SA : Yes—it must be protected, but it must also be reinvented. You reinvent it through shapes, by adjusting forms or colors. You work on proportions, different shoulders, perhaps a larger double-breasted jacket. Right now all the girls are wearing oversized men’s jackets. These are the things you have to observe on the street, even if, often, by the time a trend reaches the street, it’s already old.
What would Mr. Armani make of what you’re doing?
SA : He would probably throw his hands up in his hair!
When you work, do you still feel him telling you things? Because surely he wouldn’t stay quiet.
LDO: No, of course he wouldn’t stay quiet. That said, our archives are intact. Giorgio never reused something he had done 10 years earlier, he never wanted to go backward. But I think that’s something we can do. I see so many people who have copied us, so we can certainly do it too!
We have an extraordinary archive that he never really mined to remake past pieces. There’s an enormous amount of material to work with, 50 years of archives. He used to say, “No, no, not from the archive, it makes everything look so old,” and so on, and we would reply, “But what does that matter? New designers are looking at you, they’re remaking your jackets, your tailoring, and you don’t want to look into your own archive?”
You have no idea how many times we argued about this. He would say, “No! What am I supposed to do, the jacket with the skirt again?” In his own way, he was open to seeing things differently, but when it came to his own past, he never wanted to revisit it. Still, there is a great deal of Armani in the menswear tailoring that has dominated the scene in recent years.
Beyond work, what personal passions do you have that may, or may not, translate into what you do professionally?
SA: I’m drawn to art, design, and women’s literature. I believe we women bring a rather particular lens to the world. The architecture of Odile Decq comes to mind. I love photographic books, even the rough-edged kind: Nan Goldin fascinates me. I’m inspired by the writing of Fleur Jaeggy, so spare and electric, and by her elegance as a former model. I’m always struck by people’s elegance, by a certain eloquence of gesture. There is cinema, the classics, of course, but also TV series: I’ve recently fallen for Love Story about Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr. And I deeply love nature. I have a house in the countryside where I retreat on weekends, and I adore dogs. I have three dogs, and I also founded a very large dog shelter near Pavia. I have dogs and horses, all rescued from difficult situations, that’s really my passion. Whenever I used to have even half a free day—not anymore, I’m afraid—I would go straight to the shelter. When I told my uncle about it, he complained, “Well, now you’ll always be with your dogs!” That truly is my passion. And I would very much like to do interior design.