In the span of five decades, Giorgio Armani built a fashion empire valued at over $6 billion, transforming a modest Milanese menswear line he launched in 1975 into one of the world’s most powerful luxury brands. Once a window dresser at La Rinascente department store, Armani revolutionized modern tailoring with his unstructured jackets, dressed Hollywood in American Gigolo, and went on to define Italian elegance on a global stage.
Stefano Tonchi, Editorial Director of PALMER Magazine, looks back on the many chapters of his life in Mr. Armani’s world.
“I grew up in an Armani world. Armani menswear was the very first fashion show I ever attended, as a young assistant at L’Uomo Vogue in Milan. In the original Armani showroom, there was a small balcony perched over the runway, and from there I looked down—not only at the fluid clothes gliding across the catwalk, but also at the people seated in the first row. I didn’t realize it then, in those early 1980s, that I would never miss another Armani show for the decades to come.
Through the hundreds of men’s and women’s collections, and later the couture shows in Paris with Armani Privé, I collected an entire lifetime of memories with Mr. Armani, as I always called him. They could fill a book. Perhaps the most personal one was a private meeting in his studio, when he unsuccessfully tried to convince me to return to Italy to work for him. It remains one of the greatest honors of my career.
Over the years, I photographed Mr. Armani countless times—public portraits and private moments alike. My favorite image is a still from a short film by artist Alex Prager that I produced for W Magazine in 2015. We shot it in his luminous Tadao Ando–designed museum, with a crowd dressed in Armani across different eras. It was as if the collection itself had come alive, walking through history. That is what it has always felt like: living in his world.”
