Giorgio Armani: ‘Who’ll succeed me? Time will tell’
On the eve of his historic London Fashion Week show, Rebecca Lowthorpe is granted a rare audience with fashion icon Giorgio Armani
GIORGIO ARMANI has a personal fortune of $8.1bn. Can we just think about that for a second: EIGHT. POINT. ONE. BILLION. He is Italy’s most successful designer export and is listed by Forbes as the world’s wealthiest fashion designer. ‘I’d rather be the most famous!’ he laughs – and I don’t think he’s joking. He is 83. EIGHTY THREE! And not only is he still designer-in-chief of his seven clothing lines, oversees the make-up, scent, sunglasses, watches, jewellery, furniture, home furnishings, restaurants, cafés and hotels, he is also the chairman and sole shareholder of his company.
The Italian superpower landed in London last week – with a 60-strong team (Londoners may have seen EMPORIO ARMANI emblazoned in red lights across County Hall to mark his arrival) – to show his Emporio Armani line at London Fashion Week and celebrate the opening of his new Bond Street store. I was to shadow him for an afternoon and interview him the day before the show. The shadowing didn’t quite work out. (‘He’s feeling a little, erm, sensitive,’ said the PR when I arrived at the allotted hour. ‘He’s just not as far along with the collection as he’d like to be, but I’m sure everything will be OK
for the interview tomorrow.’) Gulp. This, readers, is only to be expected in the world that is Giorgio Armani: Icon. Legend. God. Yes, god, because in the Pantheon of Fashion Greats, Armani would surely play numero uno.
So here we are, photographer in tow, the day before the show in Armani’s pristine greige offices. I have already presented my questions to the PR team – no questions, no interview, such is the control chez Armani – and, just before my audience with him, I’m given the answers (‘So you can use your time with him more effectively, to go deeper’). It’s like the ultimate fashion test: I read the answers to the original questions and come up with more questions to those answers – in five minutes. Eek! And then we’re in.
I spot his hair first. So white it glows. He is fitting a model with a clutch of helpers around him and another 50 or so Armani-ites bustling about. If it weren’t for the rails of clothes that stretch as far as the eye can see and the table groaning with sparkly accessories, you could be forgiven for thinking they were planning a military coup, not a fashion show. But this is Giorgio Armani: commander of an army bent on world domination, or at least the takeover of London, for one night only.
We wait, not daring to sit in the wrong greige armchair – ‘we’ being me and Anoushka Bourghesi, global head of Armani’s PR and marketing, who will translate (Mr Armani prefers to conduct interviews in his mother tongue), and his personal assistant Paul Lucchesi. Pretty low-key where Armani is concerned.
‘London is a metropolis, continuously
buzzing, changing and transforming itself, full of the modernity, creativity and freshness I was looking for,’ pronounces Armani on why he’s chosen to show in the capital. Eyes twinkling like sapphires, skin the colour of polished walnut, teeth that match his hair, he is dressed in luxury navy cashmere sweatshirt and track pants and with a spring in his spanking new white-trainered step. He says he’s always admired British style; its ‘eclectic spirit and eccentricity’, which he concedes he’s touched on in his own work, albeit ‘filtered through the lens of my innate rigour’. But he hasn’t been inspired by British style recently because, ‘it’s very, very far from my world, it is something more for the industry here, designers work for the photographers and stylists, whereas I dress howyousayit? – common people who are not showing that irreverent side so much’. He talks of his admiration for Vivienne Westwood ‘creative, yes, but
BRITISH WOMEN SHOULD FIND A BALANCE BETWEEN COMFORT AND AESTHETIC
very business-savvy, considering she started with punk’, and then, on the pulse as ever, he name-checks his favourite British young-guns – Erdem, Grace Wales Bonner and Simone Rocha – as having the potential for Armani-like longevity. What of British women’s style? ‘I think they should find a balance between the idea of comfort, combining it with aesthetic,’ he responds (perhaps looking at my wild air-dried hair). ‘Er, and the Queen?’ I ask, suddenly thinking of her pristine-at-alltimes uniform. ‘She is an incredible woman, very elegant, but the times now, they are a little different…maybe it’s time to come closer to the younger generations, that would be a courageous thing to do.’ So how would he Armani-ise her style? ‘The colours, she’s tried every possible colour, so maybe I would suggest to select just a couple of those… in fact, I was probably inspired by the Queen. When you see my collection, it’s so many colours,
the Queen’s colours!’ And Kate Middleton? ‘Kate is very modern, she dresses very well already.’ Perhaps Kate will pick out one of those queenly sorbet shades from Armani’s show – violet, pink, mint, aqua – in fact, his light-as-air fabrics and conservative shapes with a sporty kink could be quite a thing on the duchess.
Mr Armani has been designing for 42 years. In the ’80s, when he deconstructed the trouser suit by ripping out its traditional stuffing, his ultra-simple designs in neutral hues were the ultimate emblem of success. He was the king, the Demna Gvasalia of his day. By the end of that decade, he’d harnessed the marketing power of Hollywood and the might of the red carpet – before any other designer thought to do so – and has since wardrobed over 200 films, dressing everyone from Gaga to George Clooney. He refuses to name his favourite actors in Armani on the red carpet (‘I’d commit an injustice if I had to choose’) but concedes that he loved dressing Charlotte Rampling recently in a simple long beige dress and that Sean Connery and Kevin Costner in The Untouchables were definite highlights. ‘But it’s unfortunate how the business of dressing celebrities has become,’ he adds, ‘because I do a huge job when I create the couture, something spectacular, but at the end the requests come in and the celebrities always want something simple, so I can’t make as much of an impact as I’d like to.’ (Of course, this is precisely why they come to Armani: to wear the dress, not have the dress wear them.)
Today, while he might not be the hottest or most influential designer on the planet, women of the world still flock to him in their droves – his style, which changes by mere increments in silhouette and proportion every season – still has the power to seduce. Why? ‘Because I do not design just for magazine covers and because it’s simple and simply because it’s comfortable… comfort immediately translates into success,’ he says. Is that what he puts his many accomplishments down to? ‘That and commitment and determination. To my obsession with perfection and, of course, a dose of good luck. But age is just a number and, after
I DO SOMETHING SPECTACULAR WITH COUTURE, BUT CELEBRITIES ALWAYS WANT SOMETHING SIMPLE
42 years, I feel like I have the same enthusiasm as I had when I entered the fashion system,’ he beams.
Mr Armani is in astonishingly great shape. He is a man of daily rituals: rising at 7am every day, he then religiously engages in a 90-minute workout with his personal trainer. ‘No shortcuts, I even do it on Christmas and Easter.’ He reads the daily newspapers, then heads to the office for a full day of appointments. He also follows a simple, healthy Italian diet, prepared by his chef. So scrupulous is he in his dietary requirements that it can lead to anxiety when booking lunches outside his beloved hometown, Milan. (Anoushka: ‘The pasta has to be al dente to perfection, no oil, only delicate sauces, everything just so – so far in London only Locanda Locatelli will do.’) He has the occasional ‘extremely beneficial’ massage and, after a light dinner, likes to relax watching TV ‘and have a cuddle with my cat’ (Angel, a silver-grey Scottish Fold: the Armani of cats).
I wonder what on earth he spends his vast fortune on? ‘Houses, but not any more because I have enough. I have nine.’ He also owns a superyacht. He considers going to the cinema ‘a big luxury’ (his favourite recent film is Dunkirk) and loves exhibitions. Surely, he must have bought some incredible works of art? ‘Actually, I’m careful with art because often I don’t understand it,’ he says frankly. ‘I’d prefer a small Raphael painting to anything modern.’ But his biggest extravagance, he says, is household staff, which allows him to be ‘treated like a bit of a prince’. Interestingly, he hates staying in hotels (unless they’re his own, of course) but tolerates the Beaumont when in London. He likes to come and go unnoticed so ‘Claridge’s or The Dorchester would be a bit too demanding,’ he smiles.
There is a perception about Armani: that he’s austere and untouchable. Sure, he exhibits perfectionism and controlfreakery like the best of them, but the man I meet is warm and funny, gentle, open. ‘I’ve been so lucky,’ he says as the interview comes to a close – which he has allowed to run a whole three minutes over! ‘My life’s been full of great joy and satisfaction.’ He once told me that he had sacrificed his life for his work – ‘the life of a young man when I first started out and the life of a grown man now’. Does he still have those same regrets today? ‘Of course, I’d love to have more time to spend with my loved ones.’ And then comes the final question, the one that has been levelled at his head for at least 15 years: who will succeed him? Could anyone ever really take the place of Giorgio Armani? He just smiles, eyes twinkling: ‘You’ll know everything in due time.’
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