Giorgio Armani died. What do you remember about the recently departed fashion geniuses?

Giorgio Armani, the designer and founder of one of the most famous fashion houses, has died in Milan at the age of 91. He turned the idea of a business suit upside down and was a favorite of celebrities all over the world. Armani has become another fashion genius who has passed away in recent years. How he and his great colleagues changed the fashion industry is described in the Izvestia article.

Giorgio Armani

• Giorgio Armani has been far from the fashion world for a long time. At first, he wanted to become a doctor and studied at the University of Milan for two years, but eventually he withdrew his documents. Armani tried to become a photographer, served in the army and began to earn a living by doing odd jobs in a department store. But there he was able to work his way up to a clothing buyer and eventually became interested in design, offering his services to several manufacturers at once. In 1975, Armani founded his own brand.

The man from the department store: fashion designer Giorgio Armani has died

In his youth, the future couturier dreamed of becoming a doctor

Armani revolutionized the business suit. For men, he created outfits in light colors with loose silhouettes, which he tried to actively introduce into the cinema, and for women he presented both strict and feminine costumes, which before him were only a copy of men's. Armani worked a lot on celebrity looks for the release, becoming almost the father of the red carpet phenomenon. At the same time, he was not only fixated on the world of high fashion, but also focused on sportswear and a wide variety of business areas.

Karl Lagerfeld

Karl Lagerfeld could well have been born not in Germany, but in Russia. His father was a polyglot, knew Russian and even moved to the Russian Empire, but because of the outbreak of the First World War he was accused of espionage, spent three years in prison and eventually returned to his homeland. The father of the future fashion designer made a fortune in the production of condensed milk. Karl himself became interested in fashion when he attended a Christian Dior show in Hamburg in 1949.

Lagerfeld's fashion career began with winning a coat design competition, which landed him a job with Pierre Balmain. Lagerfeld soon chose to become a freelance designer, which was atypical for the fashion world at the time. At the same time, he refused for a long time to create under his own brand, which he founded only in 1984. Lagerfeld brought back the aesthetics of past eras, from the 1920s to the 1950s, and thus restored the greatness of the house of Chanel. At the same time, he has been criticized throughout his career for preferring to use only natural fur and work with excessively thin models.

Roberto Cavalli

Roberto Cavalli found himself in the fashion business by accident. In his youth, he had chronic problems with his studies — he often stayed in school for the second year, and after graduation he could not stay in any of the colleges, trying to become either a hotel administrator or an accountant. He enjoyed organizing music parties, but his family demanded that he either find a serious job or continue his studies. Cavalli had to go to college, where he studied fabrics for furniture, and then he was suddenly fascinated by textile printing. He began experimenting with dyes, which the fashion world immediately accepted.

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Cavalli's first success came when he began to apply color printing to monochrome sweaters. Later, he developed a technology for printing on leather, which provided him with orders from the most famous fashion houses. As a result, Cavalli founded his own brand, distinguished by the brightness of colors and rebellious freedom. He introduced leather patchwork, patterned jeans, and animal prints. Cavalli made feathers, rhinestones and sequins an indispensable attribute of glamour.

Vyacheslav Zaitsev

Vyacheslav Zaitsev's creative path was different from that of his Western colleagues. He was born in Ivanovo and immediately connected his life with clothes, enrolling in a local college. After graduating from the Moscow Textile Institute, he was assigned to a garment factory in the capital, where he initially created workwear for rural workers. Zaitsev's collection turned out to be too bold for its time and did not go into production, but the French magazine Paris Match wrote an article about it. That's how Parisian fashion designers, including Pierre Cardin, found out about him, and he ended up at the All—Union House of Fashion Models, the main fashion workshop of the USSR.

Zaitsev quickly became the face of Soviet fashion in the West thanks to his Russian-style costumes and the use of Ivanovo chintz. He began to dress almost all the most famous women of the Soviet Union, and also prepared costumes for figure skaters, which added to his worldwide fame. In 1982, Zaitsev founded his own fashion house, with which he presented his collections at the haute couture weeks in Paris and Florence.

Valentin Yudashkin

• Valentin Yudashkin began his career as a fashion designer at the Zaitsev Fashion House back in Soviet times, but became the epitome of the Russian fashion industry of the 1990s and 2000s. Although his work had a strong Russian element, he also worked according to European standards, for which he was quickly accepted in French fashion circles.

The general public knew Yudashkin as a fashion designer for pop stars, including Alla Pugacheva, Philip Kirkorov, Lyudmila Gurchenko, and Laima Vaikule. He willingly agreed to various experiments, created ceremonial costumes for Russian Olympians and had a hand in updating the ceremonial wardrobe for Russian military personnel.