Giorgio Armani’s death at the age of 91 marks the passing of more than a fashion designer. Armani personified a cultural shift in the 1980s, a decade when the idea of style became inseparable from identity, social aspiration and a form of social drama. 

To wear Armani, or at least, clothes that resembled Armani, was to make a statement about taste, achievement and modernity. His minimalism, sophistication and attention to detail transformed clothing into an instrument of social expression and lifestyle into a theatrical performance. In this sense, Armani exemplified how culture itself became a stage, influencing not just what people wore but how they thought, felt and, indeed, lived.

Style democratized 

Born in Piacenza, south of Milan, in 1934, Armani was the second of three children. He dropped out of medical school and moved to Milan in the 1950s, joining the design team at the luxury department store La Rinascente as a window dresser. Despite lacking formal fashion training, he honed an instinct for style and proportion that would define his work. After a period designing for Nino Cerruti’s Hitman line, he founded his own fashion house in 1975 with architect and partner Sergio Galeotti.

Armani’s philosophy was simple but, in its own way, revolutionary: Suits should be easy to wear, comfortable and convey swagger. His unstructured take on men’s jackets broke with the fitted tailoring of French designers Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent, who dominated men’s fashion in the 1960s and 1970s, creating a more relaxed style, understated yet aspirational.

Armani’s breakthrough came with the American screenwriter Paul Schrader-directed film American Gigolo in 1980. American actor Richard Gere’s performance was inseparable from the Armani clothes he wore, demonstrating for the first time how clothing could project an identity on screen. Armani became synonymous not only with taste, but also with a new kind of social visibility: Style as social capital, enacted through a carefully constructed persona.

This was reinforced by Armani’s move to Los Angeles in 1983: He was the first designer to open an office there with the explicit goal of dressing Hollywood actors and other celebrities. The likes of Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie Foster and Anjelica Huston became ambulant advertisements for Armani, updating the historical link between Hollywood glamor and fashion. But not unattainably haute couture fashion: Anyone potentially could dress in designer clothes and carry them off. Style was, in a way, democratized.

The diffusion of Armani’s style went beyond the red carpet. Television shows such as Miami Vice turned designer clothes into an aspirational shorthand for taste, success and lifestyle. The pastel suits and Italian cars of James “Sonny” Crockett and Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs were visible markers: The clothes didn’t simply cover the actors; they validated a way of living. The cop drama used some Armani clothes, but also drew on his rivals, Hugo Boss and Gianni Versace, among others, as well as his former mentor Cerutti. All were described with the key adjective, designer.

The 1980s was the designer decade. The term itself evoked the kind of sophistication and social distinction to which the cognoscenti aspired, where social distinction, as Pierre Bourdieu would argue, refers to how taste functions as a marker of social differentiation. Clothing, media and even household products coalesced into a new social ecosystem, one in which image, style and personal branding could speak more articulately about people than their class, ethnicity, background or anything else.

Armani hotels, restaurants, homeware and beauty lines exemplified the integration of fashion into lifestyle. American rock band Blondie’s lyric “roll me in designer sheets” on Call Me (on the American Gigolo soundtrack) echoed this: A commonplace bedroom item could signify taste and cultural capital, merely by its label.

Liquid modernity and the cultural turn 

We can view Armani’s significance through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu, whose concepts of habitus and distinction help explain how style operates as a social display. Habitus describes the ingrained dispositions and practices that structure how individuals move through society. Distinction refers to how taste functions as a marker of social differentiation. 

Armani’s restraint, subtly signalling elegance without ostentation, exemplifies distinction in action: The wearer communicated the social capital they’ve accumulated and the taste they’ve acquired; they could project identity and status through clothing. (Social capital refers to the value and prestige associated with certain cultural markers, such as designer clothing.)

In the context of the 1980s, this aligns with Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity. Social categories were becoming less fixed, lifestyles more flexible and identity pluralized, so we could swap and change how we thought about ourselves and how we wanted others to regard us as we passed from context to context. Armani’s clothes allowed individuals to navigate this fluidity: An Armani suit, shirt or gown was more than a garment for display: It allowed wearers to inhabit the person they wanted to be.

The aforementioned American Gigolo and Miami Vice dramatized this. They showed a society in which visible image was not incidental to social life, but absolutely central. Where style articulated ambition, mobility and cultural distinction. Scholars of media and fashion have long recognized Miami Vice as a template for the diffusion of designer culture, demonstrating how values and aesthetics could circulate through screens and into everyday life. Armani’s impact was not merely sartorial but social: He participated in the creation of a mediated culture in which taste and lifestyle became determinants as well as reflections of identity and social status.

Armani’s rise coincided with the moment of what academics later called the “cultural turn.” Until then, the prevailing view was that the economy (the production of goods and the circulation of money) was the decisive force shaping society. The cultural turn reframed this, showing that culture, style and everyday practices could be just as powerful in shaping how we live.

Here, Bourdieu and Bauman converge: The fluidity of liquid modernity was navigated through acts of taste, and Armani provided a kind of grammar for those acts. His influence was thus structural: He did not simply clothe bodies, he helped articulate a society increasingly defined by image, style and the symbolic markers of distinction.

Beyond clothing 

Armani crystallized a moment when culture itself was acknowledged as a structuring force in society. The 1980s cultural turn represented a broader shift in social life and the way we study it. Aesthetic choices, media and consumption became potent instruments of identity, aspiration and social negotiation. Armani was part of this shift. Through his designs, his brand and, indeed, his cultural presence, he created a method for the accrual of social and cultural capital.

In this sense, Armani was not only a designer but a cultural agent, a figure whose influence illuminates how performance, taste and social navigation were central to modern life. His passing marks the end of an era, but the culture he helped codify continues to shape how we dress, present ourselves and understand social distinction today.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.