By Giulia Piceni. Cover image: Margie Mitchem for I’M Firenze Digest.
Why Giorgio Armani Still Sets the Standard: 5 Takeaways for Young Creatives
Giorgio Armani transformed fashion by redefining elegance, from fluid tailoring to iconic cinema wardrobes and the red carpet. After his recent passing, his career illustrates how innovation can emerge through reinterpretation of tradition, how an apparently indirect professional trajectory can be reconciled with creative achievement, and how design acquires authority when it engages both younger audiences and wider cultural arenas beyond the fashion industry. For students entering the field today, Armani’s example offers essential lessons in innovation, discipline, and cultural vision and demonstrates that elegance and permanence in fashion are achieved less through spectacle than through precision and continuity. These 5 lessons from his career are essential for the new generation of creatives entering the industry.
1. Armani’s Deconstructed Jacket: Innovation Means Rethinking Tradition
In the 1970s Armani examined the structure of the jacket, a garment that had for decades embodied the conventions of masculine power and professional dress, and introduced alterations that shifted its function and its cultural meaning. By removing padding and stiff linings he allowed fabrics to fall in uninterrupted vertical lines, creating a silhouette that was lighter, more fluid, and more closely attuned to the body’s movement. This reconfiguration, later described as the giacca decostruita, granted men an unprecedented form of relaxed elegance while offering women a wardrobe option that conveyed authority without repeating the rigidity of masculine codes.
For the young designer, this example illustrates that progress in design rarely derives from radical novelty. It is instead achieved through a patient reconsideration of existing forms, identifying in their inherited structures the possibility of transformation and renewal.
2. Armani’s Unconventional Path Is a Lesson in Creative Success
Armani did not begin his career with formal training in design. His first academic pursuit was medicine, chosen in the search for professional stability, but he soon realised that his disposition and aspirations were directed elsewhere. Employment as a window dresser at La Rinascente in Milan gave him the opportunity to observe the mechanisms of display, while subsequent work as an assistant in menswear design introduced him to the technical disciplines of tailoring. These experiences, which might have seemed tangential at the time, became essential to the vocabulary he later developed. His collaboration with cinema, beginning with American Gigolo in 1980 and extending to productions such as The Untouchables, The Dark Knight and The Wolf of Wall Street, confirmed the extent to which his designs operated not simply as garments but as elements in the construction of narrative and identity.
For the student entering the field, the lesson is that a designer’s trajectory does not need to follow a single predetermined line. Knowledge acquired in apparently unrelated domains may eventually enrich the capacity to imagine clothing within broader cultural contexts.
3. How Emporio Armani Speaks to a New Generation of Designers
The establishment of Emporio Armani in 1981 represented more than a commercial expansion of the brand. Through the creation of a flagship store in via Durini, through highly visible advertising campaigns that became part of the urban environment, and through the publication of Emporio Armani magazine, the designer articulated an aesthetic that was consistent with his main line while being accessible to younger audiences. Students, young professionals and emerging international markets discovered within Emporio a language of elegance that was aspirational yet attainable.
For the young designer today, the lesson is that the ability to address a generation requires a careful translation of aesthetic principles into forms that remain coherent with one’s vision. Engagement with younger audiences is not achieved through dilution, but through sensitivity to how style must be reformulated in order to meet the desires of its time.
4. Armani’s Olympic Uniforms: When Fashion Becomes Cultural Identity
Armani’s decision to design the uniforms of the Italian Olympic teams at London 2012 and Rio 2016 illustrated how sartorial language could operate within contexts far removed from the traditional circuits of fashion. These garments combined the discipline of Italian tailoring with subtle patriotic references, such as the discreet embroidery of verses from the national anthem, thereby merging functionality with symbolic representation. The intervention demonstrated that clothing has the capacity to act simultaneously as a vehicle of performance, of national pride and of aesthetic refinement.
For the young designer, the lesson is that the significance of fashion is enhanced when it participates in collective rituals and institutions beyond its usual domains, and when it seeks to articulate identity in arenas where the audience extends far beyond the consumer of luxury goods.
5. Armani Privé Shows How to Master Glamour Without Excess
During the 1990s the red carpet became one of the most prominent stages on which fashion circulated as image, and Armani used this platform to consolidate his position as a designer of enduring authority. With the foundation of Armani Privé in 2005 he created a couture atelier dedicated to producing gowns for actresses such as Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Lady Gaga. These garments, often remembered for their clarity of line and chromatic restraint, exemplified a philosophy in which glamour was understood not as accumulation or excess but as the refinement of proportion.
For young designers, the example is instructive because it suggests that the durability of a fashion image depends less on spectacle than on discipline. Precision in construction and restraint in expression allow garments to sustain their relevance beyond the moment of their initial display.
