UNICEF Tab Project and Green Cross International, among many others over the years.
This morning, September 4, 2025, it was announced that arguably the world’s most famous Italian designer had died in his home at the age of 91. The nonagenarian had spent more than 60 years as a force for good in the world of high fashion. Today the world lost a man committed to excellence; we were lucky to have him as long as we did. His memory will forever be a blessing.
Armani’s Early Life And Introduction To Design
Born in Piacenza, Northern Italy, on July 11, 1934, Giorgio Armani was the middle child of an accountant and homemaker. World War Two, and the years immediately before and after, were devastating to Italy and during many of these years, the Armani family lived with hunger. As a child, during the war, Armani and his friends would play with undetonated artillery shells in the streets. One exploded, killing one child and badly burning Giorgio. The designer later said that “war taught me that not everything is glamorous.”
After the war, Armani studied medicine before dropping out of Milan’s Liceo Scientifico Leonardo da Vinci and joining the Army. He was stationed at a military hospital in Verona, which allowed the young man to attend the collection exhibitions each season, and soon he began thinking about the possibility of taking his life in a new direction.
Around 1957, Armani began to work at the high-end department store La Rinascente, where he worked as a window dresser and clerk, and was responsible for featuring up-and-coming designers like Marimekko.
Though he became the best known, and best-selling, Italian designer in the world, Giorgio Armani was an Italian courtier without any formal design training. His expertise, especially with textiles, came from years of research, retail work and careful attention to what clients wanted and needed.
By the early 1960s, Armani was working at Nino Cerruti, a well-known Italian couturier and tailor, where he began to design menswear.
The era of stolid British-influenced suiting began its end in the mid-20th century, which created a vacuum Armani was more than happy to fill.
How Armani Changed The Shape Of Suiting
Traditionally, very much in the style of Savile Row or Italy’s conservative Neapolitan tailors, men’s suiting was rigid and boxy, made up of layers of tightly woven luxury textiles given the “full canvas” treatment.
Armani softened the look by removing the internal canvas layers and ditching shoulder pads, and by smoothing out the lines of a suit’s internal structure. He made menswear slightly more feminine, made women’s suits more masculine, and by making business clothing more androgynous, Armani changed the way people around the world dressed for work.
Over the next decade, Armani worked for other brands, took on freelance projects and in 1966 met Sergio Galeotti, a young man training to be an apprentice, and fell in love. Galeotti encouraged Armani to go off on his own. Armani’s love left his own career (and sold his Volkswagen) to help raise the funds to launch Giorgio Armani S.p.A in Milan in 1977.
Within a decade, Armani was the best-selling European designer in the United States, and there is no doubt that his work, which began at the tail end of the Made In Italy Movement, helped to make Milan, and Italian fashion more generally, be seen as an arbiter of style nearly as important as Paris.
In 1980, Giorgio Armani dressed Richard Gere for Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, then The Untouchables and Miami Vice; the designer spent decades dressing the world’s most famous people for every televised red carpet.
In the 1990s, the company expanded to include Armani Jeans and Emporio Armani, and began licensing sunglasses, cosmetics and more, including a fragrance deal with L’Oreal. The Italian press called him “King Giorgio”; GQ said he had designed “the total look.”
Then, tragically, Galeotti, Armani’s partner, died of an AIDS-defining-illness in 1985, at only 40 years old. Armani stepped back to grieve and contemplated ending his career, but decided that his love would have wanted him to persevere. “He helped me believe in my own work,” the designer later explained.
Armani’s Empire And Legacy
Armani never had a family, and after the death of his partner, he threw himself into the work, turning a relatively small Italian house into a multi-billion-dollar global empire. Throughout his career, the master resisted the temptation to take on investors, and until his death the brand has been a business entirely controlled by Armani and his family, and has used this position to make positive changes in fashion.
When Brazilian model Ana Caroline Reston died of anorexia in 2006, the designer became the first to stop working with models with a body mass index below 18. In 2016 Armani committed to stopping its use of animal fur.
In 2019 the brand signed The Fashion Pact. The fashion industry’s “largest CEO-led initiative for sustainability in the fashion industry,” the organization and its partners share the goal of attaining a “vision for a nature-positive, net-zero future for fashion.”
In 2021, Armani enhanced its existing sustainability department, focusing on “People, Planet, and Prosperity.” The brand utilizes an Environmental, Social, Governance (an ESG) approach throughout the company in line with the agreement signed in 2019. In more recent years, the company has created sustainable capsule collections that play with recycled extruded plastic textiles and organic natural fibers. As of its Autumn/Winter 2022-2023 collection, Armani no longer manufactures any products made with angora wool.
A life-long sports fan, Armani designed Italy’s Olympic uniforms in 2012, as well as kits for both Chelsea and the England football teams over the years.
There was a bit of a public falling out when La Wintour (supposedly) ditched an exhibition of Armani’s work in 2014 (sources say there was either a conflict, or, she said she would not go because “The Armani era is over”) but the “notoriously disciplined” designer, according to New York Magazine, was “dedicated to self-control” and chose to focus on more important things than one editor.
As he always did when life was hard, Armani went back to work; he focused on his clients and their needs. For some 65 years, the couturier dedicated himself to excellence in design, amassing $13 billion (£10 billion) in sales over his career.
“I’m never satisfied,” the designer was known to say. “In fact, as someone who is forever dissatisfied and obsessive in his search for perfection, I never give up until I’ve achieved the results I want.”
In a statement about its founder’s death, the Armani Group said that Giorgio “worked until his final days.”
This article was originally published on forbes.com.
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