Giorgio Armani Says Fashion Should Be Less Entertaining

In 1965, a young Giorgio Armani was tasked with imagining the clothes of the future. Fresh out of a mandatory stint in the Italian army, and still unsure of his true calling, Armani had landed a job with Nino Cerruti, one of Italy’s premier fabric wizards. The challenge proved formative. “Cerruti asked me to find some new solutions to make a man’s suit less rigid and more comfortable, less industrial and more sartorial,” Armani recounts in Per Amore, an updated version of his memoir published by Rizzoli last week. So he concocted a suit jacket with “the suppleness of a cardigan and the lightness of a shirt,” and revolutionized menswear in the process. 

When the Hollywood bigwigs storyboard the broad strokes of Armani’s biopic, they won’t have to stray far from the source material. His life makes for prime Oscars fodder: humble upbringing in northern Italy, swift rise to acclaim in Milan, gradual transformation from homegrown talent into global juggernaut. Even the wiliest Netflix executive would struggle to present a more compelling narrative. 

That trajectory animates Per Amore, Armani’s wide-ranging exploration of the forces that propelled him to the highest echelons of the fashion industry. First published in 2015, it’s part biography, part manifesto—and its re-release couldn’t be more timely. Over the last few years, appreciation for Armani’s early output, particularly the menswear he designed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, has reached a fever pitch. Lately, it feels like every @simplicitycity fan has Armani on the mind, and every designer worth their weight in oatmeal-colored cashmere has him on the moodboard. Squint a little, and his influence is impossible to miss, from the elegant, neutral-toned casualwear sold by quiet luxury powerhouses like The Row to the louche tailoring conjured by savvy zeitgeist-readers like Jerry Lorenzo. 

Throughout his memoir, Armani takes pains to acknowledge the team members rotating in and out of his orbit, and, above all else, the respect he has for his customers, the people who buy into his vision. But the ethos that invigorated him when he was working out of a modest studio in Corso Venezia still guides his process today: a rigorous method of subtraction and streamlining, informed by a healthy skepticism of flash-in-the-pan fads. “My contribution to the world of fashion,” he tells GQ over email, “is the idea that classicism and modernism are actually the same thing if you don’t follow fleeting trends