Giorgio Armani’s Multi-Dimensional Legacy

The passing of Giorgio Armani, the absolute monarch of the group that bears his name, is a stunning loss. He will forever live in the world’s collective imagination for his sharp, soulful and uniquely transversal approach to business in which fashion, furniture, hotels, cars, flowers, restaurants and more made up a coherent if multifaceted whole.

Should he be remembered as the designer who gave working women a uniform worth their newfound roles? The herald of soft masculinity? The man who dressed the new Hollywood? Or the arch strategist of brand diversification? It’s impossible to decide.

The Giorgio Armani legacy is titanic and sprawling, spanning five decades of profound social and aesthetic change, which Armani was typically the first to see, anticipate, follow and mould to his own whims, only to inevitably retreat in recent years into the fortress of a formula that, although timeless, was at times disconnected from the present. “You are only modern once,” said the Italian journalist and playwright Leo Longanesi. That Armani retained his modernity for more than three decades of his fifty-year career is already a heroic achievement.

The news of his passing is stunning because Armani, the last living exponent of that wild bunch that, on the crest of the 1970s and ’80s, turned Italian Style into a global phenomenon, felt immortal. Fiercely and stubbornly independent, Armani worked until the end and leaves behind a body of work of immense value: clothes of infinite softness, discreet yet full of personality, made to mould with the wearer in the most elegant of ways. Never minimalist but never loud, he created a world that was unmistakably his own out of balance and restraint.

The group that Armani leaves behind is solid, but the uncertainty that has long surrounded his succession is suddenly very real. The helm will likely pass to his trusted lieutenants Leo Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani, but the void left by such a legend will take a long time to fill.