Giorgio Armani - Brief Article - Interview

Ingrid Sischy

HOW DID THIS LEGENDARY CAREER IN FASHION BEGIN?

It's a testament to Giorgio Armani's enduring relevance in the worlds of fashion, art, culture, and entertainment that on the occasion of his twenty-fifth anniversary in business NYC's Guggenheim Museum handed over not a room or a floor but its uptown gallery space for a major showing of his work, which will be on view through January 17, 2001. In the following excerpt from Armani: Private and Public, the show's catalogue, Ingrid Sischy speaks with the designer about some of his earliest memories and his momentous start in the fashion business.

INGRID SISCHY: Are you surprised by your life?

GIORGIO ARMANI: Yes, absolutely. I never planned it out this way.

IS: When you were a kid, when you imagined the way your life would be, what did you see?

GA: Well, we children didn't have many chances to daydream. It was wartime. There were very real, everyday problems. I didn't have time to think about my dreams for the future. We were concerned with certain, very basic things: eating, getting cheap schoolbooks, and being able to go to the cinema on Sundays. We weren't allowed much!

IS: You grew up in Piacenza, which experienced a lot of bombing. How did that affect you?

GA: It was very difficult. The war affected everything. I didn't have a happy childhood. I experienced the death of two childhood friends from a war bomb. I was machine-gunned, with my three-year-old sister Rosanna; we were in the street and a plane flew over us, so we threw ourselves into a ditch. I was small and I covered my sister. It was traumatic. There were planes flying over us and we were under bombs all of the time. Our parents used to wake us up at night to take us to the shelter. At three in the morning, with blankets, we'd all be there.

IS: What were you like as a boy, from your perspective?

GA: I was an observer. I liked to listen rather than openly express myself. This trait is something that I've retained over the years.

IS: Can you describe a happy memory from your youth in Piacenza?

GA: I remember a trip, possibly the only one, in a wonderful car with leather and metal spokes. It probably belonged to a friend of my father's and was an old 1930s model. We had parked this car by the side of a lake, and we were eating frittata. I have a wonderful memory of the beautiful sky, the light blue lake, the smell of the omelette and of the leather in the car.

IS: After the war ended you left Piacenza, right?

GA: Yes. We began a new life in Milan. It was a city of many ghettos--for the rich, for the middle class, for the poor. It was a very difficult time for our family. My parents were struggling to rebuild a decent life after the war. Milan seemed a big, tough city--very different from the quiet little provincial town of Piacenza....

IS: When you moved to Milan after the war, what was your attitude about fashion and fashionable things?

GA: When I first came to Milan, I was only aware of the district where we lived. We did not live in the rich part of Milan, but in a part of Milan that was poor. It was a small area where you had your friends, the place where you played football and went to a second-rate cinema, as you didn't have the money to go to the center where the better, more expensive cinemas were. We were a small group. There were friends' houses where you took a bottle of Scotch and someone brought a record player. This is where we had our first romantic experiences-when the parents were out.

IS: When it was time for you to decide what to do with your We, why did you choose to study medicine? Why not become an actor, since you loved the movies so much?

GA: There was no open-mindedness at that time. If you were a man you had to be a notary, a lawyer, or a doctor. Being an actor was an impossible dream for me. Reading [A.J.] Cronin greatly influenced my ambitions. I wanted to dedicate my future to helping others--a very romantic vision. Of course, I discovered during my university studies that being in the medical field is a job like others, not only a mission.

IS: When you had to leave medical school for military service, how did you feel?

GA: At the time, I was having doubts on which direction to take my studies, so having to leave for military service was the perfect excuse to clear my mind and take a well-needed break.

IS: You'd put in about three years on your medical studies, right?

GA: Yes. When I began my military service I thought it would be like the military service I had seen in the movie, From Here to Eternity [Fred Zinnemann, 1953]. That was the image I had. I even took my tennis racket with me. But it wasn't anything like the movie. Because I had done medical studies, I was assigned to the infirmary. It seemed that military life was about boredom and not the romance of friendship, or big men crying. I was mostly alone in the infirmary and spent most of my days painting. Then a flu epidemic broke out and I had sixty people in the infirmary. Anyway, some time later I had a short break from the service, and I asked if I could work in Milan. I was feeling frustrated in the service, and was thinking about what else I could do with my life. A woman friend of mine who worked at La Rinascente said there was a chance for a job in the advertising department. And that's how I met the woman who gave me my first break in fashion. I believe in destiny....

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