Giorgio Armani was born on 11 July 1934 in Piacenza, in northern Italy, the middle child of a shipping clerk, and grew up through the war in a city that was bombed. He enrolled to read medicine in Milan, left after two years, and did his military service.

What came next looks small and was decisive: dressing windows at La Rinascente, Milan’s main department store, which became a menswear buying role. He died on 4 September 2025 aged 91, as France 24 reported.

From 1964 he designed menswear for Nino Cerruti’s Hitman label, the apprenticeship that taught him the thing his whole fortune rests on: how a jacket is built, and therefore how it can be taken apart.

In 1975 he set up Giorgio Armani S.p.A. with his partner Sergio Galeotti, funding it by selling his Volkswagen. Galeotti ran the commercial side until 1985, after which Armani took both roles and never gave either up. He was designer and chief executive of the same company for forty years, which is why the design decisions and the money decisions here are the same decisions.

The unstructured jacket — linings removed, shoulders softened, the suit made to hang rather than to hold — arrived in the late 1970s, and American Gigolo put it on Richard Gere in 1980. Within two years he was on the cover of Time, the first fashion designer there since Christian Dior, and American department stores were the engine of the business.

Here is what the craft actually paid him. Armani held 99.9 per cent of the company for the whole fifty years he ran it, so every dividend it declared was his. We put its average annual net profit across 2000 to 2025 at about €100 million with roughly half distributed — some €1.3 billion in dividends — plus €200 million to €600 million from the build-up years and €50 million to €125 million in chief-executive pay. Lifetime income from the house: €1.5 billion to €2.4 billion on our estimate.

The second half of his own money was the stake itself, built by multiplying labels rather than selling equity. Giorgio Armani, Armani Prive couture, Emporio Armani, Armani Exchange, EA7, Armani/Casa and Armani Junior gave him every price point from a nine-euro T-shirt to a couture gown, all under one shareholder.

The scale is on the record. FashionUnited reported FY2024 net revenues of €2.3 billion, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of €398 million and capital expenditure of €332 million, roughly double the prior year; WWD had put 2023 pre-tax profit at €224.5 million. FashionNetwork reported a 2025 net profit of €67 million with about half paid out as dividends. Against those accounts, The Business of Fashion reported that analysts and insiders would value the whole company at €4 billion to €7 billion in a sale — the market price of his shareholding, not the cash the business generates.

Armani dressed Hollywood for four decades, and the red carpet as a commercial platform is substantially his invention: the first designer to lend to actors systematically, and the first to see that an awards photograph is an advertisement nobody pays for.

In Italy his standing was closer to a civic office than a career: Cavaliere del Lavoro, Milan’s ceremonial honours, the 2025 anniversary of the house treated as a national event. For a valuation that matters for one reason — a brand reliably worn by the most photographed people alive commands a licensing premium, and that premium is where much of the group’s margin comes from.

Armani is the rare case where endorsement income runs the other way: he did not front other people’s brands, he licensed his own to the largest operator in each category and took a royalty. L’Oreal has held the fragrance and beauty licence for decades, producing Acqua di Gio, Armani Code and Si; eyewear sits with EssilorLuxottica.

Those royalties are the highest-margin money in the group, because the licensee carries the factories, the stock and the advertising while the brand takes a percentage of net sales. He also dressed the Italian Olympic team through EA7 and tailored national football squads, which functions as paid advertising rather than a fee of consequence.

He extended the name into categories most designers never touch, and kept them inside his own company. Armani/Casa put furniture under the label; Armani Hotels opened in the Burj Khalifa and on Via Manzoni; Armani/Silos, the museum he built in a former grain store, holds his archive; and there are Armani restaurants, clubs and a theatre in Milan.

He also bought the basketball club Olimpia Milano and funded it as an owner rather than a sponsor. None of this is large against the clothing business, but these are owned assets rather than fees, and the will distributed them as such.

His homes were a portfolio in themselves: the Palazzo Orsini in Milan, which was both residence and headquarters, and houses in Pantelleria, Forte dei Marmi, Saint-Tropez, Saint Moritz, Antigua, New York and Paris. Across five countries we put the property at $500 million to $750 million.

The yacht Main, a 65-metre Codecasa delivered in 2008 and named after his mother’s childhood nickname, he designed himself; Boat International has been aboard it. Outside his own company he held nearly 2 per cent of EssilorLuxottica, worth roughly $2.6 billion in 2025 and, after the house itself, the largest asset he owned.