In memory of Giorgio Armani

In 2007, Giorgio Armani was awarded an Honorary Degree in Design in recognition of his career as an exemplary testimony to the value of project applied to fashion. He transformed the role of the fashion designer into that of a designer-entrepreneur, combining creativity, design rigour, industry relationships and people needs.

His work represented a model of Italian design combining aesthetics, innovation and quality, and helped to redefine contemporary design culture. The awarding of the honorary degree recognised the importance of his 'craft to design' approach, a lesson that remains relevant and inspiring for new generations of designers today.

Politecnico di Milano joins the international community in mourning, remembering Giorgio Armani as a Master and guide who used design as a medium to express culture, society and the economy. He was an extraordinary exponent of the polytechnic design culture that combines creativity, enterprise and innovation to generate value for the community and the economy.

To celebrate his work and his bond with the University, we publish the Laudatio delivered by Professor Paola Bertola on the occasion of the conferral of the Honorary Degree in Design: a text that conveys the depth of Armani’s relationship with enterprise, the city, and design, while also illustrating the motivations behind this academic recognition

Giorgio Armani: From Style to Design

Rector, esteemed Deans, distinguished colleagues, dear students, honored guests,

I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to deliver the laudatio on the occasion of awarding the Honorary Degree in Design to Giorgio Armani, though I must confess, I find it difficult to feel entirely worthy of the task.
I will try to do so with the humility of someone who can only look up to Giorgio Armani as a true master, and perhaps with the naivety, but hopefully also the freshness, of someone who retraces his story in retrospect, without having witnessed firsthand many of the most significant moments of his remarkable journey.

In the public imagination, Giorgio Armani often corresponds to the now-mythical figure of the 'fashion designer': the brilliant creator who, unbound by constraints or rules, is free to express his art.
He is frequently portrayed, even by those who know him well, as the sole mind behind every decision and thus the shape of the garments, the objects, the communication—indeed, everything his company produces. This image only reinforces the myth of creative 'omnipotence'.

However, Giorgio Armani is, and this Honorary Degree rightly recognizes it, one of the key figures who has most effectively and profoundly contributed to dismantling exactly that stereotypical way of doing 'fashion design'.
Thanks to his ability not only to design but to organize design, to make it grow, and to connect it with context, he has created the space for a new project-oriented culture in fashion, a fertile ground for future generations of designers. A way of designing that is distinctly Italian and shared with many great masters of design, both in fashion and beyond.

This degree, then, is not merely in recognition of Giorgio Armani’s ability to create beautiful clothes, but rather how he has done so until now, because I believe it is precisely from this 'how' that the quality of his creations derives.
As a design school, we cannot simply celebrate creative talent, because unfortunately, talent cannot be taught. But we can, and must, recognize the craft, the know-how and way-of-being that transform talent into cultural, social, and economic value.

So I will attempt to explore how Giorgio Armani is a designer, and explain why, for those of us who teach this discipline, and for the young people who train in this school, he represents a vital point of reference and an example to aspire to, beyond the questions of 'fashion' and 'style'.

GIORGIO ARMANI AND THE OBJECT OF DESIGN

These words, spoken by Giorgio Armani in an interview from May 1982, offer a remarkably clear insight into his relationship with the object of his design. A relationship that is never egocentric, but always mediated by a deep attention to the client, the end user, the person who will ultimately wear a garment or accessory.

This attentiveness is at the heart of the profound 'typological' innovation that Armani introduced to the traditional archetypes of both men’s and women’s wardrobes, starting with the jacket. He was able to capture emerging needs and lifestyles, and to design garments capable of freeing the wearer from rigid definitions of role or gender.
It also underpins the form and language he has refined over the years, naturally evolving, yet always oriented toward simplification and detailed research into materials, garment construction, and finishing.

In the 1990s, during the widespread explosion of minimalist fashion, Armani remarked:

From these words emerges a relationship with the designed object that tends toward subtraction, toward reduction, what Bruno Munari called 'removal of the unnecessary' in Verbale Scritto around the same time. This reflects Armani’s ongoing commitment to creating products that respond to real-life contexts and lifestyles, always with the stated goal of helping the wearer live better. It is precisely this sensitivity and respect for the individual that enabled Armani to successfully diversify his products, by use, by price range, and by design language, creating multiple lines and new brands over time. He has effectively translated his own ambition to 'design everything for everyone' into a coherent, accessible, and ever-expanding system of products.

GIORGIO ARMANI E L'INDUSTRIA

At the beginning of the 1980s, already at the height of his success, Armani chose to stop presenting his collections at the trade fair alongside other designers. He explained his decision in these terms:

Giorgio Armani has never described his work as the isolated expression of creative genius. On the contrary, he consistently presents it as a pursuit of that delicate balance, between creativity, technical research, feasibility, and function, that defines the work of those who design for industry, and therefore, for the market.

He has always rejected the label of 'artist', recognizing in his work not the estrangement typical of art-making, but rather the focus, discipline, and method of someone engaged in a profession.
These statements bring Armani closer to the great masters of Italian design, who built their legacy through a close relationship with industry and production, contributing to the innovation and dynamism of the Italian system.

This relationship began with the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile (GFT). With GFT, and later with many other Italian industrial entities, some of which still collaborate with the Armani Group, a truly dialectical partnership was formed. Armani never delegated technical decisions to the companies when those decisions affected product quality.

One often-recalled anecdote tells of how the first collection GFT produced under Armani’s direction was a huge commercial success, yet within three weeks, 70% of the garments had to be pulled from stores because 'they didn’t hold together': the technological solutions adopted weren’t yet adequate to meet the design requirements of Armani’s vision.

This episode illustrates a dynamic typical of many successful Italian companies across the various sectors of Made in Italy, where design acts as a powerful engine for technological innovation, impacting production processes, craftsmanship, and materials.

What’s especially admirable is Armani’s continued ability to cultivate a fruitful and forward-looking relationship with industry. Even in more recent years, new innovations have emerged from his strong design ethos, not only in textiles, but in the many other sectors his brand has entered over time: cosmetics, furnishings, and more.

The consistent success of Armani products is also testament to the seamless integration of creativity and technical mastery with organizational and managerial skill, a dual capability that first took shape in his collaboration with Sergio Galeotti, and after Galeotti’s passing, found continuity in Armani himself, both as designer and entrepreneur. As he once stated:

This creative-entrepreneurial duality is a hallmark of the Italian model, where design decisions are never merely subordinate to business needs, but instead co-exist in a productive and dynamic relationship. It is this creative entrepreneurship that pushes Armani to continually explore new ground, from pioneering forms of product distribution and communication, such as the Armani Teatro and the multi-purpose space at Via Manzoni 31, to being among the first to launch online shopping, first in the U.S., then in Europe.

GIORGIO ARMANI AND THE PROJECT

Walter Gropius once offered one of the most enduring definitions of design, comparing it to the work of a director, a definition that, considering today’s ever-growing complexity, feels more relevant than ever. It’s from this idea of direction, or orchestration, that I would like to explore another essential dimension of Giorgio Armani’s work: his remarkable ability for continuous growth and renewal, which has led him from fashion consultant to designer-entrepreneur, to the director of a complex design system.

In the face of an increasingly intricate cultural, social, and market landscape, Armani has undertaken a steady evolution, progressively expanding both the scope of his work and the definition of his profession. The result is the creation of new spaces and new possibilities for those entering the design world today.

Far from the stereotype of the isolated, introspective designer lost in their own creative tension, Armani has been able to structure and coordinate a design team capable of working in synergy across an ever-expanding array of products and services, while retaining for himself the role of an attentive and rigorous director.

Looking today at the extraordinary diversity of products and services under the Armani name, one cannot help but recognize his ability to identify and unlock the potential embedded in the concept of Made in Italy, understood in its most positive and ambitious sense.

Throughout his career, Armani has consistently led his company with passion for the product as a guiding value in every strategic decision, starting with the acquisition, during an era of widespread outsourcing, of Italian manufacturers responsible for his lines. This gave him greater control over the quality of the output.

This commitment is also evident in his collaborations with Italy’s top local resources across all the sectors touched by the Armani universe: from furniture and home décor companies in the Brianza region, to the Cadore eyewear district, home to some of the most important eyewear manufacturers.

Or consider his distribution strategy, developed well ahead of its time, which today enables the Armani Group to operate over 300 stores in 37 countries, each one carefully designed to reflect the same design values as the products themselves.

In no instance has the design work for any of these product lines been left to the manufacturers alone. Instead, Armani has always maintained direct oversight, and with the expansion into new sectors, he has fostered fruitful collaborations with top designers, architects, and creatives, fully consistent with the “design as direction” concept mentioned earlier.

I believe this evolution can be seen as the expression of a strategic vision, guided by a deeply rooted design drive, a desire to extend a particular idea of design beyond the garment.

GIORGIO ARMANI AND MILANO

Giorgio Armani was born in Piacenza, which, by a curious and unintended coincidence, is also my hometown, but he found in Milan the fertile ground to grow professionally and to develop his project.

He often speaks of the city with gratitude, with that mixture of love and exasperation typical of those who have adopted Milan as their own, those who speak “lovingly ill” of it.

It was the Milan of the 1970s, and Armani began his career in a place that has marked the early paths of many Italian designers: La Rinascente. Back then, the city was a stage for extraordinary cultural ferment and a capacity to generate ideas and quality that is hard to find elsewhere. The way Armani and many other protagonists of that period recall it fills my generation with a mix of envy and nostalgia, for not having been there.

However, this is not a nostalgic tribute to a figure of the past, but rather a recognition of a contemporary designer, of his constant effort to evolve along with a changing world, and to open up new opportunities for those who, today, pursue a profession that can no longer be what it once was.

It is also a tribute to what seems to be a recurring desire in his work: to give Milan back to us, not through empty nostalgia, not as it once was, but new, as it already is in part and could become even more so. A Milan ready not to nurture a small group of enlightened intellectuals and designers, but to foster a large, transversal, designing tribe, to borrow a definition from one of my own teachers, Andrea Branzi, who is seated here among us today.

At this very moment, the Triennale is hosting two exhibitions: one is a major retrospective on Giorgio Armani’s work in fashion; the other is curated by Andrea Branzi and titled New Italian Design. I believe this to be a happy coincidence.

When I was invited to deliver the laudatio for this Honorary Degree, I saw it as a way to make even more explicit the desire for this event to be not a celebration of the past, but a strong signal toward the future.

I was also reminded of the image of the little girl chosen by Gabriele Vacis to sing the national anthem, alone, in the center of the stadium, during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.

Of course, I don’t believe that my presence on this stage can achieve the same poetry, but perhaps it can carry a bit of the same strength: the strength to spark an idea of something new, and to send a message of positive confidence in the future, for my generation, but above all, for the university of the students I also represent here today.