Giorgio Armani was born on 11 July 1934 in Piacenza, the son of Ugo Armani, an accountant for a transport company, and Maria Raimondi, and grew up with his elder brother Sergio and younger sister Rosanna. During the war the family was poor, and as a boy he was badly burned when an unexploded shell he was playing with went off. He studied medicine at the University of Milan for three years before leaving in 1953 for military service, where his medical training took him to the military hospital in Verona.
In 1957 he joined La Rinascente in Milan as a window dresser and then a menswear buyer, a training in how clothes are sold. In the mid-1960s he moved to Nino Cerruti, designing menswear while freelancing for as many as ten manufacturers. In the late 1960s he met Sergio Galeotti, an architectural draughtsman who became his partner in life and business; in 1973 Galeotti persuaded him to open a design office at 37 Corso Venezia, and on 24 July 1975 they founded Giorgio Armani S.p.A., reportedly selling Armani's Volkswagen to help fund it. The first menswear collection, for spring 1976, was shown in October 1975, with womenswear the same season.
Armani's soft, deconstructed jacket, with its padding and stiffening taken out, changed tailoring for both men and women and became the uniform of the professional 1980s. A 1978 agreement with the clothing maker GFT let him produce luxury ready-to-wear on an industrial scale. Emporio Armani followed in 1981, with Armani Jeans, Armani Junior and, from 1991, Armani Exchange. Hollywood became his showcase: he dressed Richard Gere in American Gigolo (1980), worked on more than a hundred films including The Untouchables (1987), and built red-carpet dressing into a strategy. The New York Times later called him "fashion's master of the power suit", and in 2001 Time wrote that he had "forever changed the way people think about clothes".
Galeotti's death in 1985 left Armani in sole charge, and he remained the company's designer, chairman and chief executive for forty years more, keeping it independent. The Guggenheim in New York gave him a retrospective in 2000, the first for a living designer; he launched Armani Privé couture in 2005, signed with Emaar Properties that year to develop Armani hotels (opened in Dubai and Milan), and owned the basketball club Olimpia Milano. After the death of the model Ana Carolina Reston he was among the first to bar underweight models from his shows.
He died at home in Milan on 4 September 2025, aged 91, having missed his own shows for the first time that June; some 15,000 people attended his public wake at the Armani/Teatro. His wills, made public on 12 September 2025, direct the Fondazione Armani to sell an initial 15% stake to a major industry group, naming LVMH, EssilorLuxottica and L'Oréal, with a further sale or a stock-market listing to follow, and give 40% of voting rights to Leo Dell'Orco, 30% to the foundation and 15% each to his niece Silvana Armani and nephew Andrea Camerana.