Giorgio Armani, architect of modern style and red carpet glamour, dies at 91

Giorgio Armani, one of Italy’s last-surviving fashion emperors, has died at the age of 91. Across decades, he reshaped the silhouette of the modern suit, softened its lines, and created a vocabulary of understated luxury that became synonymous with refinement, comfort, and quiet authority.

Armani was born in July 1934, in the northern Italian city of Piacenza, which suffered intensive bombing during World War II. During a shelling in his childhood, he was badly burnt, an experience that kept him in hospital for weeks and left a lifelong mark on his early ambitions. “I suddenly closed my eyes and didn’t open them again for 20 days,” he later recounted in an interview with The New York Times. He spent his youth dreaming of becoming a doctor, inspired by the noble idea of saving lives. He studied medicine for three years at the University of Milan but ultimately chose to work to support his family.

His rise to fashion greatness began in the late 1950s when he joined La Rinascente, a department store in Milan, first as a window dresser and assistant photographer, before moving into fashion design under Nino Cerruti. Yet it was not until he turned 40 that he felt ready to launch his own brand, encouraged every step of the way by his late partner, Sergio Galeotti. Galeotti, an architectural draughtsman, believed in him unwaveringly. “It was Sergio who believed in me,” Armani told GQ in 2015. “Sergio made me believe in myself. He made me see the bigger world.” Galeotti’s death in 1985 due to AIDS was a profound personal and professional loss. Armani, in his autobiography, described that year as living “as though I were holding my breath, without thinking about the inevitable, working day in and day out.”

I spoke to him via Zoom in 2018 for an interview for Brides Today, with a translator mediating. At 83, he looked remarkably healthy: tanned, trimmed, and dressed in his signature uniform of a midnight blue T-shirt and navy blue trousers. He spoke softly but with authority. “I think my solution has always been to continuously yet subtly innovate: in this way, the classic, elegant and minimal never become boring but are constantly redesigned, softened and made more fluid for an interesting, ever-current result,” he said.