Armani told NEWSWEEK that story in one of several interviews about the latest chapter in his remarkable career: a bold global expansion into a variety of new cities, stores and merchandise. Though famously reticent, Armani also spoke openly about a personal tragedy that shaped his determination to retain control of the House of Armani–a move that could prove to be his smartest yet. Shunning pressure to sell out to larger suitors in this age of megamergers, Armani has retained complete control of his empire and, more important, of the cool, minimalist design sensibility that helped put Italian fashion on the map and that he is now extending to cosmetics, shoes, jewelry–even furnishings.
It’s an unusual strategy these days, but Armani’s timing may be perfect. The slovenly arrogance of the late millennium–that you could be a slob because you were going to be a billionaire–has passed. Dot-comers have been reliably sighted wearing coats and ties. And in times of economic uncertainty, there’s always a tendency to look to eternal verities for grace under pressure. During the Great Depression people fell for the impeccable calm of Fred Astaire. Now Armani’s elegantly relaxed style may offer similar allure to a world fretting about the risks of global recession.
If Armani manages to seize a unique moment, it won’t be the first time. In the 1970s he revolutionized the way men and women dressed, in part by dressing them like each other. In the 1980s he redefined the look of Hollywood by making glamour subtle, and in the 1990s he built an empire selling blue jeans as well as business suits. Now, despite the edgy economy and his age, he’s gambling hundreds of millions of dollars on expansion. There are plans for Armani florists and Armani cafes in select locations. Adding to a retail empire that already spans more than 200 outlets in 33 countries, he will open new Casa Armani home-design stores this fall in Los Angeles and New York, and megastores next year in Hong Kong and London.
In retrospect, Armani can be seen as the Anti-Bubble. At the height of the soaring stock market, he could have sold his company for enough to move him way up on lists of the world’s richest humans. (He’s currently number 292 on the Forbes roster.) “We’re talking billions of dollars,” he says. “Of course I was tempted.” Other fashion houses were tempted, too, and they rang up debt to bet on the market. Privately held Prada bought Jil Sander, Helmut Lang and Church’s Shoes. It figured these names would dazzle the street in anticipation of a lucrative IPO, which Prada had to put off as the market fell this summer. Armani’s most powerful corporate suitors, luxury conglomerates Gucci and LVMH, have seen their shares plunge since January 2000 highs.
Now Armani’s solo strategy is looking pretty smart. While rivals must answer to an embittered and cautious market, Armani answers only to himself. During the bubble years he accumulated $800 million in cash that allowed him to underwrite his current expansion. “I can judge my work better than anyone else,” he says. He admits he wasn’t always so confident. “Years ago I was scared of the world,” he says.
The first time we met with Armani was at a party he threw in his Milan apartment after his men’s fashion show in June. Major Hollywood stars were in attendance: Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, George Clooney, Ashley Judd and Samuel Jackson. Armani dutifully circulated through the room, but often he retreated to a corner just to watch. The next morning we asked him why he seemed so alone at his own party. “I’m obliged to play the part of the brilliant host who makes friends with people I don’t know–with American actors, for example,” he said. “Last night I met Brad Pitt. I found him very nice, but I don’t know him. It’s a facade. At the end of these evenings, I always ask myself, ‘What did I do for those three or four hours?’ "
Armani has no problem recalling his childhood during World War II. The industrial city of Piacenza, where he lived, was a frequent target for Allied air raids. “If the sun was out, I was scared, because the sun brought the bombers,” he says. His sister, Rosanna, who is now retired from her brother’s firm, remembers one particularly bad day when she was 4. Giorgio was 9. As the two of them came out of a bomb shelter, some schoolmates called to Giorgio. He crossed the street to see what was going on. His friends had found a smoke grenade or flare. One of them lit it, igniting a flammable powder in his own shirt pocket. The explosion killed Giorgio’s friend, and burned Giorgio from head to foot. “He spent 40 days in the hospital,” says Rosanna. “They put him in alcohol every morning and they took off his skin.” The only physical scar that lasted, she says, was from the buckle of a sandal that burned into his foot.
When Armani is asked how his sense of style developed, he recalls a Christmas soon after the war, when his mother served a chicken for the first time in months. “I still remember the smell of it,” he says. But little Giorgio thought she had set the table with too many flowers. He told her some of the arrangements had to come off. The man often described as a minimalist smiles to himself. “That was the beginning of the story.”
The family moved in 1949 to Milan, where Armani was treated as a provincial outsider. He studied medicine, then got a job in La Rinascente department store setting up displays. He was almost 30 before he got a break–a chance to work with designer Nino Cerruti–and Armani wasn’t sure he wanted it. “I was making enough money to give some to my parents,” he says. To leave that security “was not easy.”
Then a charismatic, well-to-do young fashion enthusiast named Sergio Galeotti changed Armani’s life forever. “Giorgio was quiet,” remembers Rosanna. “Sergio was like this crazy public-relations man. Incredible!” They soon became partners in life and business. “He gave me confidence in myself,” says Armani. “He had a great deal more courage than me. I was ten years older. I had lived through the war. He was a young man, with money, with no problems.” They opened, Armani says, “a small office [with just] a great deal of enthusiasm… but it worked.”
As the model Lauren Hutton remembers, “Before Giorgio, there was never an Italian fashion industry. There was an Italian fabrics industry.” The cloth went to designers in Paris or Rome. Nobody thought of showing clothes in Milan. Now all that began to change. Armani “became a flagship for success in Italy,” says his former employer Cerruti. “From 1974 onward, he and [Gianni] Versace were the symbols of dramatically growing Italian fashion. He was much closer to people with a normal life. Versace was for a more extreme audience.”
Over the next 20 years Armani became a household name. The Guggenheim Museum has mounted a major Armani retrospective, now showing in Bilbao, Spain. “When we first saw Armani at the Oscars, it was a revolution,” says Vogue’s Anna Wintour. “It was the end of that glitzy, over-the-top, rather vulgar way of dressing.” He “deconstructed” jackets for men, and they were actually comfortable to wear. By the mid-1980s, Armani was looking at a billion-dollar future. Then, in 1985, Sergio Galeotti died of AIDS.
More than any other event, it was this tragic loss that explains why Armani remains a stubborn fashion loner. “When I lost Galeotti, I was forced to take care of all that he took care of before,” says Armani. “The financial reports, lawyers, contracts. Few people thought that I would succeed as a manager. So I began to learn the language of lawyers. I wanted to continue a story I began with Sergio and the second, more personal [reason] was for my own validation, my own self-respect.”
Unaware of how personal Armani’s business had become, later suitors would woo him in exactly the wrong way. By 1999, the great “luxury tycoons” like Bernard Arnault of LVMH and Domenico De Sole of Gucci saw only that Armani was nearing retirement age, and started to move in. They offered to let him remain the creative force of the House of Armani, and to relieve him of annoying details like distribution and marketing. But this was not drudgery to Armani. It was the role he had taken on to overcome Galeotti’s death. “For Giorgio it was a really an awful moment,” says Rosanna. “But he took the business right in hand. [Employees] wanted to know what would happen. He said, ‘For you, nothing’.”
Toward the end of the last interview, we asked Armani what he saw as his greatest failure. “We’ve had lines that didn’t work; we’ve had merchandizing that didn’t work, but that’s not failure. Those are normal things,” he said. “Perhaps the greatest failure… was not being able to stop my partner from dying.” There was a brief moment, just then, when the stoical cool slipped away. But then it returned. This happened. It’s over. Now this is Armani’s life.
