From fascism to fashion: how war-ravaged Italy shaped Giorgio Armani and his legacy

Armani’s early life  

Giorgio Armani was born on July 11, 1934, in the city of Piacenza in northern Italy. “That year marked a high-water mark for Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship. The next, Italy invaded Ethiopia, setting the stage for Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany in the Second World War,” notes Italian journalist Renata Molho in Being Armani (2008).

Armani had an older brother, Sergio, and a younger sister, Rosanna. Their father, Ugo Armani, was a civil servant who worked for the Fascist Federation and their mother was a homemaker. The Armani family loved theatre, perhaps because Armani’s paternal grandfather had long manufactured wigs for the city theatre. He enjoyed taking his grandchildren to work, and it was inevitable that they were drawn to the art.

Giorgio, however, disliked the falseness of the wigs his grandfather created. Molho writes, “This precocious manifestation of aesthetic sensibility foreshadows the artistic process he would later adopt when he set about inventing his style”. Armani had once mentioned that his chief sources of inspiration were the things he disliked, such as wigs.

Life in early 20th-century Piacenza

Piacenza, given its strategic location, was one of the main targets for Allied air raids during the Second World War. The first bombs landed on the Piazza del Duomo (the cathedral square), and its historic centre was attacked soon after. A subsequent air raid destroyed the train station, the bridges over the river Po, and the town arsenal. “The years passed, the war raged, and Piacenza was hit by a total of ninety-one raids. In all, 1,214 Allied planes dropped bombs on the city, 206 people were killed, and hundreds of homes were destroyed,” notes Molho.

“The war changed everything. It was hard, very hard,” Armani once said, as cited by Molho, “I witnessed the deaths of two of my friends in a bombing raid. With my sister, Rosanna, three years old at the time, I experienced a strafing run. We were in the street; an airplane flew over us. We threw ourselves into a ditch. I was little and I protected my little sister. It was traumatic. Bombs were constantly falling down on us.”

When Giorgio was 11, his father was sent to prison for eight months for his role in fascist politics. “I remember the tears that streamed down his face, his helplessness, his shame. We would go to visit him on Sundays…,” he recalled in the biography. Interestingly, in a 2002 interview, Armani said that back in the day, nearly everyone in Italy was fascist. He added that fascist assemblies gave both adults and children a sense of belonging. “In that period, everyone felt that they had an important role to play in the destiny of the nation,” he said.

Armani’s mother, his inspiration 

Whilst her husband was in prison, Armani’s mother, Maria Raimondi, strived to raise her children well. Dressing them in clothing made of old parachutes and military uniforms, she persevered to make their childhood fulfilling. Armani had said, “She made us sports shirts and shorts with a khaki fabric that at the time was called ‘coloniale,’ and we looked every bit as good as our wealthy friends. Perhaps my love of sober, discreet, understated clothing came, subconsciously, out of that childhood memory—out of my mother’s ability to send us off to school, well dressed, though with what little she could afford…”

In the 1930s, argues academic Eugenia Paulicelli in Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (2004), fascism saw the potential fashion had in contributing to the Italian economy. “Opportunistically, the regime used the industry to further its ideological picture of what Italy and Italians should be,” she writes, adding, “Italy’s relative isolation, its autarchic phase and the tragic war years had the effect of stimulating the imagination of designers to use and combine cheap, previously unused material such as cork, paper, cellophane, straw, etc. for their creations.”

New styles were produced using any available material, such as the fabric of a parachute. Even in a country occupied by two foreign armies, Italian people never gave up on their sense of dressing and creativity. “For example, some couture houses near Milan organised fashion shows in the countryside in places that could be reached only by boats,” notes Paulicelli.

Milan, military and a career switch

At the end of the forties, the Armani family moved to Milan, where Ugo Armani found work after serving his term in prison. “We began a new life. It was a city where people lived separately, the rich all together, the middle class all together, and the poor all together. It was a tough time for our family,” Armani said in the biography.

Inspired by his mother, Armani would help set the table, make sheets from leftover cloth, and create furniture from spare wood around the house. He was also keen on dressing his mother, as recounted by multiple friends and family in his biography.

While contemplating a career, he decided to join the army. Drawn to the idea of barracks life, he joined the Corps of Combat Engineers as a private and was stationed first in Siena and later in Riva del Garda. Shortly after, however, Armani was disenchanted by the monotonous life and hardships he faced. Still serving his obligatory term in the Italian military, Armani landed a job at La Rinascente, a major Italian department store.

As destiny had it, La Rinascente was transitioning to cater to Milan’s rising upper middle class. “It was a piece of luck that Giorgio happened along precisely when things were beginning to change,” writes Molho. From there, Armani’s life trajectory shifted from barracks to the backstage of fashion.

Despite the adversity of early 20th-century Italy, resilience and creativity endured. Perhaps it is in times of hardship that necessity becomes the mother of invention. Capturing this spirit, notes Paulicelli, is the old Italian saying — La vita continua (Life must go on).