Giorgio Armani was born in Piacenza, Italy, and broke into the fashion industry in the sixties after a brief time in the military service. Giorgio launched his career as a window dresser and in 1964, with an in-depth knowledge of fabric and design, he was taken on as a designer for men’s clothing company, Hitman. He soon made his mark. In 1973-74, at the prestigious Sala Bianca fashion show in Florence, he presented to great acclaim bomber jackets that treated leather as a regular, everyday fabric. This penchant for using materials in unexpected contexts and combinations came to be known as a defining characteristic of his genius. In 1975, Armani and Galeotti started their own company, Giorgio Armani S.p.A., and founded the Armani label. That July, Armani launched a revolution in fashion with his unlined and unconstructed man’s jacket. Completely loose and informal, the blazer offered sensual hints of the body beneath, marking a major departure from, on the one hand, the stuffy suits that straitjacketed men in the 1960s, and, on the other, the sartorial abandon of the hippie generation. The rumpled jacket was an immediate success, and a new breed of tailoring was born. Three months later, he unveiled an unstructured jacket for women. Made with traditional menswear fabrics, it was as simple and soft as the man’s and bore a masculine authority. With this alternative to long, flower-child skirts and classic French tailleurs, Armani joined Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel as an emancipator of women’s fashion.

In 1982, Armani became the first fashion designer to appear on the cover of Time magazine since Christian Dior in the 1940s. He was one of the first designers to approach celebrities to wear his designs, beginning with then Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley in 1988. Armani also invited Hollywood stars to wear his designs at the Academy Awards, winning devotees such as Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster. Today, Armani extends his talent diversely, dressing Italian and English soccer teams and Alitalia airline flight attendants.