The superstar of fashion designers lives alone in a vast palazzo, where airy rooms empty one into the next and servants pad quietly out of view. A garden sprawls beyond the glass walls, but he rarely steps outside. A wardrobe mistress keeps his beloved navy sweatshirts neatly stacked. He is a perfectionist, a man who wants to know only what he did wrong.
”Happy is not the question,” says Giorgio Armani, in a rare interview at his home. ”I am a serene person.”
Serene and successful: At 52, silver-haired, intensely private, Armani is one of the hottest designers in the world. Twelve years ago he pulled together his first collection with a friend, a secretary and $10,000. Today he rules his fashion empire from a three-story Milanese mansion that he also calls home.
On the ground floor, the business floor, men and women dressed in rumpled linen stream in and out. A polished gentleman in a dark suit holds down the reception desk. Behind him is a private Armani trademark, a pyramid-shaped Pagoda lamp balanced on one skinny leg like a stork.
Armani lives upstairs. His two-story apartment is mostly empty space. White walls run on like rivers, unbroken by photographs or art. Seating and coffee tables are all crouched low, done in an amorphous dovelike beige.
Only calla lilies, which are white, are allowed to bloom here. People bring presents, but Armani confesses, ”I hide them in closets.” His stereo is silent; his books are closed and on the shelves. Clutter dissipates at the doorstep. Armani even winces at the word. ”I have it all in my brain,” he says, speaking in his low, modulated Italian to a translator. ”When you keep a lot of papers, junk, it conditions you.
”The thing I care most about here is the space. It`s an enormous amount of space. The contrast of that with a very simple, unaffected life
. . . sometimes it intimidates me.”
These days, tired of hearing the same queries again and again, Armani gives few interviews. His palazzo has been photographed as a backdrop for fashion spreads, but rarely has Armani revealed its full interior, and never in an American publication. Photographers who do gain entry are steered gently through the house. Armani listens carefully to questions. His ceramic-blue eyes never flicker, and he seems to give nothing away.
”Life in my house,” he says, ”is one of choosing corners where I can curl up and forget everything else that goes on around me. A corner for me means being with other people. I like to have loved ones around me.”
But he adds: ”I entertain for only two or three people at a time. I don`t believe you can have a profusion of friends.”
Fifteen months ago, Armani`s business partner and closest friend, Sergio Galeotti, died at the age of 40. Galeotti had owned half of the business, which he willed to Armani. He also owned four homes with Armani, including a converted farmhouse in Forte dei Marmi, an island home on Pantelleria and a villa in the Po Valley. A decade earlier, Sergio Galeotti had propelled the designer into fame. With his death, he made Armani one of the richest men in Italy.
It was Galeotti who insisted, back in 1970, that Armani quit his steady $40,000-a-year job with menswear designer Nino Cerruti and go out on his own. At first, Armani hired himself out to other top designers while Galeotti ran the business. Five years later his first private collection, unveiled in a single crowded room, sent out shock waves: Armani had invented the
unconstructed jacket for men.
Galeotti, Armani told a newspaper reporter for Corriere Della Sera, ”was one of the two sections of the engine. Now I am left holding both ends and I`m doing it, for Sergio. I`m carrying on because that`s what both of us would have wanted.”
Meanwhile, his Milan home was achieving a curious kind of perfection
–stripped-down, spare, pure Armani–yet it appeared that he lived there without touching anything, and without being touched in return.
He bought the palazzo on Via Borgonuovo four years ago. It had been built by an Italian industrialist in the 1950s to blend in with its neighbors–grand old buildings, with carvings and gargoyles from another century. Because the palazzo had no gargoyles, the industrialist had 17th-Century mural
reproductions painted on the inside walls and erected an imposing marble staircase.
Armani`s vision swept through this house like a strong wind. Where the murals stretched out, he repaved the walls in white. Confronted with the marble staircase, he walled it up.
”My first imperative,” he explains, ”in living or in fashion, is to be contemporary.”
He brought everything down to bare white, except the pale blond wood floors.
He added one color–the indescribable dove-gray, dove-beige shade his employees call Armani Neutral.
And in the confines of this narrow palette, Armani created a simple, serene space. He did so using multiples of just two pieces of furniture. One is a low, modular slice of sofa. The other is a coffee table made of bent metal and painted with auto paint.
”Giorgio likes to use very poor materials,” says Gabriella Forte, a close associate, ”and give them a very noble quality. The materials, they`re a bit like his clothes. Nothing apparent. Nothing screams rich, but nothing is high tech. He plays on proportions: a huge desk, a huge ashtray. Again, it`s like his clothes.”
Armani claims that it takes two years for a house to soak up the personality of its owner. Why hasn`t his? Partly, work steals most of his time. Partly, with Galeotti`s death, he has not learned to befriend this house. ”It`s too early to say how I will feel about it,” he says. ”Not to share all the things we wanted to build. . . . I love the space, but it hasn`t yet become too personal.”
Still, the place is awesome. The third floor hides an indoor garden, topped with a glass dome, one wall crawling with ivy. In the center is an Armani Neutral modular sofa, awash in sun. When rain beats on the glass, it is hard to imagine that this sofa stays dry.
Armani`s bedroom, never photographed, is meditative and stark. The bed is white. The headboard is black. On the headboard are a black telephone, two white Pagoda lamps and three wristwatches with black bands. He is fond of watches. Like him, they are functional, precise, unrevealing.
And Armani? Photographs rarely show him smiling; instead he levels his eyes at the camera like a surveyor. When Taxi, an Italian magazine, ran six photographs of him, five looked like reprints. His blue eyes are as famous in the fashion world as Paul Newman`s are in Hollywood. He has smooth skin, a small mouth and features that appear to be concentrated down the center of his face. There is an intensity here that makes a visitor think of the cliche, that still waters run deep.
Yet his clothes–the ones he wears, not the ones he designs–suggest a man who never closes his office door. He lives in multiples of the same navy sweatshirt, sometimes sweaters, all stacked up in his wardrobe like a regiment. And he wears suede shoes that look suspiciously like Hush Puppies.
Four years ago, when he made the cover of Time, the magazine dug up a typical example of his garb. Spotting the designer on a plane one day, it reported, a stewardess pointed him out to a steward. ”That`s Giorgio Armani,” she said.
”No!” said the steward. ”Dressed like that?”
He also is fond of cats. Armani has four–”my squadron of cats,” he calls them–including the regal black Nero, who arranges himself for warming under the Pagoda lamps, and Micio, a bewildered-looking tabby kitten. For all his monastic love of empty space, Armani makes room against the white walls for two orange plastic litter-boxes, kept assiduously clean by servants.
Armani is talking about houses now, leaning on his elbows on a long stretch of empty desk.
”Usually I am really intimidated by going to people`s houses. I always feel uncomfortable. It`s not how the interior is–it`s important that I feel the house corresponds to the personality of the person I am visiting.
”You have to be sincere,” he says. ”Then I feel comfortable, even in an ugly house.”
Forte, who is president of Armani`s operations in America, translates for him with fluid, almost poetic ease. She has a great deal to say about him, and like most of his employees she is deeply loyal. Armani`s entire adopted family, in fact, seems to be made up of devoted employees. Before Galeotti`s death, the two partners and the ”family” would troop off on weekends to one of the partners` three vacation homes.
”Giorgio appears very serious, very tough,” Forte says. ”But he is one of the most warm human beings. He is kind of like a child.
”He is a perfectionist. He doesn`t think he has ever arrived, that he is the best. Giorgio will never ask what you like: It`s what you don`t like. What went wrong, not what went right–because he can figure that out for himself.” It is lunchtime. The secretaries downstairs will be heading out to cafes. Upstairs, Armani`s table for 12 is set for one. On the linen placemat, an unobtrusive servant has set out three silver forks, two glasses for water and wine and a single white plate.
