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Of course my editor asked me to write something about Giorgio Armani, a story that would stand as the inevitable envoi to… what? I wouldn’t presume friendship, though we’d built a relationship over the many decades I’d been covering his remarkable career.
But in a sense, I’d already written that piece for the BoF 500 in October 2022. When someone of such significance dies, there’s an understandable rush to commemorate them. Would they wish to read their own elegies? Doesn’t everyone wonder what people would say about them when they’re gone? That was my goal with the 2022 piece: to let Armani know what he’d meant to me and countless others while he was still around to appreciate it. I called him a “lion in winter,” a suitably elegiac notion, but he was too restless for reflection, as much as he acknowledged that time was his enemy and perpetual dissatisfaction was his default position. At the same time, Armani seemed to be happy.
We always spoke through translators (he always had very good ones) but the most memorable exchange we ever had was nearly twenty years ago on the balcony of a restaurant overlooking Bondi Beach in Sydney. I don’t speak Italian, he didn’t speak English, yet we communicated for at least forty minutes, with no one else around. I still can’t fathom it. Later the same day, we went to see Russell Crowe’s rugby team practising, and it was the same thing. Easy exchanges with everyone, and I don’t believe they were all speaking Italian. That night, in a club, Armani was mobbed by kids — or, at least, people much younger than him — and he kept pace with them on the dance floor until at least 4 a.m. He would have been 72.
Maybe I’m making a case for him as the Great Communicator. His clothes certainly managed that for him. Only a handful of designers changed fashion the way Armani did. I never tired of pointing out what a revolutionary he was. He was still lighting the odd fuse well into his 80s, because he was always his own man, answering to no one else. That fierce independence was his inspiration, his guiding light, and its dimming will cast a lasting shadow over fashion.
Read Tim Blanks’ “Giorgio Armani: Lion in Winter” here.
