Georgio Armani: Hollywood’s “Go To” Designer for the Red Carpet
June 6, 2008
Fashion Designer Giorgio Armani was born on July 11, 1934, in Piacenza, about 50 miles south of Milan, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. Armani gave up a career in medicine to pursue his interest in fashion. After a brief career as a photographer, he began a menswear label in 1974 and a women’s line in 1975, but most fashion insiders site Armani’s breakthrough moment as his styling of Richard Gere in the 1980 film “American Gigolo.”
Today, his public feuds with Donatella Versace and Valentino don’t seem to dampen his image as an international man of charm and style. Armani is the creative director and CEO of his brand, designing his own couture collection while supervising multiple ready-to-wear labels, and also licensing his name to a full line of cosmetics and perfumes, a home collection and, most recently, an Armani bicycle inspired by the designer’s many vacation homes.
In 2001, Forbes named him the most successful Italian designer, estimating his net worth at $1.7 billion; in giving him the same title five years later, the magazine estimated his fortune had grown to $4.1 billion.
Though he’s the richest designer on the planet, Armani historically never used super models in his shows, on the grounds that they “distract” attention from the clothes. Armani was among the first designers to ban models with a body mass index (BMI) under 18, after model Ana Carolina Reston starved herself to death due to anorexia nervosa.
Giorgio Armani has created a very popular line of fragrances that contains about 45 titles among them some of best sellers like Acqua di Gio and Armani Code.
In January 2007 Armani became the first designer to broadcast a haute couture fashion show live on the Internet. The Armani Privé spring/summer 2007 fashion show was broadcast via Microsoft Corporation’s MSN and Cingular cellular phones.
Armani designed made to measure suits for Christian Bale’s character Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight. Advertisements featuring ‘Bruce Wayne for Georgio Armani’ with pictures of Christian Bale wearing Armani suits from the film were released in 2008.
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