06/09/2025
My time in Giorgio Armani-land with the man who tore out fashion’s stuffing
The Italian designer who died this week told our writer Versace was for ‘sluts’ and that his interview technique was a disaster
John Alridge, September 6 2025, The Sunday Times
Giorgio Armani, who died on Thursday aged 91, made our wardrobes and world più bello. Without him, there would be none of the soft-shouldered suits and cardigan jackets so many of us wear today and none of the designer fragrances, jeans, sunglasses, or watches — brand extensions that he pioneered. Worse, the England football team would still be wearing Glenn Hoddle-inspired beige suits.
I know this because The Sunday Times asked me to cover his business for the past three decades. I was there when he dressed David Beckham and his team-mates in the early 2000s. I interviewed him in his Nobu-branded restaurant in Milan on the 40th anniversary of the creation of his brand — when he told me Prada is “for snobs” and Versace for “sluts”. He invited me to the 2007 Vanity Fair Oscars party in Los Angeles where he introduced me to all the stars “wearing me” — but was just as keen to show me how he catered for the mass market with his cheap(ish) Armani jeans.
What I liked most about him is that he was as much a businessman as a fashion fella. He analysed the market brilliantly and also personally oversaw every detail of each collection, runway show, advertisement and pricing strategy to make sure his products would sell in their millions, generating annual revenues of £2 billion.
• Giorgio Armani obituary: billionaire designer who exuded style
It was his focus on the bottom line as much as hemlines that partly explains why he never came out. No one denied he was gay and had a partner but when asked he always said: “It’s personal and private.” He worried, probably correctly, that his business in the all-important Asian market might suffer if he was open about his sexuality.
Ever since he sold his VW Beetle for £500 so he and his then partner Sergio Galeotti could set up his label, Mr Armani — no one dared call him Giorgio — was driven by two business and style goals. First, to rip the stuffing out of fashion and second, to make it fun and affordable for everyone. He had grown up in the postwar era of austerity and stiff formality — high-collars, thick woollens and starchy suits — and wanted none of it. At our first meeting in his design studio in the early Noughties, he explained: “I make clothes which are smart but not too formal, fashionable but not too trendy. Fashion’s purpose is to make it easier and more elegant to live.”
The public agreed. His elegant, drapey gowns, slouchy trousers and cardigan jackets, usually in a safe palette of navy or “greige”, dominated fashion for a generation. He created a powerful yet feminine working uniform for women who from the 1980s were increasingly entering the professional world, while also paving the way for the rise of high-end sportswear and new dress codes, notably smart casual. He educated men about fabrics. Before Armani most men thought cashmere mix was a bar snack.
He went on to become the first designer to dice and splice his brand into mini-labels, each with its own collection and accessories. They ran from Armani Jeans, through Emporio Armani and Collezioni, up to the wildly expensive Black Label and Privé haute couture. This made his style accessible to everyone — whether their budget was limited to a pair of pants or ran to a £50,000 cocktail jacket. “I want to be democratic,” was his mantra.
He was hard-charging. I watched him tell staff, even the women, to “pull their balls out” when he felt they were slacking. He once ended an interview when I dared to ask him about retirement. “This conversation is a disaster,” he harrumphed. I didn’t mind. In fact, I found his plain speaking a breath of fresh air in an industry in which most designers are anxious not to utter a word out of place lest they spark a consumer boycott. In 2015 he caused a stir when he admonished gay men who “dress homosexual — to say, ‘Ah, you know I’m homosexual’. That has nothing to do with me.”
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The creation of his unique $10 billion 24/7 Armani lifestyle brand reached its peak with the opening of his eponymous hotels in Dubai and Milan, where guests work out in the Armani gym, before Armani-clad staff serve Armani food on Armani plates, on Armani tables, in Armani restaurants. On the opening night of the Dubai property in 2010 he told me proudly: “I have invented an entire world — Armani-land.”
Fashion designers who transform the industry and wider society, let alone create their own universe, can be counted on the fingers of one hand — Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani. The one I — and I venture most people — will miss the most is Italy’s one-man brand.
