Giorgio Armani’s fashion heritage and cultural heritage preservation

The first part of this post reflected on what we can learn about managing fashion legacies from Giorgio Armani’s choices shortly before his death. It explored how the Spring/Summer 2026 Armani fashion show indicated Mr. Armani’s control of his fashion heritage alongside of and beyond the Armani brand’s intellectual property rights in the fashion he created. In this second post, I spotlight how Mr. Armani’s decision to display his fashion creations in the Pinacoteca di Brera and in other museum venues was part of a strategy to bypass Italian cultural heritage law’s protectionist ethos, offering the designer and his brand control over the cultural narrative surrounding Armani fashion for the future.

Mr. Armani clearly had safeguarding his fashion legacy in mind over the past few years as he prepared for his brand’s 50th anniversary. As Mr. Armani stated in his last interview, “If what I created 50 years ago is still appreciated by an audience that wasn’t even born at the time, this is the ultimate reward.” Outside of a for-profit fashion industry market that might appreciate Mr. Armani’s fashion as must-have vintage pieces, Mr. Armani’s fashion can be appreciated as part of our common cultural heritage.

Clothing, accessories, and other tangible and intangible products from brands’ pasts can be culturally important to members of the public. These objects can testify to specific moments in time, be historically important, or artistically relevant. The public for whom these objects are culturally important may include a brand’s consumers and more stakeholders within and outside the fashion industry. International and national laws tell us how to treat properties that are culturally important to us. We cannot, for example, destroy “immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people, such as monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or secular” during wartime, absent military necessity. Countries should return “antiquities more than one hundred years old” to other countries that have designated these antiquities as of historical importance. Countries also need to help communities within their borders to identify, document, research, and preserve languages, performing arts, and other social rituals and traditional craftsmanship that a community recognizes as part of its cultural heritage.

Some countries that are known as source nations, like Italy, provide national legal preservation mechanisms for movable and immovable properties, including monuments and antiquities that approximate or are even more stringent than the local preservation regulations we encounter in individual states in the U.S. Public or non-profit museum collections in Italy, like that of the Pinacoteca di Brera, for example, are automatically classified as cultural property under Article 10(2) of Italy’s Code of Cultural Property. This classification is accompanied by an almost perpetual obligation to preserve the collection’s individual tangible properties, through restoration and similar activities. But works of art and other objects of particularly important historic interest, including fashion objects, may also be declared to be cultural properties under Article 10(3) of Italy’s Code of Cultural Property if they are owned by private persons or other for-profit entities. A private individual or for profit corporation, like a fashion brand, may find they have an extensive duty to preserve an object or even an archive they inherit because of a cultural importance that is administratively recognized by the Italian State.

In the United States we primarily tend to define legal duties to preserve movable, tangible works of art based on museums’ institutional duties. While our National Historic Preservation Act applies to mostly immovable objects or movable objects with a strong connection to a place, and we do recognize the importance of archeological artifacts, museum guidelines, from the International Council of Museums’ Code of Ethics to the American Alliance of Museums’ Ethics,  overwhelmingly offer the main best practices and customary norms for museums’ management of movable works of art. The classic comparative example that highlights legal differences between the U.S. as a market nation and Italy as a source nation considers the different options available to an art collector who buys a Da Vinci painting at auction in New York or in Milan. In Milan, the art collector could certainly not set fire to the Da Vinci after buying it, even if she wanted to. Italian cultural property law would make this a crime, even if the collector owned the Da Vinci herself. In New York, on the other hand, providing there are no contractual conditions attached to the Da Vinci as part of the sale, a collector could merrily take the Da Vinci home and burn it in her fireplace as her own personal property.     

As cultural properties, including works of art, become more intangible and reproducible, the reasons to physically preserve works of art become tenuous. Justifications for preservation of a tangible cultural property may morph into an obsession with controlling the symbolic meanings of cultural properties. Italian museums’ control over the reproductions of tangible cultural properties in their collections, like Michelangelo’s David, for example, has come under scrutiny. This scrutiny is especially vibrant since the justification of preserving a tangible property may morph into a mutant copyright that potentially hampers projects that are themselves culturally relevant, albeit at a frontier of commercial and non-commercial endeavors. Why preserve one tangible object that appears in multiples? Why control the reproduction of a tangible object if an unregulated digital reproduction of it can support knowledge and appreciation of the object’s historic importance? Why preserve a tangible sketch by Mr. Armani when we can digitize the sketch and appreciate its cultural importance for fashion history from anywhere in the world?

Fashion makes this question of preservation for intangible products quite visceral. Indeed, a working group convened by the Italian State to explore preserving fashion as cultural heritage   came to the conclusion that a network supporting fashion brands’ archives, brand and public museums devoted to fashion, artisanal workshops, and fashion cities would be more impactful than a strict preservationist ethos for tangible fashion objects. We might even say that this decision was in line with Italy’s ratification of the Faro Convention, which defines cultural heritage as a group of resources representing constantly evolving beliefs and values. Interests in preserving works of art by living artists in our contemporary times can be similarly complex. Given our evolving appreciation of contemporary art and its often intangible nature, preserving contemporary art and other objects from our material culture may require, as Italian law already does, different time thresholds and evaluations of cultural interests, not to mention other avenues of preservation beyond cultural heritage law that focus on supporting intangible art-making practices and not the tangible art product. How do we know that a contemporary artist’s work is of historic value? We need time, opportunities for consensus-building, critique, comment, and dialogue among the public and many other stakeholders.

It is for this reason that Italian cultural property law requires, when it does classify a tangible fashion object as cultural property, that individual fashion objects of particularly historic interest owned by a private entity be at least fifty or seventy years old and by a non-living author. Mr. Armani’s individual fashion objects likely could not have been classified as cultural properties independent from the collection of a public or non-profit Italian museum during his lifetime because these fashion objects were simply not old enough and their author, Mr. Armani, was still living. There may have been an alternative legal avenue for a cultural property declaration if Mr. Armani’s fashion were conceived as an archive owned by the privately held Giorgio Armani company. However, even with Mr. Armani’s death, challenges still remain for a formal administrative declaration that Mr. Armani’s archive (and the pieces displayed in the exhibition space, Armani/Silos, that Mr. Armani founded to celebrate his brand’s  40^th anniversary) are cultural property under Italian law. The Giorgio Armani corporation’s private ownership makes the archive of Armani’s historic garments counterintuitively both central to a business purpose, and yet obviously of cultural relevance because of a connection to an important historic individual. In declaring the Armani corporate archive and its pieces displayed in Armani/Silos to be a cultural property, the Italian State would have to walk a fine line of legal reasoning. An administrative office of the Italian Ministry of Culture would have to share specific reasons for the tangible archive’s particularly important historic interest and connect those reasons to a specific period of the company’s activities, as the Italian Ministry of Culture has already done for other fashion archives, like that of the luxury suit-maker Brioni. The Italian State would also have to consider the purpose of such a cultural property declaration, given Mr. Armani’s choice to give Armani/Silos and his non-profit Giorgio Armani Foundation such an outsized role in the management of his company’s assets, including his fashion archive, after his death.

And this is where the importance of Mr. Armani’s choice to work with museum institutions himself – from the Guggenheim in New York in 2000 to the Pinacoteca in Milan in 2025 – outside of any obligation under cultural heritage law becomes apparent. Mr. Armani effectively pre-empted the Italian State’s need to declare his past fashion cultural property. He did so during his lifetime by controlling his cultural legacy through museum exhibitions and creating the Giorgio Armani Foundation. He did so after his death by giving the Giorgio Armani Foundation 100% ownership of the shares of the Giorgio Armani company and assigning life estates in these shares to close confidantes and family members who had worked with him. This ownership structure divides rights to call a shareholder meeting and rights to vote and receive dividends between the Foundation’s board and the individuals who have a life estate in the shares. Mr. Armani directed that the Foundation should soon sell a portion of the shares it owns to a luxury conglomerate like LVMH or to a partner like L’Oreal, who has the license to produce Armani’s perfumes. But the Foundation’s mission and its commitment to Armani’s design principles, including his interest in actively presenting and shaping the historical importance of his creative output without State intervention, will certainly inform the for-profit company’s business decisions moving forward. The design principles and commitments dictated by Mr. Armani include searching for “an essential, modern, elegant, and discrete style” for the brand and concentrating on “innovation, excellence, quality, and care of the product.”

The message that Mr. Armani’s grey suits are just as culturally relevant as the statues, paintings, and even columns of the Pinacoteca’s historic palazzo is both a central part of the visual display of Giorgio Armani. Milano, per amore, and a pillar of the control Mr. Armani decided that his Foundation would exercise over his fashion heritage for the future.

Mr. Armani took advantage of many legal options between intellectual property law and cultural heritage law to control his fashion heritage. Mr. Armani chose to actively collaborate with museums during his lifetime and to found his own commemorative museum space, Armani/Silos. He restructured the ownership of his company, and, by extension both the intellectual property assets and fashion heritage the company owns, as part of his foundation.

As American designers, and their heirs, consider their own fashion legacies, and the space between intellectual property law and cultural heritage law, Mr. Armani’s choices might be inspirational. Shannon Abloh, the widow of American fashion designer Virgil Abloh, the founder of the brand Off-White and the former Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton, has, for example, created a foundation and is actively promoting her husband’s work through cultural exhibitions while his brands’ intellectual property rights are owned by other entities. The space Mr. Armani embraced between and beyond intellectual property law and cultural heritage law to control his fashion heritage may be one of his greatest legacies after all, at least from a fashion law point of view.