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0How style guru Giorgio Armani revolutionised fashion
September 4, BBC
Giorgio Armani, who has died at the age of 91, was the first designer since Coco Chanel to bring about a lasting change in the way people dress.
Born in a pre-war era of rigid traditions and styles, his creations followed - and helped make possible - increasing social fluidity in the latter half of the 20th Century.
Chiefly, he will be remembered for reinventing the suit - feminising it for men and popularising it for women.
Armani took away the restrictions and confinements of stiffer styles that went before him - making men feel sophisticated and women empowered in the workplace.
Newspapers hailed him the "first post-modern designer". In many ways, he was a revolutionary.
Giorgio Armani was born in Piacenza, northern Italy, on 11 July 1934.
His family's comfortable middle-class lifestyle was destroyed by the war and, with food hard to find, his earliest memory was hunger.
Armani played with unexploded artillery shells in the street, until one suddenly went off. He was severely burned and a close friend was killed.
"War," he later said, "taught me that not everything is glamorous.”
As a young man, Armani drifted.
In 1956, he began a medicine degree - but dropped out after three years and joined the army.
Swiftly tiring of life in the military, he found a job as a window dresser at La Rinascente - a department store in Milan - where he moved swiftly through the ranks.
Most designers learn their trade as apprentices or at fashion school - but Armani's education took place on the shop floor.
He learned what fabrics the customers liked, and went to the textile mills to buy them. He became an expert in how the cloth was constructed, and used his knowledge to perfect the tailoring.
Soon, Armani was working for Nino Cerruti - an influential haute couture designer. Within months, Cerruti asked him to restructure the company's approach.
The 1960s middle classes could not afford haute couture, but yearned for a stylish, distinctive look of their own.
With his expertise in fabrics, Armani provided an answer. His fine cloths made possible a menswear range with neat, precise cuts that could be manufactured at scale.
