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All that seems to have been cleared up nicely, thanks. In 1976, the year Pressman was instrumental in introducing Armani to America, the combined sales of the men's and women's lines was $90,000. This year the ante will be a bit higher: $14 million, which accounts for only about 10% of Armani's worldwide revenue. That figure, an estimated $135 million, is a 60% increase over '81 sales.
The prospects for such a success were by no means clear twelve years ago, when Armani had to be cajoled away from his steady $40,000-a-year job designing men's wear for Nino Cerruti. It took the considerable persuasive powers of Sergio Galeotti, then 25 and a draftsman in a leading Milan architectural firm, to lure Armani from the kind of early middle-aged complacency he was slipping into. Armani, the second of three children of a transport-company manager in Piacenza, 40 miles southeast of Milan, grew up during World War II and remembers waking up screaming from nightmares about air raids. A childhood like that requires a heavy investment in security, which his parents Ugo and Maria did their best to provide.
Giorgio's grandfather Lodovico had a shop in Piacenza where, his grandson recalls, "he made wigs in the 19th century style, many for the local theater. He took me backstage with him. I was fascinated." Giorgio's parents diverted him from dreams of the lively arts and into medical school, which he endured for three years before surrendering to the inevitable military service and a three-year hitch as a medical assistant. Back in civvies in 1954, he took a job, "almost by accident," with La Rinascente, one of Italy's largest department-store chains. He helped put together a series of ambitious window displays "showing quality products from countries the ordinary Italian couldn't visit—Japan, India, the United States." They turned out to be products the ordinary Rinascente customer could not afford either, and Armani found himself transferred to the office of Fashion and Style, where, as he says, "employees were sent who had nothing to do."
There, however, he found plenty to do. "I began to understand about fabrics and the importance of rapport with the public," he says. "It's one thing to design clothes, but it's something else again to hang around the salesrooms watching the public react to them." After seven years in Fashion and Style, he was steered by a Rinascente manager to an interview with Textile Magnate Cerruti, who was hunting for an assistant in the new fashion line he was adding to the family business.
"You look per bene [respectable]," Cerruti said. "You will do." Then he tossed a pile of materials across the desk and asked Armani to choose what he liked. "Luckily," Armani says, "I chose what he liked. I got the job." Later Cerruti disclaimed credit for discovering Armani. "Discovering a man like Armani is impossible, because he discovered himself," Cerruti insisted. "He had a natural talent, and he is self-taught. He would have stood out from the crowd in any case. Men like Armani are so rare that when one emerges even the blind are aware of it."