The A X branding has become iconic within the Armani family and is often featured on the garments, giving a clear slogan vibe to the pieces. Emporio Armani is one of the original sub-brands from Armani and sits in the middle tier of the Armani brands. The range includes clothing, sunglasses, scents and accessories which are all very accessible to buy. As previously mentioned, Emporio Armani took on parts of the Armani Jeans label back in This fusion was in part due to both labels sharing the same eagle logo and a similar demographic of year-olds.
EA7 however, was an original sub-brand of Emporio Armani and is still one of the most popular labels on the market. What is EA7? Born in the northern Italian town of Piacenza in , Armani later attended medical school at Piacenza University for two years before leaving for military service. While on leave from the military, Armani got a job as a window dresser at Milan department store La Rinoscente, where he worked up to a buyer position, marking his first foray into fashion. In , Armani started working as a designer at fashion house Nino Cerruti, where he met Sergio Galeotti.
In , Giorgio Armani started the company with Galeotti. Being a designer himself, Armani made apparel with his sense of aesthetics, beauty and luxury, a sense that appealed to the elite of the society. It is a privately held company with the founder Giorgio Armani being the sole shareholder. With many sub-brands designed under the parent umbrella brand of Giorgio Armani to cater to the specific needs of different market segments, it has become one of the strongest fashion and luxury brands in the world.
The brand is built on 3 pillars: class, quality and exclusivity. Its product lines cover all corners of fashion, including apparel, swimwear, accessories, perfume, cosmetics, watches, eye wear, bags and shoes for men, women and kids.
Giorgio Armani is very expansive in Asia Pacific with its multiple future growth markets for luxury brands. For example, China is embracing premium fashion and luxury goods at an increasing pace, and Giorgio Armani has been one of the forerunners to exploit the market potential.
Unlike the usual practices of branding that are normally seen in the consumer goods industry, the branding philosophy in the fashion and luxury goods industry is quite unique and personality based.
Most of the famous fashion houses like Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent, Gucci, Versace and many others were built on the personality of the founders.
As design is the most important ingredient of fashion and luxury apparel, the individual style of these designers becomes crucial to creating and sustaining the fashion brand strategy.
It is these unique designs and patterns that reflect the personality of their creator that gives an identity to the brand and helps to differentiate it from the crowd. The Giorgio Armani fashion house, like many other fashion houses, has been built primarily on the unique personality and identity of Giorgio Armani himself.
The brand takes on the identity of the founder through the designs created. Though this aspect of the fashion industry provides fashion houses with a strong sense of differentiation that can be conveyed in a tangible and visual form, it also poses a serious threat. Whenever a brand gains popularity and acceptance from its target customers in its core business, the next obvious step for the brand is to charter a new course by venturing into different product lines, different segments, and ever different markets.
This phenomenon seems common across industry sectors. Giorgio Armani with its iconic popularity amongst the elite of the society and the fashion literate segment of the market has followed similar steps by extending the brand. Today the Armani brand architecture encompasses one corporate brand and three sub-brands, each catering to different sets of target customers and at different price levels.
The signature Giorgio Armani line: This is the main collection of very high quality classic apparel that consists of the signature Armani suits, Oscar gowns and so on, which are of the ultra-premium price points and essentially targeting consumers in the 35 to 50 year old age group.
Emporio Armani: Targeted especially at the young professional segment in the 25 to 35 year old age group, the Emporio Armani brand provides fashionable and contemporary designs that are relevant to the target customers.
Milan and wore the number 7 jersey. It was created for everyone who loves exceptional style and wants to maximize their experience from sporting activity. This fashion label caters to a wide range of sport including running, fitness, golf and winter sports. This serves as the ultimate testimony to the power of the brand. Androgynous and anonymous models. Whenever things became too much, Armani was the anti—too much. Once again, he argues, the world has come back to him. What COVID has shown, he tells me, is that people can dress well with little, that there is no need to go shopping every day.
Fashion, he says, has to go back to its true function, which is helping people look and live better. Fashion is what people wear, he says, not a spectacle. A headless army of mannequins adorned in Armani grays and beiges fills the top floors, many of them coupled with designs from 20 or 30 years later, as if from the same collection. The point is obvious: Armani is immutable. There is also a wing dedicated to the elegant gowns Mr. Armani began dressing famous actresses in for the Oscars and other red carpets in the s, and these tell another story.
For all his talk about getting back to basics, Mr. Armani played a central role in creating an all-consuming celebrity-fashion-industrial complex that many critics see as corrosive to the industry and a progenitor to the present influencer age that he loathes.
He shakes his head. Perhaps less out of penance than marketing acumen, Mr. In , Mr. Firth said Mr. But the dress was a hit. During February Milan Fashion Week, Giorgio Armani was among the few whose show was moved behind closed doors for respect to all the guests and people involved. At the time, the red zone of COVID was just a few kilometres from Milan and the city was already overwhelmed with hospitals full of by critically-ill patients.
He was the first one to donate to Milan hospitals and the first and only one to buy 60 full pages in Italian newspapers to send out tributes to healthcare workers coping with the dimensions of the emergency. He reconverted all his factories in Italy to make overalls for doctors and nurses. He also sent out a very sharp message to the world: continuing to manage a fashion industry as it was before would have been immoral. Armani was one of the first luxury powerhouses to broadcast that he was not willing to sell his pieces, created with love and passion, to see them disposed after a few months.
He believes that the pace of the so-called luxury industry is similar to the heavily criticised fast-fashion. In such an uncertain and chaotic time, he rapidly emerged as one of the few leaders, and not only in fashion. Even the biggest consulting firms are ready to sell pre-made guidelines for getting back on track quickly. Many fashion and luxury brands that are distressed by such an unexpected event cannot wait to see a bounce back.
But caution is advised. Special events must be dedicated to special moments, they cannot be routine. Of course, there will be a Darwinian selection and a polarisation in the industry between companies able to understand the global markets and new signals and to proactively act accordingly, finding new solutions to old problems and the ones waiting for China to save them, without even putting under discussion an obsolete way of managing brands.
Luxury is undergoing a severe restructuring and will see most brands relying more and more on the Chinese one as the main, if not the only, target market.
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