Barneys’ Gene Pressman Remembers Giorgio Armani

Opinion|Giorgio Armani Gave Men Permission to Feel Fashionable

Fashion has no shortage of eminences in their own minds, but one man was unquestionably a maestro: Giorgio Armani.

Mr. Armani, or simply Armani, as he has been known for decades now, died on Thursday at 91. The Armani Group, which, unusually for global fashion houses, he owned independently, sold billions of dollars of clothing, accessories, fragrance, furniture and much else last year. His was one of the most remarkable ascents in the 20th century.

I was lucky to watch it from the very first. Mr. Armani, or as I always knew him, Giorgio, was one of the many star designers discovered, nurtured, imported and grown by my father, Fred Pressman, at Barneys, his Seventh Avenue store.

Fred joined Barney’s, as the discount men’s wear shop owned by his father was then called, shortly after World War II. By 1975, when Mr. Armani, a former window dresser for the Milanese department store La Rinascente, founded his own company, Fred was busy bringing a better quality of goods to the shop.

I will never forget watching a Knicks game in my father’s den in Harrison, N.Y., as he paged through a copy of L’Uomo Vogue, the Italian men’s fashion magazine. I just wanted to watch the game; he never stopped working. It was an advertisement for Armani that caught his eye.

By that point, Fred had been sending deputies to Italy to bring back the best of Europe. One of his most stalwart employees, Ed Glantz, had brought home for his wife a raincoat that Mr. Armani had designed for the Italian company Montedoro. Now Mr. Armani had a label all his own. Soon after, Fred asked Glantz’s wife, Gabriella Forte, who worked at the Italian Trade Commission, for a favor: to ring up Mr. Armani and ask for a meeting.