Updated Sept. 4, 2025 at 5:45 p.m.*
MILAN — It was July 24, 1975, when Giorgio Armani officially founded his company with a starting capital of 10 million lire (around 800,000 euros in 2025, adjusted for inflation).
On Thursday, just over 50 years later, Armani has died at the age of 91, leaving behind a global empire generating over 4 billion euros in annual revenue.
The numbers certainly add up to serious international success, but it is his style that tells the real story of how Giorgio Armani helped reshape social norms and cultural paradigms.
How did he do it? Simply by staying true to himself, beyond this year’s trend.
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Discipline as his mantra and ultimate goal, freedom as the natural outcome of an aesthetic that empowered women and liberated men from the stifling mold of traditional masculinity, making them attractive.
Richard Gere shattered that taboo in American Gigolo, and from that moment on, the male wardrobe was never the same. There’s one scene in the film that gave men the go-ahead: the one where gigolo Julian Kay, in his underwear, decides what to wear while listening to Smokey Robinson & The Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage.” Calm and self-assured, he tosses shirts, trousers, and jackets onto the bed without the slightest embarrassment about his vanity.
In the same spirit, Armani freed women from the obligation to be seductive, as prescribed by the patriarchal gaze. No more baby dolls showing off their bodies and fluttering their lashes, but women stepping out into the world to claim their dreams and their due, also with the freedom to wear men’s clothing.
In 1978, Diane Keaton walked onto the Oscar stage (winning for Woody Allen’s Annie Hall) wearing one of his jackets, and that loose, comfortable, genderless silhouette is still revolutionary. Just as revolutionary was his consistency, his refusal to cave in to passing trends.
“Diane’s style in the film was a blend of masculine and feminine, very soft and personal. By wearing my jacket, she unexpectedly carried that look off the screen,” Armani later recalled.
It was a look that opened the door to what we now call “fluidity” — a word Armani was not fond of, because it’s often misunderstood as disguise rather than an act of freedom. Call it “rigor,” if you prefer, a term that, for Armani, had roots in his childhood and in the memory of his mother, Maria. “It went hand in hand with the financial situation of my family at the time. We had no money, so that necessity simply became a way of life.”
Armani is widely recognized as the designer who fundamentally changed the rules of modern fashion. In the catalogue accompanying the 2000 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which paid tribute to Armani, there was an entire chapter devoted to gender. The fashion critic Suzy Menkes referenced Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, who in the 1920s and 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s reimagined men’s fashion for women. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, Armani made it easier for women to feel at ease in the corridors of power and corporate offices, while giving men the freedom to be attractive without being stiff.
That’s why I’ve put women in blazers and made men’s jackets out of soft, feminine fabrics.
“Gender equality, which certainly isn’t limited to social roles but also extends to dress codes,” Armani explained in an interview with Vogue, “has been a central theme for me since the beginning. That’s why I’ve put women in blazers and made men’s jackets out of soft, feminine fabrics. It’s a subject I understand. So I welcome the openness and the variety of proposals. I just feel that sometimes, in the rush to provoke, people go too far, with runway experiments that end up exhausting themselves right there. Personally, I still look at how people actually dress in real life, and I want to create something meaningful, even when dealing with such a delicate and complex subject.”
In short, freedom to dress as you are, not to hide behind a costume.
The beauty of simplicity, even in haute couture, in dresses meant for red carpets or regal occasions. Tailored jackets with bold shoulders and loose trousers, paired with soft overcoats, flowing tops and skirts, or long gowns that follow the body’s lines and let movement show through sheer fabric.
Luxury lies in the subtlety of the embroidery, which decorates and defines while playing with the light. “I love understated things, discretion, elegance born of intelligence,” the maestro said in an interview. “I listen to everyone, then I do what I want.”
*This piece was originally published July 25, 2025 and was updated Sept. 4, 2025 with news of Giorgio Armani’s death.
