T
here aren’t many designers who can lay claim to a legacy like the late Giorgio Armani’s. The Italian died last week aged 91. There’s the top line — that he was someone who, from the 1980s, fundamentally changed the way men and especially women dressed, turning tailoring from a hard armour into a soft shell.
And then there are the clothes that were his chosen means to do so, thousands of which are still in the brand’s possession.
By December, the Armani/Archivio project will have digitally catalogued 5,000 looks — and show 150 at an exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Initially, the archive will be accessible only to his team. But eventually all of it will be available to the public.
It made sense that, towards the end of his life, Giorgio Armani should have focused not just on consolidating his archive and celebrating it, but making it more user friendly.
