I wouldn’t be surprised if it was irritation at being asked so often when he was going to retire that made Giorgio Armani decide a year ago that he would do something to make his inquisitors sit up and take notice: he announced that he would move into haute couture. It certainly gave the fashion industry a jolt. Here, after all, was a prince of ready-to-wear fashion deciding to move into haute couture when most observers thought that it was an anachronism.
Talking to him as he worked frenetically behind the scenes getting ready for his show on Monday, I found that one thing is clear. He’s all fired up. I don’t think he’s doing it for the money. He says: “It was my gift to myself — my very expensive gift to myself.”
In other words he wanted to do it pretty badly, even if it ends up costing him money.
It has also given him the chance to ponder the question of what constitutes real luxury these days; he thinks it’s hard to find.
“Some time ago,” he says, “if you came to Paris and bought an Hermès tie it was special and exclusive, but today you can buy an Hermès tie in almost every city of the world, so it no longer seems so special. The same is true of many other things. I thought — how can I give my customers really special things, and it seems to me that Armani Privé was the answer.”
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That is the name he gives to a whole collection of things that he considers special: the scents that he developed for himself and his close friends and which now can be bought in Giorgio Armani boutiques or Harrods; his watches and accessories, and his haute couture clothing.
Besides wanting to give his customers the chance to buy a one-off piece, he also believed that there was a way of doing haute couture that nobody else was doing.
“Couture is mostly presented as exciting, spectacular theatre that provides great copy for fashion editors but doesn’t usually offer clothes that are very wearable or that flatter women,” he says.
He wants his clothes to have an intrinsic quality, without the need for pyrotechnics on a flashy catwalk to draw attention to them.
Since he launched his haute couture range a year ago, he has discovered that his customers fall into two main categories: the red-carpet brigade who need something to catch the paparazzi lenses (although many think of Armani as the minimalist, the king of beige who produces clothes that are flashy enough to give the late Versace a run for his money); and those who want classic day clothes such as trouser suits, pretty day suits and coats.
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Like the chic American customer I sat next to at the show who preferred the quieter numbers, never considering the ones that “marque trop” (make too big an impression and so cannot be worn very often).
If you’re in the market for a very special Armani number you need to think of $30,000 (£17,000) as the starting figure. You should visit the Sloane Street or Milan showroom and have three fittings. In about six weeks you will have your own little number. You can also buy into the Armani Privé world in a small way: the shoes this season were sexy and scintillating. As were the hats, jewellery and bags.
Armani is also excited by his new hotels, the first two of which will open in Dubai and Milan. It seems an absolutely fitting way to spend one’s seventies — creating beautiful things with no thought to whether or not they make money.
If they do, lovely. If not, tant pis.