Francesco Bonami recalls Giorgio Armani: when he “entered” Guggenheim

This entry is posted on number 38 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until September 16, 2025

There Shed It is not the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but it was equally a symbolic place of Italian popular culture and we all were waiting for Giorgio Armani, new owner, would have transformed it, revolutionized, enhanced.

The Capannina in the hands of Armani is not a scandal but Guggenheim, on October 20, 2000, when he inaugurated his great and grandiose retrospective, created an earthquake in the world of museums and culture. The critic of New CriterionHilton Kramer, when the critics and not the influencers counted a lot, shouted at the disaster accusing the then director and powerful Thomas Krens of having sold one of the most important museums in the world to a designer. The criticisms of Blake Gopnik and Herbert Muschamp followed.

The world of art, at the beginning of the millennium, was still moralist and conservative and fashion looked at it with a certain suspicion. Krens drew and put in the hands of Robert Wilson the set -up, e The exhibition had more than half a million spectatorsbecoming one of the five most visited exhibitions in the history of the museum.

I who lived in New York I remember her like a real one revolution. On the other hand, I had grown up in the 80s in Florence with the countryside of Aldo Fallai and the wardrobe of American Gigolòwith Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton, with the soundtrack of the other Giorgio, Moroder. A film that stimulated great and pure onanism.

Armani, his imagination rather than his clothes, impersonated a way of being completely new For a generation grown inside the Eschimo and sleeping on the floors of the employed universities. It was the personification of REAGANIAN ADMONISM of Roberto D’Agostino. The antidote to the poisoning of the lead years. We couldn’t afford an Armani jacket, but we dreamed of doing it.

The exhibition at Guggenheim arrives much after cover n. 86 of New York Times Magazine of 10 February 1985, with the Portrait of Lizzie Himmel by Jean-Michel Basquiat in his studio, barefoot, but wearing a full of black Armani complete with a tie. The apotheosis of sensuality and fluidity still to come and conquer.

Armani since the early 1980s had managed to infiltrate the lifestyle of contemporaneity. The seed of what will be the scandal of retrospective at Guggenheim is there, inside that portrait of Basquiat. An artist who at the same time impersonated the underground of art and the establishment of the disruptive social life of a New York that will be difficult to duplicable, with the excesses and disasters that was carried inside.

There is no more different individual from the Armani man of Basquiat, yet in his being a damned elegant rebel there is something obscurely “Armanque”. Just the New York Timesin the article by Guy Trebay who remembered him the day after his disappearance, published a Photo by Armani Bambino The day of the First Communion, in 1942

There has always been talk of the Power Suit invented by the stylistbut I believe that power is confused with the desire for success and self -esteem, true or imaginary that it is. Success is lighter than power, it is arrogant but less aggressive. Armani’s dress is not for those of “you don’t know who I am”, but for those of the “I know who I am and what I want”. The difference between external power and inner power.

The portrait of Basquiat is the icon of the faith itself. Armani was, in the 80s and 90s, the Supreme Pontiff. In fact, Thomas Krens, the director who had cleared Armani’s fashion in the museum, more interested in power than in the inner self -esteem, dressed Armani but was not seen. Also because it was too high. An Armani dress worked for people neither too high nor too low, it worked on right people. Giorgio Armani had spotted the scale of the contemporary individual. That I believe is one of the secrets of his success.

For this reason, the Guggenheim exhibition, which then, overcome the scandal, will travel around the world, represents an important moment, however questionable and criticized, in the history of museums. At the dawn of the twenty -first century the contemporary individual, spot on by Armani, no longer sees the cathedral museum, wants the museum Shopping Mall of culture and entertainment, a theater museum not only of art but of all contemporary society, primarily fashion. Robert Wilson played this feeling not showing, but staging Armani.

In 2000 Armani was now a classic to be celebrated. But the Armani of the “moment” was that of the 80s, when we all started to feel a little Richard Gere or Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In the 80s there was no mention of globalization and social media. It was the era of the “man in fax”. Yet even without posts or tweets, Armani was able to translate on global all Italian self-confidence on a global level that goes under the name of “peeling”the absence of effort of elegance, also aggressively tamarra like that of Basquiat who, taking off shoes and socks, transformed the wolf of Wall Street wolf into a symbol of the underground demons kissed by genius and success.

At the disagreement of a gallery in Soho, a collector poured a glass of wine on the trousers of a famous artist. Instead of apologizing, he said: “Go to Armani, buy a pair of pants and put it on my account!». “But I don’t dress Armani!” He reacted the artist. “From today yes,” the collector closed. Armani was not discussed. If you wanted to be or look someone, you wore it.

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