Giorgio Armani in Japan
GIORGIO ARMANI IN JAPAN
since the late 19th century, the five buildings that make up the Tokyo National Museum have been located in the city’s Ueno Park, a peaceful setting for a world-class collection of art and antiquities, and a place equally celebrated as a site of pilgrimage for the performing of hanami: the ritualistic viewing of the cherry blossoms that burst into view each spring, and then are gone.
On a balmy Friday afternoon in late May, elegant ladies and gentlemen of a certain age perambulate the park’s footpaths, as generations of them must have done, toting parasols to protect them from the hot sun. A crocodile of schoolkids in crisp, white uniforms shuffles by — just as they, too, must have done here for a century and more.
A less congruous, more fleeting presence is supplied by a flutter of skinny young men and women, manoeuvring their crane-like frames around the entrance to the Hyokeikan building. This structure was erected in 1909 to celebrate an imperial wedding — its name means “to express congratulations” — and is representative of the Western-style architecture of the Meiji era, during which Japan began to open up to Occidental influences. Something old, something new.
Shepherded by security guards in stern black suits, the skinny people slouch, and vape, and stare at their phones. Kohl-eyed, their hair slicked down, many are wearing white lab coats, giving them the appearance of unusually willowy trainee chemists or perhaps impressively carb-dodging junior bakers. In fact, these are the models preparing to walk in the Giorgio Armani cruise collection, Spring/Summer 2020. The lab coats protect their modesty, and keep their catwalk outfits unseen until showtime.
Inside the Hyokeikan, at the foot of a grand circular staircase, is a high-ceilinged room, not
unlike a spruced-up church hall. Today it serves as the backstage area for the show. Here are still more models, in various states of dress, having their makeup applied, their shoes fitted, their hair styled. Here too are the production people, the sound and light people, the video people, the photographers, the stylists, the groomers, the marketing people, the PRs, the caterers, and assorted interlopers, such as myself.
Hidden from view, on the other side of a floor-to-ceiling screen, is the show space. The museum’s interior has been transformed into a large white room, empty save for rows of soft-cushioned bench seats either side of a catwalk. These benches await the pressure of the bottoms of select members of the world’s fashion press, who have been invited to Tokyo to witness and record the event, as well as the very important behinds (VIBs?) of international retailers, local dignitaries, and Uma Thurman.
But none of those VIBs has yet arrived. Right now the room is empty but for a few set dressers, as well as the designer, chief executive, chairman and sole shareholder in Giorgio Armani SpA. He stands alone in the middle of his catwalk, arms folded, mouth pursed, his famous face a mask of concentration, blue eyes behind business-like steel-rimmed spectacles.
Mr Armani — everyone calls him Mr Armani, even behind his back — is wearing a black velvet suit, white shirt, dark tie, shiny black shoes. It is not necessary to ask him where he got them. He takes a seat on the front row to watch a dress rehearsal of the beginning of the show. The music strikes up, the lights dim. The model who will open proceedings, Agnese Zogla, a Modigliani made flesh, appears at the top of the catwalk, strikes a pose, her body an arrangement of triangles, and strides forwards, leading with her hips.
She is wearing a flowing, draped dress of grey pleated silk over grey trousers, as well as a hat that gives her the appearance of a Central Asian aristocrat. Mr Armani, his chin resting on his fist, asks her to take a more sophisticated stance. “Don’t be afraid,” he tells her, in Italian.
She goes again. To me, she looks faultlessly poised and regal. Mr Armani is keen to make further adjustments. From what I can gather, it’s an alteration in attitude he’s aiming at, rather than anything technical. He wants her to project a sort of quiet confidence, a soft power. She obliges for a third time. He nods approval. “The first girl who comes out gives the feel of the whole show,” he tells her. No pressure, Agnese.
Mr Armani returns backstage. While he’s been gone, all 96 models — 62 women, 34 men — have been arranged in a line that snakes around the room, up the stairs and out the door, like a school holidays departures-desk queue. Mr Armani moves along the line, one model at a time, scrutinising each in turn, making tiny, meticulous adjustments to their clothes. He takes a hanky out of a pocket and refolds it. Straightens a collar. Smooths a lapel. Closes a button. Knots a scarf. Tightens a waistcoat. Some outfits get restyled on the hoof: a girl in heels doesn’t look quite comfortable or commanding, in the Armani style. Her heels are swapped for flats. A boy’s beret is removed, reshaped, placed back on his head, removed again, discarded, recovered, folded and placed in the boy’s hand, to be carried rather than worn. Mr Armani is never alone throughout this process, but he makes all these decisions without consultation. He knows exactly what he’s after. Delegation has its place and time, but not here or now.
“It’s easier for me to do than to have done,” he tells me later, when I ask him about this tendency to micromanage. “I know everybody says you can’t do everything yourself, but I want to, and until I can’t, I will try to.”
As the models are sent out from the dark of the backstage corridor, the last person they see before they pass into the light of the catwalk is Giorgio Armani. I’ve no idea if this is reassuring or terrifying for them. Perhaps a bit of both.
When the show’s over, I ask Mr Armani if he is pleased with how it went? He shrugs. “Good location,” he says. “Good models. Clothes? Not bad.” Then he grins.
It’s a mischievous grin. Not what one expects, perhaps, from a famously inscrutable perfectionist. Mr Armani has a sense of humour. He raises his eyebrows, rolls his eyes, mugs a little for his staff. At a press conference, during an interminable Japanese translation of a short statement he has made in Italian, he gives me a comradely, WTF wink. On another occasion, as he is introducing me to various members of his senior team, he guides me towards a distinguished-looking, silver-haired man in a suit.
“This is Mr Bertelli,” he explains, as we shake hands, and I nod respectfully. It takes me a beat to realise I am being had. Patrizio Bertelli is the CEO of Prada, and husband of Miuccia Prada, perhaps Mr Armani’s greatest rival. He might be the last person one would expect to find backstage at a Giorgio Armani show.
We all laugh. (My laugh is a little sheepish.) Make no mistake, though. Mr Armani knows how to lighten a mood, but there is an intense seriousness of purpose to him. “My life has been about my work,” he says, simply, when I wonder what he enjoys doing when not running his company.
Tonight, while the rest of us drink and dine and dance at his expense, he will board a flight for home, to continue work on the two men’s ready-to-wear collections — Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani — that he will show in Milan, three weeks hence. From there it will be straight to Paris for the Armani Privé collection, during the couture shows in July. After which he will turn his attention to the women’s readyto-wear collection, back in Milan in September.
In July, somewhere in the middle of all that travel, and work, and meetings, and interviews, and decisions, Mr Armani turned 85.
‘There’s a certain type of media that believes that everything that is new is nice.
It would be easy to follow that. But it’s not right’
long before it was splashed across billboards and buildings, and stitched into the linings of silk suits and red carpet gowns, and jeans and shoes and handbags, and printed on T-shirts and etched on to bottles of fragrance and cosmetics and sunglasses, and watches and jewellery, and furniture and homeware, and painted above the doors of hotels and restaurants and cafés and nightclubs, long before it was a brand name recognised wherever in the world people wear clothes, and desire to live a life of style and sophistication, a life more glamorous and carefree than the one they actually live, Giorgio Armani was the name of a boy born in the summer of 1934 in Piacenza, in northern Italy, 40 miles from Milan.
He was the middle child — older brother Sergio, younger sister Rosanna — of Ugo and Maria Armani, his father an accountant for a transport company, his mother a housewife
‘The first girl who comes out gives the feel of the whole show’: models wait their turn on the grand staircase inside the Hyokeikan building, Tokyo, May 2019
who also managed children’s summer camps. His childhood was marked by poverty and war. Italy, under the Fascists, marched out of the Depression and into WWII, when Giorgio was six. Piacenza was heavily bombed by the Allies. At nine, Giorgio was badly burned by unexploded gunpowder. He was blinded for 20 days, with no idea if he would see again.
That detail is related in matter-of-fact style, almost breezily, in Mr Armani’s handsome, illustrated autobiography, published in 2015. It is a story of self-invention so incredible it requires no hyperbole, a story of humble origins not merely transcended but trounced. On the cover is a photo of the infant Giorgio. It is reproduced in black and white except for the boy’s eyes, which are cornflower blue — Armani blue — and already fixed on some far-off prize.
Originally, he wanted to be a doctor. He studied medicine in Milan for two years, but in 1955 was called up for national service, first to Siena, then Riva del Garda, finally to a military hospital in Verona. Medicine wasn’t for him. In 1957, he found a job as window dresser at La Rinascente, the famous Milan department store. (It’s still there, 10 minutes’ walk from Armani’s principal home and headquarters, on Via Borgonuovo.) By the mid-Sixties he was designing clothes for Nino Cerruti, a crucial figure in Italian men’s fashion, though not nearly as crucial as his then-employee was to become. In the late Sixties he met Sergio Galeotti, an architectural draftsman, who became his partner in life and business, and who eventually persuaded him to set up on his own. In 1975, they founded Giorgio Armani SpA, in Milan. In October that year, a late starter at 40, he showed his first men’s and women’s collections.
Fashion designers who make a decisive break with the past, who change forever the way we dress, are few in number. Coco Chanel and Christian Dior, certainly. Yves Saint Laurent, probably. Giorgio Armani, indisputably. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, he brought a new, liberated spirit to dressing for work, and a new elegance and sexiness to dressing for fun.
“It was a game at the time,” he told me in Japan. “Formal that was more casual, casual that was more formal. That’s the area a designer can play in, without going too much to an extreme.”
Extremes have never been Mr Armani’s thing. Unlike many fashion designers, he is concerned less with the spectacular statement, with fashion as fantasy — all those headlinegrabbing catwalk creations that will never, most likely, make it out of the studio and onto the street — than he is with obsessively refining, reworking and reinventing a series of silhouettes he sketched many years ago, for clothes that can — and have been, and continue to be — worn by anyone with an interest in looking stylish and attractive.
Mr Armani’s flash of inspiration in the midSeventies was to understand, in a way no designer before him had, that the way men and women lived and worked had altered; that the distinctions between work and leisure, masculine and feminine roles, were blurring, and that a rigid uniform for the office and a different one for the home was no longer practical or desirable. He removed linings, he softened shoulders, he wrapped and folded and draped the fabrics of his clothes around their wearers. “I think I was quite ahead of my time,” he says to me, in his plain-speaking, unadorned way.
In menswear, Mr Armani’s contribution has been as significant as anyone’s. He didn’t invent the modern men’s suit, but he transformed it conclusively: ripping the stuffing out of the jacket to create a garment that was lighter, looser, more relaxed. Now suits could be lived in, moved in. Now stylish professional men need no longer feel stiffly buttoned-up, and stylish working women, especially those in the corporate world, could dress in a way that was appealing without drawing unwanted attention to their femininity.
“My purpose in fashion,” Mr Armani writes in his memoir, “is to offer a less severe, less rigid allure to the male figure, and a less mannered style to the female figure — all the while preserving elegance and distinction and the idea that others should notice you for your mind and your self-esteem.”
In the public consciousness, the defining moment for Armani was 1980, when Richard Gere appeared, beautifully dressed in Armani tailoring, in Paul Schrader’s film American Gigolo. Those who saw that film in the cinema were witnessing the birth of what would later be called the metrosexual, of mediated masculinity, and the beginning, too, of a boom in men’s fashion and style, with which Giorgio Armani was and remains synonymous.
Shortly thereafter, Mr Armani began to produce fragrances, in partnership with L’Oréal. He launched Armani Jeans, the younger, sportier Emporio Armani, and, in the US, A/X Armani Exchange. He also opened his first standalone shops, in Milan. Soon he was selling accessories, eyewear, sportswear, watches, cosmetics.
In 1985, Galeotti died, aged just 40, of heart failure. By all accounts his loss is the great sadness of Mr Armani’s life. On the evening I talked to him, he was wearing a dazzling diamond pin in his lapel, a gift, he told me when I asked about it, from Galeotti. Mr Armani has said he was unsure, in 1985, whether he could go on alone. He went on.
Today, Mr Armani is a billionaire eight times over. He has hotels in Milan and Dubai; restaurants in Bologna, Hong Kong, Paris, Cannes, New York, Tokyo and more. He employs more than 7,000 people. His labels include Giorgio Armani; Emporio Armani; Armani Privé; Armani/Casa for the home; Armani/Dolci for the sweet of tooth; Giorgio Armani Beauty; Armani/Fiori (flowers); Emporio Armani for kids; EA7, his sportswear line.
The clothes on the catwalk in Tokyo have many of the hallmarks of Armani. For women, an elegant, elongated silhouette, flowing tailoring hanging from strong shoulders; long silk gowns; leather; prints. On men, softly tailored double-breasted suits in a quiet riot of browns, beige, chocolate, coffee. Sweeping dusters, shawl-collar peacoats, leather bomber jackets.
Mr Armani was keen to point out this collection was not designed specifically for the Japanese market. When conceived, it was not even with the idea of showing it in Japan. That said, he accepted that all Armani collections have an affinity with Japanese design and culture: “A certain simplicity with rigour”, is how he put it.
Of his original conception of the Armani look, he has said, “I chose to subtract instead of add, to react against style that served as an end in itself.” To me he says that the clothes he seeks to design are “those that give freedom, those that don’t put men and women in a cliché”.
Fashion, by name and nature, requires novelty. At the same time there’s a requirement for a designer to stay true to himself, to his values and aesthetic. Those impulses appear to me to be in conflict, I say. How does one resolve that?
“It’s very difficult,” he says. “There’s a certain type of media that believes everything that is new is nice. It would be easy to do, to follow that. But it’s not right. I know there are
‘I never made a plan. Day after day it happened. I just followed my feelings,
did what I thought was right. I stuck to my position’
lots of people who don’t like my fashion. But there are people who are the opposite, who are too possessed by the Armani style. They don’t want me to change. That’s difficult too. If I followed that I would always do the same thing. It’s a balance.”
Elegance is a word he uses a lot. What does he mean by it?
“Elegance doesn’t mean to have to wear a jacket or a suit or to have a pocket square. It means the way you wear something. The way you hold yourself. Your gestures. This is where you can see someone’s character. It’s how you wear something. Not how it wears you.”
He has made his mark on industries outside fashion. The name Giorgio Armani is associated with music (he’s dressed stars from Clapton to Gaga), sport (he has dressed football teams including Chelsea and Inter Milan; the Italian Olympic team will wear EA7 to Tokyo 2020), and especially cinema. Name a major movie star of the past three decades, from De Niro to DiCaprio, and they’ve worn Armani on the red carpet. They’ve worn Armani in character too, from The Untouchables to The Wolf of Wall Street.
Asked to survey his empire now, from the vantage point of 45 years in business, he seems suitably appreciative of his success, but hardly overwhelmed by it.
“I never made a plan,” he says. “Day after day it happened. I just followed my feelings, did what I thought was right. I stuck to my position.”
on the morning of the day before the day of the Giorgio Armani cruise show, Mr Armani appears at a press conference for members of the Japanese fashion and business media, in a packed room on the ninth floor of the newly renovated Armani/Ginza Tower, in Tokyo’s swankiest shopping district.
Five banks of smartly dressed Japanese journalists are arranged on folding chairs. For the rest of us, it’s standing room only. If it feels hot outside, on the street — and it does — then it’s stifling in here. Even more so where Mr Armani is standing, under lights. While a number of us, your correspondent included, are noticeably wilting, not a bead of sweat appears on Mr Armani’s brow. He is wearing a soft-shouldered navy blue blazer over a navy blue cashmere T-shirt and flowing navy trousers. A scarf is knotted at his neck, peasant-style. It is navy blue. His tennis shoes are Arctic white. They match his hair, and his perfect teeth. His skin is deeply tanned. His most marked characteristic are his eyes, the eyes of a much younger man, penetrating eyes.
He opens with an extempore monologue in Italian, explaining the genesis of the collection he will shortly unveil. His words are translated into Japanese, at some length, by a smiling middle-aged woman standing next to him. Then, after much polite bowing and many expressions of respect, questions are asked in Japanese, translated into Italian for Mr Armani, answered in Italian by him, and then translated back into Japanese. A separate English translation (of the Italian, not the Japanese) is whispered into my ear by Anoushka Borghesi, Mr Armani’s global head of PR and media.
Mr Armani talks of his own aesthetic, and how it dovetails with the Japanese aesthetic. “An elegance that is never ostentatious,” is one thing I scrawl in my notebook. “Casual but still quite reserved.” “More Armani than Armani,” is his summary of the Japanese. He uses words like “wearability”, “commercial” and “practical”.
This is Armani’s first time holding a catwalk show for a cruise collection. Also known as resort collections, cruise collections are the less flashy, harder working clothes that exist outside the traditional fashion calendar of the biannual prêt-à-porter shows. Less heralded, perhaps, because less showy, they make up, as a result, a much larger proportion of sales; most people don’t want to wear clothes that draw too much attention to themselves, or what they’re wearing. They hope to fit in rather than stand out.
Increasingly, the famous fashion and luxury houses — Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent
— use the occasions of their cruise shows to stage spectacular events in exotic locations, competing with each other for attention in the press and, especially, on social media. It’s safe to say Mr Armani takes a dimmish view of this trend.
“What’s the point of fashion shows?” he says. “Once there was a good reason. Now it’s just a spectacle for the media. All that glamour and extravagance just to have coverage on social media, forgetting what the reason for it is. It needs to be a product you can sell.”
The questions from the floor are, to say the least, wide ranging. When are you happy? “When I see beautiful people wearing my clothes, that makes me happy.”
Which outfits, one fiftysomething Japanese woman wants to know, does he recommend for the fiftysomething Japanese woman? “I don’t design with age in mind. Fashion is about giving freedom to women, not constricting them.”
What is his favourite place? “Japan,” he says. “It fits my personality and values.” Pressed to say more on the Japanese, he praises the people’s good manners. “You don’t find that in the West anymore,” he says. “It doesn’t exist.”
A young man in a Burberry T-shirt (brave) takes the microphone and announces he has a two-part question. The first part seems to me reasonable enough: why navy blue? The second part is more ambitious for 10am on a sweltering Thursday morning, or indeed any temperature at any time. What, the man in the Burberry T-shirt wants to know, is the meaning of life?
It’s possible the Japanese translator has misheard the question, or my translator has misheard the Japanese translator’s translation of the question, or I have misheard my translator’s translation of the Japanese translator’s translation of the question. Mr Armani is unfazed.
He takes the first part first, as anyone would. Navy blue, he says, is flattering. It is slimming. And it imposes a certain distance. There is a reserve to it. Unlike, say, red. When a person wears red, it says a lot about his or her character. Navy blue: not so much.
And the meaning of life? The room is all ears. “That’s very difficult,” he says, with commendable understatement. “It’s a mystery.”
Only later, as is the way with these things, does it occur to me that of course the meaning of life might as well be navy blue. And that the young questioner, wise beyond his years, already knew that, and so did Mr Armani, but both were far too polite to say so.