Armani’s argument is basically that when things get crazy, the safe but best designs can be revolutionary – and empower a woman to do revolutionary things like, say, bring down the British monarchy. When Meghan Markle needed to prepare for battle with the House of Windsor, she was choose black Armani silk dress with white lotus flower motif.

“My job has one single purpose: give women the inner strength that comes with being comfortable, who they are with and what they are wearing,” Mr. Armani, who approved the dress earlier, told me as I turned back after the Oprah interview. “I’m flattered that one of my dresses was chosen for such an important event – it means my work really speaks.”

But is Mr Armani willing to use all his enormous influence to repair what he considers a broken industry – even if that means scaling down his own massive operations? He told me that when I visited his sprawling headquarters, his COVID-free hotel, his commercial and couture showrooms, and the bustling atelier with busy tailors, he was in a meeting directing his team to drastically reduce the number of summer appearances for all markets around the world. .

“The first thing I said was ‘Collections need to be reduced by almost a third.’ “Sixty percent of global fashion production, he says, end up unsold and” dumped “onto the black market or outlets.” I don’t want to work for an outlet! ”

After complaining for years that his warnings were being ignored, Armani insisted that now, after COVID, it was different – and that some of the other big players in the industry were willing to follow in his footsteps. “Now they are taking a step back,” he told me. “I won’t name names, but some are big [label] which exploded in the market. Now starting to say, No – we can’t do everything, because people don’t buy. “

Mr. Armani has changed modes before. After he and Galeotti started the company in 1975 with the initial money raised from selling their Volkswagen Beetle, they provided a stylistic correction to the excesses of the era. They captured the rise of feminism with the elegant, draped tailoring that made Mr Armani a maker of empowered working women and the more fashionable modern men, symbolized by the Armani dress of Richard Gere in the 1980s. American Gigolo. Armani’s gray and beige fabrics introduced a whole palette of muted colors to the culture, and for nearly half a century of work he has painted the world with them.

Mr Armani, not shy, told me that his innovation was a “big change,” but it was also “an easy game because the style was almost ridiculous at the time.” In fact, his innovations are often reactionary. Her response to 90s supermodels singing along to the jukebox that exploded in George Michael’s videos? Androgynous and anonymous model. Whenever things get too much, Armani is a person who is anti-too much. Once again, he said, the world had returned to him.

What COVID is showing, he told me, is that people can dress well with a little, that there is no need to go shopping every day. Fashion, he said, must return to its original function, which is to help people look and live better. Fashion is what people wear, he says, not spectacle.