“I’m ready for the runway, and I don’t have the clothes,”says in his office, surrounded by portraits of himself, during his first in-person interview since the coronavirus paralyzed both his industry and his hometown of Milan more than a year ago. In another, the 86-year-old says, he dreams he is the central character of a play and starts singing. And then there is the recurring nightmare—Mr. Armani perched on a cliff edge over a daunting precipice—that has haunted him throughout the pandemic.
“They say I have powers, that I can see into the future,” says Mr. Armani, clad in his familiar uniform of a fitted midnight-blue crewneck sweater, blue pants, and sneakers as snow white as his hair. “What will happen? I don’t know!” “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”
He also says that he planned to pass down much of the business to his family, naming his niece Roberta Armani and his chief lieutenant, Leo Dell’Orco. What is still missing, of course, is his replacement—someone “who says yes or no. There’s still no boss.” 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.
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,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.
“The first thing I said was ‘The collections need to be reduced by almost a third.’ ” Sixty percent of the global fashion output, he says, ends up unsold and “discarded” to the black market or outlets. “I don’t want to work for the outlets!” What COVID has shown, he tells me, is that people can dress well with little, that there is no need to go shopping every day. Fashion, he says, has to go back to its true function, which is helping people look and live better. Fashion is what people wear, he says, not a spectacle.