Transcript · At 25 I was lost. At 31 I start at the bottom. At 65 I have an empire · Giorgio Armani

Facing life alone. Here he writes, and it's beautiful. "My father was hired at a Fascist party office as an administrative clerk, and I felt he was a bit distant, he couldn't really open up to him." "I was alone, my father and my brother were gone. Despair overcame me and I wept."

Every day, like a curse, the words my boss once used to describe me hung over me: "Armani, you will forever be..." And here there's a little bit of a clue.

about how we can increase our luck and our life a bit.

What was the turning point that let Armani make, let's say, the leap? "I like feeling the thrill of an idea being born, I like refining it, changing it, correcting it and finally making it real." Armani, thirty-one years old. So just think.

In fact, it has only just begun.

The last sentence, he writes: "this work, which for me is life, is a continuous act of love."

Sometimes, if you feel you have to face life alone, well, both Armani and Enzo Ferrari made it in conditions I can't even imagine right now, so all of us can make it somehow. Hi, welcome to In Buona Compagnia. We're Marco and Francesco, and every month we dive into the story of a person who inspires and fascinates us, and we tell you what we learned. This month we're telling you what we learned reading Giorgio Armani's book, Per Amore. He's someone who has always inspired us, and after his death we decided to read his book and see if there was something in it that inspired us, that interested us: ideas, principles from his work. And we usually start with a sentence or a paragraph we liked. In this case I'd like to start with a sentence that really struck me, because it connects strongly to Enzo Ferrari, and the sentence is "facing life alone." Here he writes, and it's beautiful: "Then came the war, the real one, which changed my life forever. The cellars were our shelters." So I try to picture it: he's born, a little boy, into a situation like that, and it also makes you realize that today, even if our life isn't perfect, and no life is perfect, we're living in the best period in human history. And thinking that someone like Giorgio Armani lived through an extremely hard time of war really makes me think. And here he writes: "during the war it was my mother who made sure we had food that was different from what was commonly handed out." This part is beautiful, because he writes: "the bread was hard, harsh in smell and taste, with a sticky crumb inside. In the evening all we had was milky coffee, we had chicken now and then, and only thanks to the generosity of friends and family who lived in the countryside could we go and get chicken and meat to eat." And here he writes, beautifully: "my mother often faked a pregnancy, hiding it under the wide skirts of the time, so that the German patrols going around the countryside wouldn't stop her from scraping together a few eggs, a chicken and two loaves of bread."

Exactly, because, as you say, Armani was born during the Second World War, and it's also striking when he writes about it: imagine a child who, from a very young age, has to get used to watching his back, paying attention to what's going on around him, being careful about who he talks to, but also about what he plays with. And it's also striking when he writes that from a very young age he was used to hiding in bunkers, in underground shelters, in cellars, as you said, to take cover from air raids.

Yes, because here we come back to the sentence that I think is beautiful, "facing life alone," because here he writes about his dad: "my father was hired at a Fascist party office as an administrative clerk, and I felt he was a bit distant, he couldn't really open up to him, and he was really too distant." And he writes: "I was 25 and I felt I had never really known my father." And then here he writes: "I understood that I had to face life alone." And this sentence makes me think of a beautiful passage, a beautiful paragraph from Enzo Ferrari's biography, which is called My Terrible Joys. After his military service, Enzo tried to get into Fiat, and he writes: "I was full of hope when I walked into the office on Corso Dante. And it was a flop. Fiat told me, politely, that it couldn't hire anyone because it wasn't big enough to take in all the war veterans. It was the winter of 1918, I think. Bitterly cold. I remember it with great pain." And then this, for me, is the paragraph, the two lines that are really... The first time I read it, I started crying. By now I've read it so many times that I know it by heart. He writes: "I found myself out on the street, my clothes freezing on me, crossing the Parco del Valentino." So here, in Turin, there's the Parco del Valentino, and how beautiful to think that maybe you go to the Parco del Valentino and it's the same path, the same place where, many, many years ago, Enzo Ferrari walked. And so he writes: "I found myself out on the street, my clothes freezing on me. Crossing the Parco del Valentino, after brushing the snow off with my hand, I let myself drop onto a bench. I was alone, my father and my brother were gone. Despair overcame me and I wept."

Beautiful.

And that's why this, written here, is also something that comforts me a bit, knowing that sometimes, if you feel you have to face life alone, if both Armani and Enzo made it, in conditions I can't even imagine right now, all of us can make it somehow.

And that comforts me a lot. So Armani lives through the war, the Second World War ends, and as a young man he decides to continue his studies and decides, just think, to enroll in medicine. So from medicine to fashion, two things that have nothing to do with each other, but as a first step he decides to enroll in medical school. But, as often happens, maybe you decide to take a new path because it seems like the right one, but you're not 100% sure, I mean, you still don't know what you want to do. And it's lovely to read that even someone like Giorgio Armani felt exactly the way you might feel right now, or anyone else. So he writes: "I chose medical school, I wasn't at all convinced about that path and I had no clear idea at all of what to do." And he goes on: "I felt late and without a trade." Late and without a trade. So, I'll say it again, thinking that someone like Giorgio Armani felt late and without a trade and then managed to do what he did, as you said before, this passage comforts me enormously.

You might think, well, even if he enrolled in medicine and didn't want to do that, he already had a passion for fashion. But not even that, not even that. Fashion didn't interest him at all. And here he writes: "studying came easily to me. I was so distracted, and perhaps aware," as you said, "that I hadn't chosen the right path. Fashion was not part of who I was at all, at least not in any clear way. I lived with a certain restlessness about everything I saw around me, a kind of dissatisfaction in pretty much every field. I was often described as the one who was never satisfied, unhappy with everyone, but of the sacred fire for fashion, the kind people talk about when they explain the choices of a creative in the field, there was no trace." And this is interesting, because here I wrote: Cucinelli is very similar, because he too was 25, didn't know what to do, and then decided to start making things. Cucinelli chose engineering.

Exactly. And then, through a chance connection, he gets there.

And here I wrote that for many people, what Cucinelli would call the dream of a lifetime, or what in English is called "your life's work," or "your life's task," meaning the work of your life, okay? For many people it comes very early. We met someone in our family who is one of the greatest surgeons in America, and he already knew at 13 that this was his dream. So for many people this life's work shows up right away, at a very young age. For other people, though, like Cucinelli and Armani (because Armani became Armani when he was already 40), at 31 he was doing an apprenticeship, an internship with Cerruti, who was also a designer, a great Italian designer. And here's something interesting I noticed while reading. This notion, I wrote it here, this notion of "follow your passion," okay? Already as a kid, when someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up, you feel you have to say exactly what you want to do, or you feel that if you're not passionate about anything, you're a bit out of place. Exactly, inadequate. But this notion of following your passion is, in my opinion, a bit misleading. It's a very attractive message: follow your passion, do what you love. But from what I've seen, for Armani it's kind of the opposite, because he didn't have a passion for fashion. But... how was this passion born? It's the complete opposite. He met people, by meeting those people he ended up in an environment, he got interested in a particular area, which in this case was fashion, he became good at it, he had a talent, so good at it, a talent, which is something that comes naturally to you, so it's an extension of yourself, it stimulates you, it helps people, because with fashion too you might think, well, they just make clothes, but Armani instead believed that fashion could help the individual feel better. So it helps other people's lives, and then, after you have all these elements, you develop a passion for this thing. So it's basically the complete opposite.

So Armani, as you said before, has no passion for fashion, but he comes into contact with fashion because a friend suggested he try La Rinascente, which happened to be hiring, and they needed to put together a catalog, and you had to present some photos, a bit like a résumé. The problem is that Armani, having no interest in fashion, hadn't attended any art school or photography school, so he presented photographs that, as he puts it himself, were pretty awful. And obviously they were amateur shots, and they got rejected. But on the other hand, Armani was hired to assist the various architecture studios, to put together the exhibitions, the fashion shows, the set-ups and so on. That's exactly how he starts coming into contact with the world of fashion.

And here it's always encounters. It always starts with encounters, and here there's a little bit of a clue about how we can increase our luck in our life a bit, that is, meeting as many people as possible. I mean, going to that event even when maybe you don't feel like going, because you never know who you might meet, what might happen. And here it really is one person after another, and with Cucinelli it's the same.

If maybe he had never met his wife, he would never have gone to Solomeo, he would never have seen her father running a shop, and he would never have started making cashmere sweaters.

And so maybe if Armani had never gone to La Rinascente, had never met Cerruti, who knows where he'd be.

Armani writes: "it was a very long apprenticeship, which certainly carried great weight in the rest of my career in fashion." And it was during this apprenticeship that his boss, I won't say every day, but he writes: "every day, like a curse, the words my boss once used to describe me hung over me: 'Armani, you will forever be a good second'." Imagine Armani, Giorgio Armani, being called a good second.

And then he leaves; he could have stayed forever. He writes it, but I think that sentence really stuck in his throat, and in my view he wasn't someone who could just follow orders. And so, at 31, he starts working for Nino Cerruti, who was a great Italian designer. At 31. It's interesting, because nowadays maybe someone feels behind because someone their own age has already achieved everything. Armani is 31. In fact, it has only just begun. Only just begun. In fact, he had no idea of what he was about to achieve. Exactly, because Nino was looking in Italy for a role that already existed in France, which was that of the fashion designer. His task, he writes, so Armani's first task: "my task was to suggest a new image of man. Cerruti asked me for new solutions to make the suit less stiff, more comfortable, less industrial and more tailored." Here he writes something else that I think he learns working with Cerruti, which matters a lot when he goes on to design his first clothes. He understands what it really means to be a designer, and he writes: "being a designer immediately turned out to be a job halfway between the boldest imagination and great concreteness. You always had to observe, okay, but anticipate." Observe but anticipate. Two very important words, we'll come back to them later. And so now his collaboration with Cerruti ends; he doesn't write how that collaboration came to an end, but that's where his first steps as an entrepreneur begin.

So at first his work was mostly style consulting, and over time, little by little, he also starts creating his own line. But the question is, and here we're at the start of the 1970s: what was the turning point that let Armani make, let's say, the leap? It came when Giorgio Armani caught the attention of the Americans, because it was American women who were the first to appreciate his work, his clothes, his jackets, his outfits. It's from here that, little by little, in the 1970s, the Giorgio Armani Corporation is born, and thanks to this appreciation from the Americans, Giorgio Armani starts to rise.

And he founds the Giorgio Armani Corporation with a capital of 10 million lire, which was equivalent to about €70,000 today. And here he writes: "in those years fashion was pervaded by extreme, eccentric trends. I chose the path of taking away rather than adding." This is a key concept, we'll come back to it later.

I mean, even from the very beginning Armani decides, as you said, to go against the current rather than follow the flow.

Exactly, and one thing that really bothered him was creativity for its own sake, instead of being at the service of consumers. And this is important, because later we'll link it to someone who I think is very similar to Armani, Steve Jobs, and we link these two ideas to Steve because they really are very, very similar. The interesting thing I didn't know is that his beginnings were during the so-called Years of Lead.

Exactly, because it was the era of terrorism in Italy, the era of kidnappings, murders, attacks, bombs in Milan, and Giorgio Armani writes: "There was a general climate of challenging everything that until then had been considered normal."

And it was a period marked, on one side, by left-wing terrorism, so the Red Brigades, and on the other by far-right massacres. So in that period there was the Bologna massacre, where they planted a bomb in the waiting room of the central station: it exploded, killing 85 people and injuring more than 200. And then the peak came with the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. So a very difficult period.

But the point is that Armani, at this moment, is right at the key moment. Exactly. And Armani writes: "this wiping the slate clean of the past forced me to start over from scratch."

Yes. And so, and so, wait, let's go back to the earlier point, which was "observe but anticipate." So he observes what's happening and then anticipates a style that will become key for Armani.

Exactly, because he understands the times, he understands people. Yes. And he understands what people would need at that moment.

Because his first response to this very dark period was sobriety. Which means: Armani created an elegance that was very invisible, but very refined. So he didn't use loud colors, it was always black and white, and they were colors that whispered instead of shouting "look at me, look at me, look at me." And so it was a very discreet luxury that didn't provoke and didn't divide. The real revolution, though, comes, so he observes what's happening and then anticipates what people wanted. It comes with the unstructured jacket of 1975.

To understand why it mattered, let's look at what the traditional jacket meant. The traditional jacket was stiff, structured, with padded shoulders that widened the shoulders, and it was the symbol of patriarchal power, of the bourgeois hierarchy, of everything the Years of Lead were really challenging. So what did Armani do? He literally deconstructed it. He removes the shoulder pads, okay, removes them completely, chooses very soft, natural fabrics, and created a jacket that moved with the body instead of imprisoning it. And then, in that period, an even more brilliant idea comes along: the women's power suit. So what does he do? He wanted to give women too the power to feel like women of power. To feel like women who could also build a career. And so what does he do? So here he observes and anticipates these people's desire, and he writes, what does he do? He takes the men's jacket and trousers and reinterprets them for women. It wasn't a mere disguise, but an elegant reworking that gave women the tools, literally the clothes, to compete in the workplace with authority. In an era that was challenging traditional gender roles, Armani offered a concrete answer through fashion. And so he writes: "in this period I was able to play ahead of the game. The public's need is sensed even before it shows itself, and you play ahead, by identifying the changes in society." And yet this idea of creating these, even though he still thought he was playing ahead, the idea of offering this unstructured jacket, of creating this power suit for women, was heavily criticized. And he writes: "I was sure I was right and I never, not even for a moment, made compromises. I was a forty-year-old with graying hair who saw the world around him with intuition and concreteness. To the obvious need for new forms of clothing I responded concretely, offering jackets emptied of everything."

Also because, as you said before, Armani's beautiful aim is exactly this, being able to touch everyday life. And so he writes: "discovering that a jacket has helped a woman feel more confident and stronger in a meeting: these are exactly the stimuli I could never give up." Maybe that's exactly why, at over 90, he was still there working in his company, precisely because maybe we can think of this as his mission, in a way.

One of the very important principles is that, if we go back and maybe picture Armani sitting at his desk drawing clothes, the first power suits, the first unstructured jacket, I thought, well, surely Armani started from the clothes, maybe started by looking at the fabrics. Instead, what he writes many times is that the most important thing is not creativity for its own sake. So for me that's the clothes, so creating a super creative outfit, okay? The most important thing is to start from the body. So the thing he hates, as we said before, is creativity for its own sake. So creating something, and we can apply this to any product we create, to anything we do, just for the sake of it: creativity for its own sake. What he loved instead was creating something that was at the service of consumers, starting from the body. And he writes: "I have never loved creativity for its own sake. The explosion of fantasy that is only good for astonishing people and leaving them open-mouthed, with creations that then have nothing concrete about them when it comes to wearing them. I think everything must translate into a garment, an accessory that a woman and a man will then be able to wear." And here, reading on, he writes: "the body is the starting point and the end point of everything I do." A link I made is with Steve Jobs, whom we'll talk about a lot because I have lots of examples here. But there's an interview where he says: the most important thing is to start from the customer experience and then work backwards to create the technology. Okay? It's the same thing. The technology in this case is creativity for its own sake, so the clothes. The customer experience is starting from the body. And here he writes: "so the starting point of what I do is the body. Very often in fashion the body is a pure abstraction." So in this case we can think of it as the customer experience. Maybe people say, people think about the product first and then the experience, but it's the other way around. So the body is a pure abstraction in fashion, "onto which designers project fantasies made to show what had never been done before, or that lay claim to an unattainable ideal to aspire to in vain. And for me that has always been a very harmful way of understanding fashion." Something Coco Chanel had also grappled with decades earlier, and he had developed this almost medical appreciation for the truth of the body that never left him. And so, from that first point of view, he was going against the current. "At a time when everyone seemed to be shouting at the top of their lungs how beautiful we are, how beautiful this dress is, I always preferred the whisper of an essential elegance, the harmony of a perfect proportion."

And that was when he decided to make these power suits, the unstructured jacket. Above all, there's a sentence that sums up everything you said, which he writes: "there's no need to undress to reveal yourself."

There's no need to undress to reveal yourself. So in everything he expresses he always puts the person at the center, not the clothes they wear. The person, not the clothes they wear.

Even the idea of beauty and elegance isn't about the body being exposed for everyone to see, but about suggesting, veiling and revealing, letting people sense without ever showing off. Yes, I think it's beautiful. Really beautiful. Letting people sense without ever showing off.

Letting people sense without ever showing off. And here, in my notes, I wrote, these really are the first, he's very similar to Steve Jobs in my opinion, from this point of view. In his thinking: instead of starting from the clothes, starting from the human body, from the person. Here it's written: "the important thing was to start from the simplest possible experience for the human being." The simplest possible experience for the human being, and then work backwards and build the technology to make that experience possible. And here, what he writes, well, not that he writes it, because it's a biography. There are two beautiful ones. The first is called Insanely Simple and the other is called Make Something Wonderful. I think in the first book, Insanely Simple, there's an example that connects this idea of starting from the simplest human experience and then working backwards and creating the technology. In 1844, when the telegraph was invented, which was an incredible breakthrough in communications, you could actually send a message from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon, which wasn't possible before. Some people talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It wouldn't have worked. And the reason it wouldn't have worked was that you would have had to learn that whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code in this case. It took about 40 hours to learn how to use Morse code.

So, fortunately, what happens next?

In 1870 along comes Alexander Graham Bell, who filed the first patents for the telephone, which was a radical breakthrough in communications, and it performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. It let you give your words an intonation, with a meaning that went beyond plain language. "Today we find ourselves," he writes, "in exactly the same situation. Some people say we need to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity, but it won't work. The special things you have to learn this time to make an IBM PC work are also very complicated, and most people will never learn all the things you have to do to use an IBM PC." And that's exactly where the Macintosh comes in. The Macintosh, Jobs explains, came from observing what people appreciated, okay? What did they appreciate? They appreciated beautiful typography, they appreciated personal expression, rather than technical capability. "What I mean is that if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind it was to bring not only ease of use to people, so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things, but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people, not for plotting laminar flow calculations, but so that they could see beautiful photographs or pictures or artwork, to help them communicate what they were doing in their lives." Another example I wrote down here is that the Apple team had been given the task of developing a very simple way to turn a home video into a DVD. And so there was this person called Mike Evangelist, and he and his team worked hours and hours and hours to create an interface that was very simple, to then present to Steve. And Mike was shocked when Steve walked into the room. He ignores all the work. He goes straight to the whiteboard. And he says: "here's the new application." He said: "it's got one window. Drag the video into the window, then click the button that says burn. That's it. That's what we're going to make." So there are two concepts here. One is the concept of simplicity, which we'll talk about later, but the other is, okay, once again, what is the simplest experience for the human being? And then we work backwards and create the technology to make that experience possible. One thing I think I should have said earlier, which is a bit of a disclaimer, in my view, for everything we're sharing: all these ideas, these principles that worked for Armani, for Cucinelli, for so many other people, the important thing is to use them as inspiration and food for thought, because what worked for them might not work for us and could even go completely against our nature. One thing that I think was really an archetype of Armani, and I don't know whether it can work for other people, is that even though he thought of fashion as an Olympic sport, meaning everyone works together, there's a group and you work, in the end he is the last person to decide. Here he writes, so when Giorgio Armani started to grow: "some of my executives suggested major changes at the top and a new internal organization. My answer has always been: the success of Giorgio Armani lies in the fact that it depends on the choices of one single person." So yes, of course, because there's a team behind him, but in the end the decision remains his alone. This is an archetype that worked for him, but maybe it doesn't work for other people.

But I think this really reflects his personality. In fact he writes: "do I, Giorgio Armani, have an inability to delegate? Absolutely, because the more creative a job is, the harder it is to explain to someone else what you want." Even if you can explain it to them a thousand times, but above all because, most likely, not even you yourself know what you want. And as you said, over time he learned to stop expecting the stroke of genius from whichever manager or CEO happened to be there, because in the end the final choice is Giorgio Armani's.

And here too it's very similar to Jobs, where, again in the book Insanely Simple, he didn't believe in delegating significant marketing decisions to others. And during the Think Different campaign, which we can put up here, but it's the most important one, with all the most important people in history, in the book here it says that Jobs was involved in every single thing. At that time Jobs was also CEO of Pixar, so he worked three days on Apple and the other two days on Pixar, but in the marketing of that ad campaign he was there every second. Every image, every word had to go through him first and then to the others. "Not in a tyrannical way," he writes, "but as an enthusiastic participant. I've lost count of the midnight phone calls we had just to go over the copy of an ad that was about to run." Jobs working until three in the morning to personally approve every version of the Think Different commercial, the night before the presentation. His justification here was very pragmatic: "if you think it's important, you find the time to do it." It wasn't perfectionist madness, it was the conviction that the quality of the final result rises in direct proportion to the involvement of the ultimate decision maker, who was Steve. So he didn't like delegating either. But for Armani it works.

Yes, and it worked for Jobs too. In '75, as you said, he founds the company with a capital of 10 million lire. In '98 Giorgio Armani S.p.A. has revenues of 1,502 billion lire, which would be 766 million, with a profit of 242 billion and with a value of products sold worldwide of 6,000 billion lire. So, as you said, just because it worked for him doesn't mean it works for others too.

What strikes me at this point is that, yes, he's the last one to decide, but what he managed to develop was instinct, his own judgment, what's called taste. And here there's a conversation I heard between Naval Ravikant, who is a very smart person, and Eric Jorgenson, who is the author of the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. And here they explain, I mean, Armani, like Steve, is the last person to decide, but his decisions, I think, are right in most cases. So how does he get to make those right decisions? Because there's only Armani. He started out making clothes, but step by step, he writes: "I ventured elsewhere. My name appears on a line of cosmetics and perfumes. I design furnishings, interiors for hotels, homes to which I've given my name, in Milan and one in Dubai. I've furnished prestigious residences and private homes in different countries." So then he started doing other things, and all those things, in their own way, were successful. So his decisions are right, but his decisions are right because over time he developed what Naval Ravikant describes as the most important thing, which is judgment. Judgment becomes the most important thing. The main idea Naval and Eric were discussing is that judgment, so developing your own personal judgment, your own taste, is the most important thing. Because if you know where to go, if you know where to steer, you get paid much more, you have more responsibility, and direction matters much more than anything else. And this important judgment, how do you develop it? You develop it, it comes from experience and reflection. So you live experiences, you reflect on those experiences and you build your judgment. Then your judgment, as surely happened to Armani, becomes so good, it's so good that you can't even explain why, when you say okay, let's do this because I feel it. This is the judgment that comes, that develops over years and years and years of experience and reflection. And at the beginning, like at the beginning for you, at the beginning for me, for many young people, you don't know exactly what to do, you have no taste, no judgment at all, and so you look for other people's feedback. This is important for Armani: you look for other people's feedback, but in the end you become so good at making decisions, like Armani, that you no longer go to other people. And there comes a point where your judgment is so good that you can't even explain why it is, and so the people who have reached this point, like Steve Jobs, like Armani, are the people who then truly create works of art, beautiful things.

He developed that judgment, that taste,

which you can't teach, and you can't even understand exactly what works. But through this judgment and this taste he ends up launching, creating furnishings, furniture for a home that gets furnished through his taste, through the judgment he developed over the years.

Another concept that really struck me in Armani's book and in his thinking is the concept of "less but better." So, like you were also saying earlier about the concept of simplicity, of going against the current, he writes: "the essentiality of a garment, of a suit, is made to follow the body and its movements. It isn't an aesthetic style to seek approval, to seek fame, but a continuity between the garment and the person." So Armani thinks of simplicity as strength, and it's not that he starts from something very complex and organized to arrive at the idea of simple; he decides to start directly from the idea of simple and to elaborate and build on that.

Here he writes: "fashion. My fashion is born from a process of subtraction." So he applies a process of subtraction to his fashion. "I offer creations that last over time because they start from the premise that less is more. I'm convinced that less is always better. I borrow the definition from the industrial designer Dieter Rams because I find it perfect. Less but better. The point is that my essentiality is made to follow the body and its movements. It isn't an aesthetic challenge," so, creativity as an end in itself. And this concept of simplicity is very similar, Brunello thinks the same thing too. In fact, here he writes in the book The Dream of Solomeo: "beauty and simplicity, this is a fundamental theme, and simplicity is not the elimination of parts, but a synthesis produced by a great deal of work of conscience and of knowledge. It's much easier to make something difficult and complex than to make something very simple." Another very important example can be found in Steve's book, Insanely Simple. Then here there's the example of when the iPod came out, okay? It really was the big difference the iPod made. And the big difference is that before, all MP3 players had everything on the device, it was all there, so they were these huge bricks, everything was in there. And the great genius of Steve and the Apple team was applying a process of subtraction. In this case, what did they do? The device, the iPod, was a tool where the only thing you could do was what? Listen to music. But the music wasn't on the iPod, it was on iTunes. So the music was there, on iTunes. So instead of putting everything on the iPod, the iPod became a very simple object where you did what? You selected the music, skipped forward and back, turned up the volume, and that was it. And it was a tiny object.

iTunes, on the other hand, was where you put all your music, so you could organize the artists, the music, the genres, and then on the iPod you listened to the music. So this is a very important process of subtraction, of making something as simple as possible. And it always starts, as we said before, from understanding what the simplest experience for the human being is.

Moving on through the book, Armani also talks about how, if you think about it, he worked for 40 to 50 years, always the same company, so this too is the work of a lifetime.

Of a lifetime, that's true.

And he writes...

Wait, let's remember what that means, I mean, Cucinelli thought that having a happy life meant devoting yourself to a dream, the dream of a lifetime, so just one. And he writes...

"In these more than 40 years there has been no time for anything but work. I haven't cultivated other passions. I have had a necessarily," so he actually writes that it was necessary, "a necessarily maniacal relationship with my work, and perhaps I have sinned, at times, with an almost obsessive perfectionism, always trying to keep control of everything." And I found this idea of perfectionism in other stories too: the story of Ralph Lauren, Bugatti, Maserati, all people who strive for absolute perfection.

But this, on the other hand, is also one of his biggest regrets. Why is it one of his biggest regrets? I think we'll put it here, let's put in the clip now where he explains his biggest regret, and then we'll come back and tell you what we think.

My biggest regret, the most evident, the clearest, the most obvious, is not having taken enough care of myself. I was very attentive to others, perhaps at the service of others, and sometimes even to the point that maybe I should have given up my work, or split my working time between private and public life. I didn't manage to do it. I didn't manage to do it because of this work, which takes you from morning to night. And instead I tried, for example, to take from outside and bring people in, friends, lovers, to bring them into the sphere of my work, not the other way around: not to step out of my work to engage with the outside, with the world, but to bring the world into my story, into my own small reality. It forced me to remember a very demanding journey I've made, forgetting the stress. And this is very serious, I don't recommend it. Work, stick with your work, but don't forget that when you go home you have the cat, or the dog, or the child, or your mother, your grandmother, or your lover. You understand? I mean, don't forget, because as you go on, you need people by your side.

So we can see that even someone like Armani realizes that over the course of his life he didn't devote enough time to himself, to taking care of himself, to taking care, linking back to Cucinelli, of his own soul, being with the people he loves, his family, but he devoted too much time to work. Which, if you think about it, is an idea that goes against Brunello Cucinelli, who says "at half past five I'm done, that's it, I go home, to my family, my daughters, my grandchildren." Whereas Armani, as I said before, in these 50 years of career found no time for anything but work.

For me, it makes me think that I'd like to live a life with many dimensions. So there's not only room for work, but lots of room for family, lots of room for sport, lots of room for activities that have nothing to do with work as such. Because it makes me think, I mean, you devote your whole life to your work and you think it's the right thing, and then you watch this short interview with Armani and he tells you, he makes you understand, that it was one of his regrets, and that maybe if he could go back he wouldn't do the same thing.

The last concept I'd like to close with is the concept of drawing. I mean, Armani refers to the fact that nowadays, with artificial intelligence, many people are worried about having their own job replaced, that many processes humans carry out now will be replaced by artificial intelligence, okay? Right. And this concept of drawing, even the act of creating the first sketch of a garment, could in fact be replaced by artificial intelligence, I mean, even right now artificial intelligence makes images and drawings that are unbelievable. Right. Armani says: "I absolutely don't agree, because drawing is the foundation of my work." And he writes that no one will ever be able to replace the human being, at least in this field, because "your own pencil stroke, which has been refined, makes clear to a tailoring technician how that garment should fall on a woman's body." And it's precisely drawings that accompany a designer's work. Another lovely thing I saw in an interview, Armani says: "30 years ago I didn't expect that at 80 I'd still be there running the company." In reality he stayed on running the company until past 90. "And it's not because he rested on his laurels, but because he came to enjoy it. When things are done with the heart and with the mind, when you invent by truly putting yourself on the line, time is simply a relative variable." And Armani writes: "the process thrills me even more than the product, and I like feeling the thrill of an idea being born, I like refining it, changing it, correcting it and finally making it real." The last sentence, he writes: "this work, which for me is life, is a continuous act of love." Beautiful.

Well, with this we want to wrap up this third episode of In Buona Compagnia. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, if you learned something new, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and share it with someone who might be interested in these things. Well, thank you so much, and see you in the next episode. Bye bye!