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Episode 3 · November 21, 2025 · 49min
In Buona Compagnia is an Italian podcast. This is the English version of the episode: the video has English subtitles, and the transcript, reflections and sources are translated. The quotes from the book are our own translation from the Italian; Armani's memoir was also published in English by Rizzoli as Per Amore (2023), and our wording does not follow that edition. Versione italiana →
Giorgio Armani is the Italian entrepreneur who revolutionized fashion with two insights: the unstructured jacket of 1975 and the women’s power suit. Per Amore is his autobiography.
He was born in Piacenza in 1934, in wartime, into a family marked by his father’s distance, a clerk at a local Fascist party office. As a young man he studied medicine without conviction: “I felt late and without a trade.” He had no passion for fashion, but by chance a friend suggested La Rinascente, where he was hired to work on the shop windows.
At 31 he began his real apprenticeship with Nino Cerruti. His boss called him “forever a good second.” Ten years later, at 41, he founded the Giorgio Armani Corporation with 10 million lire (about €70,000 today) and applied the principle that would guide him all his life: “observe but anticipate.”
During the Years of Lead he launched the unstructured jacket and the women’s power suit, giving women the clothes to compete in the workplace. “There’s no need to undress to reveal yourself.” He would go on running the company past the age of 90 because “this work, for me, is life, it is a continuous act of love.”
Giorgio Armani
At 25 I was lost. At 31 I start at the bottom. At 65 I have an empire
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At 25 I was lost. At 31 I start at the bottom. At 65 I have an empire
I often feel I have to face life's challenges completely alone. It comforts me a lot to know that Giorgio Armani and Enzo Ferrari too, at one point in their lives, felt completely alone, and yet they kept going and built extraordinary things. If they made it, I can make it too.
I very often feel behind in life compared with other people. I'm still not sure I've understood my place in the world. But now I've understood that everyone has their own timeline, each of us is different and has our own path to walk in life. A mantra that has helped me is Mute the world and build your own. Giorgio Armani started his apprenticeship at 31 with another great Italian designer, Nino Cerruti. The Giorgio Armani Corporation was still a long way off. At the age of 41 Giorgio founded his company.
Don't simply follow your passion. Instead: meet people, end up in an environment, get interested in a particular area, become good at something, develop a natural talent that is an extension of yourself, that stimulates you and that helps people. Only later, when you have all these elements, will you develop a real passion for that thing.
Meet, meet and meet lots of people in your life. You never know who will change the course of your life. If Armani had never gone to La Rinascente, had never met Cerruti, who knows where he would be today.
Creativity for its own sake is useless. Focus on creating something that serves consumers, that solves a real problem, that improves people's lives.
The starting point of everything Armani does is the body. For me this means starting from the simplest experience for the human being, then working backwards and building the technology (or the product) to make that experience possible.
The public's need is sensed even before it shows itself. You play ahead by identifying the changes in society. Armani understood what people needed during the Years of Lead before they knew it themselves.
The success of Giorgio Armani lies in the fact that it depends on the choices of one single person: Giorgio Armani. Consistency of vision is fundamental.
Fashion is an Olympic sport, it's a team game, but in the end it's always Giorgio who makes the final decision. There is collaboration, but there is only one final vision.
You can't delegate creativity. The more creative a job is, the harder it is to explain to someone else what you want. Often not even you know exactly what you want until you see it.
