When he remodeled the garden of his home in Milan, Giorgio Armani added a pavilion, a wall of bamboo and an imposing pair of Japanese maples, transforming an awkwardly inclined courtyard into the kind of spare, contemplative space you might find at the heart of a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) in Kyoto. The ideal spot, in other words, for a fashion samurai, a lion in the winter of his years, to sit back and quietly reflect on his achievements.
But Giorgio Armani isn't that person. "I need to forget that I'm 88, otherwise it's over," he declares. "I need to try as if I started today, and this is a problem because when I wake up in the morning, I'm 88, which is very hard." Even after all this time, with the global empire, the billions of dollars, the awards, he exists in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. "I'm not satisfied, because I want my current work to be appreciated, not to have an award for what I have done, not to have an attestation for something passed. That's what wakes me up every morning. I still need to prove myself." He tells me that he has never dreamed so much in his life, two or three dreams a night. "Sometimes I dream of doing a beautiful fashion show and when I wake up, I'm so angry because it was only a dream." Even in sleep, he is pursued by dissatisfaction.
We are sitting in a room adjacent to the garden, with his assistant Paul and translator Anoushka. At one point, Armani says he likes my accent ("Australian-British" he calls it, only 1,300 miles off from my native New Zealand). "It makes me really suffer that I can't speak English. I would have loved to learn it." But I've always been struck by how direct he is in interviews, and I assume that's because he is able to express himself with complete clarity when he is speaking in his mother tongue. On the wall is a massive work by the Italian artist Silvio Pasotti. It's a surrealistic melange of fashion history, designers, models, magazine covers collaged with iconic images like the Helmut Newton photograph of Karl Lagerfeld in a black bathing suit. He sprawls insouciantly across the bottom of the painting.
That's not the only time he'll appear in this story. Next to him, in the left-hand corner, Armani sits looking back over his shoulder at the artist. He's shirtless, sexy in denim shorts and Pasotti has tattooed a Lacoste crocodile on his shoulder. "Because that was the time of Lacoste," the designer laughs.
We happen to be talking a week before Armani shows his Spring-Summer 2023 collections for the sub-brand Emporio and his namesake line. His workload remains unchanged. I ask him how each season starts for him. "With a blank piece of paper, and my hands in my hair," he says ruefully. "Then I take away what wasn't good in the past. And I look at what's happening at the moment. I look at my colleagues' work. Sometimes I'm positively surprised, many times negatively." Armani is notoriously judgmental. At the moment, he's not positively surprised. What does he look for? "Where the novelty is, what exists of the fashion of the time that still can be right for today."
But when "today" is defined by a war, a pandemic, rampant political and financial instability and, overriding everything else, environmental catastrophe, what exactly is "right"? The war in Ukraine has hit Armani hard. He has his own childhood experience of World War II as a reference. He grew up in Piacenza, a small city to the southeast of Milan, and he has vivid memories of taking refuge in the local movie theater during Allied bombing raids. When he was 9, he and his friends found a bag of gunpowder. While they were playing with it, it exploded. He spent six weeks in hospital on the brink of death. Legend has it that the skin on one foot still bears the imprint of his shoe buckle.
"When I look at the news and I see the images of suffering, it feels like what I'm doing doesn't make sense nowadays," Armani says. "This is where it's difficult for my job, but I need to beat this feeling, this sort of brake that I have that doesn't enable me to create. I have an example: the recent women's show, the one I decided to show without music. It was just a few days after the war had started, I did a press conference in this room. I was asked about fashion and in that moment, I just couldn't speak about it." Anoushka interjects, "I was there so I can honestly say, Mr. Armani started crying."
