Giorgio Armani on Fashion’s Future—And Why He’s Not Slowing Down

Roberta Armani tells me that the future is something her uncle thinks about incessantly. “I’m sure he’s made his plans, and whatever he has decided, we will be with him,” she says, adding that she had no insight into his mention of a merger with another Italian giant. Though, she says, “it could be great, finally, to have an important Made in Italy joint venture in the fashion industry.”

Italy’s other fashion-industry billionaires commend a brand that has endured and expanded and represents, no matter where one goes, the top of the Italian food chain.

“This is a value for Italy, even more than for the industry,” Remo Ruffini, the chairman and chief executive of Moncler, tells me. He admires “King Giorgio”—“I don’t know what the brand Armani will do in the future, but the Armani style is in us all everyday,” he says.

Letting go is something Mr. Armani has flirted with many times before. He once said it would be “ridiculous” if he were still a top designer at 85. “I’ve already passed that!” he says with a sly grin, now pushing the goalposts to age 90. And while he may seem to be perpetually ruminating on a succession that he may never intend to actually happen, in the meantime he is clearly in charge: quietly issuing orders, excoriating his competitors, making aides jump to fill a glass of water at the mere clearing of his throat.

Deference is something the workaholic has grown used to and fond of. What he doesn’t like is the way his competitors and fashion colleagues talk about him as if he were so celestial as to be out of the game.

“Like I’m an honorary president,” Mr. Armani says, puncturing his studied austerity with a burst of rare laughter. While he suspects such praise is designed to “marginalize” him from fashion’s fray, he is no ribbon-cutting statesman, he insists. “I’m the prime minister,” the leader who gets his hands dirty. “I want to work, to decide, to change things.”

In terms of his own designs, he says, “I’m already doing it, in my own way.” He tells me that the collection he presented days earlier at Milan’s Fashion Week “is representative of a desire to evolve on an aesthetic level.” The company describes it as more feminine, and soft, after a brutal year. His niece talks about how the eruption of colors in Armani Prive? was a declaration of life after COVID. “It was like, enough,” she says. “There is a need for some joy.”

But those shifts, while sumptuous to behold under a frescoed ceiling in Mr. Armani’s office palace, seem more responsive to the moment rather than reimagining fashion in the viral hereafter. Even Mr. Armani’s preferred muse and brand ambassador, Cate Blanchett, who has popularized recycled red-carpet looks by digging deep into her own Armani crates, can’t help, when asked how he is changing things, but talk about the ageless quality of his clothes.

“Mr. Armani’s mix of traditionally masculine and feminine lines has long been a touchstone for me,” she writes. “I’ve always aspired to the grace, simplicity, and timelessness that both he and his designs embody.”

The Armani argument is essentially that when everything has gone mad, safe but top-notch design can be revolutionary—and empower a woman to do revolutionary things like, say, take down the British monarchy. When Meghan Markle needed to suit up for war with the House of Windsor, she chose a black silk Armani wrap dress printed with a white lotus flower.

“My work has one single goal: giving women the inner strength that comes with being at ease, with who they are and what they are wearing,” Mr. Armani, who approved of the dress beforehand, tells me when I circle back after the Oprah interview. “I am flattered that one of my dresses was chosen for such an important occasion—it means my work truly speaks.”