On Sunday, September 28th, the last day of Milan Fashion Week, global celebrities, members of Milanese society and the Italian fashion industry, and throngs of everyday people, gathered in Milan’s Brera district outside of one of Italy’s most celebrated museums, the Pinacoteca di Brera. There to watch the Spring/Summer 2026 Giorgio Armani fashion show, the last presentation completely designed and imagined by the brand’s founder, Mr. Armani, before his unexpected death a few weeks earlier, the crowd and attendees could feel that they were part of a cultural moment. Indeed, the fashion show was not the only event dedicated to Mr. Armani in the museum. As models walked a runway in the museum’s courtyard, still other Armani fashion was exhibited within the museums’ galleries next to Renaissance paintings and later 19th century masterpieces, like Francesco Hayez’s The Kiss. Giorgio Armani. Milano, per amore, the first fashion exhibition within the museum’s galleries, allows Mr. Armani’s fashion to pervade the Pinacoteca, an autonomous Italian state museum under Italian law meant to preserve and valorize parts of our cultural heritage.
An image of a model in Armani’s Spring/Summer 2026 fashion show
An image of an Armani look in the museum’s galleries
Originally planned to celebrate the Armani brand’s 50th anniversary, the retrospective of Armani’s fashion in the Pinacoteca and the Spring/Summer 2026 Armani fashion show hosted by the brand in the museum’s courtyard have a new meaning after Mr. Armani’s death. Along with the decisions Mr. Armani made in his will, the brand’s fashion show and the museum exhibition offer examples for fashion designers eager to control their own fashion legacy in a space between intellectual property rights’ incentives to create and cultural heritage law’s preservation ethos.
In the first part of this post reflecting on what we can learn from Mr. Armani’s choices shortly before his death, I highlight how the Armani fashion show indicates how Mr. Armani controlled his fashion heritage alongside of and beyond the brand’s intellectual property rights in the fashion he created. In the second part of the post, I spotlight how Mr. Armani’s decision to display his fashion creations in the Pinacoteca 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.
Giorgio Armani’s fashion continues to live on a frontier that is defined by business activities, cultural endeavors, and legal rights that defy the boundaries we traditionally identify with intellectual property law and cultural heritage law. Understanding how this frontier operates through the Armani case study is one way to imagine how fashion designers, and their eponymous brands, may decide to preserve and perpetuate their fashion and its cultural relevance in the future.
Part I: Giorgio Armani’s Fashion Heritage and Intellectual Property Rights
Mr. Armani’s designs are a unique combination of tangible fashion objects and intangible designs that have had a great cultural impact, both in Italy and throughout the world. Beginning in the 1970s, Giorgio Armani defined relaxed suiting, created a signature monochromatic blue-grey fashion palette for professionals and celebrities on the red carpet, and captured imaginations as the “King of Italian Fashion.” Over time, Armani’s influence extended far beyond the suits, ready-to-wear and later haute couture gowns he created. Even if you couldn’t purchase a suit for thousands of dollars, you could buy an Emporio Armani pair of jeans for a few hundred dollars or simply enjoy a coffee at an Armani Caffè. The lifestyle Giorgio Armani created at every price point and for every customer mediated the presentation of so many identities: the male or female authority figure in a power suit occupying a corner office, glamorous women on and off the red carpet, and even the athleticism and elegance of Italian athletes competing in the Olympics.
Central parts of Armani’s construction of identity included his aesthetic, his symbols, and even Mr. Armani’s own persona. When a consumer thinks of Giorgio Armani they think of his grey-blue color palette; his name, GIORGIO ARMANI, which acts as a label on the fashion he designs; other names and symbols of his brands, like Emporio Armani or Armani Exchange; and even Mr. Armani’s own face and personality. Mr. Armani secured intellectual property rights in some of these creative outputs. He could not, however, secure intellectual property rights in all of his creative outputs, or even in the follow-on designs and artistic commentary he generated.
A federally registered Emporio Armani trademark for retail store services featuring jewelry, timepieces and other items; A federally registered Armani Exchange trademark for watches, handbags and more products
An image of Giorgio Armani created by Andy Warhol
Giorgio Armani, S.p.A. has federally registered U.S. trademark rights in the word GIORGIO ARMANI , and in the design marks for Emporio Armani and Armani Exchange as applied to a number of categories of goods. These words and symbols on certain goods indicate some part of the Armani Group as the goods’ producer. The goodwill associated with the Armani brand, including its historic impact and place in fashion history, is inevitably tied up with the use of Mr. Armani’s name and symbols in commerce. On the other hand, despite the impact of Armani’s muted blue-grey color palette on fashion history and the recognition those associations support on the market, the Armani brand does not, and likely cannot, claim a trademark right in these blue-grey colors.
Julia Roberts wearing an Armani men’s pantsuit to the Golden Globes in 1990
On fashion objects, like a dress or a suit, Armani’s muted blue-grey color palette is simply too functional, too unable to indicate Armani as a source or sponsor of the goods, a requirement for colors to function as trademarks. No matter how great a marketing budget Armani has, it would be difficult for the brand to build secondary meaning and overcome an argument that other fashion brands need to use a blue-grey color palette on various categories of fashion goods to compete on the market. While the Armani brand can secure a design mark with the color blue, it cannot secure a limited monopoly right in a blue-grey color palette per se on clothing, no matter the Armani color palette’s cultural influence.
In the U.S., an aesthetic cannot be a trademark nor the subject of copyright protection, as two influencers who fought over a “sad beige” aesthetic earlier this year discovered. Mr. Armani held the copyright to many of his portraits and writings. But other authors like Andy Warhol created their own copyrightable works inspired by Mr. Armani. Journalists freely report on the importance (or repetitiveness, at times) of Armani collections, generating their own copyrightable literary works. Absent having a right to control the use of his image for commercial purposes through a right of publicity, there were few ways that Mr. Armani, or his company, could, at least in the U.S., use intellectual property rights to control cultural assessments of and the creative impact of Mr. Armani’s fashion. Journalists are free to comment upon Mr. Armani’s fashion and other business activities through fair use. Artists like Andy Warhol may take their own picture of Mr. Armani and leverage that copyright in expressive works.
Even designers inspired by Armani can legally copy many of his designs outside of copyright law. While Mr. Armani’s suit designs were of incredible cultural impact, the designs are, at least in the U.S., practically impossible to conceptually separate from the functionality of the suit as a useful article. Even if we considered Mr. Armani’s suits to be incredibly original and iconic, that spark of originality and iconic nature is likely unable to overcome copyright and trademark’s separate functionality doctrines. Without using the GIORGIO ARMANI label and passing their suits off as by Armani, more junior brands might copy one of Mr. Armani’s signature deconstructed suits.
It is for these reasons that Mr. Armani’s decision to historicize his fashion during his lifetime and deploy his intellectual property rights through fashion shows in cultural spaces like the Pinacoteca during certain brand anniversaries is so instructive. Presenting creative outputs, like a blue-grey color palette, in a greater auratic narrative or universe of authenticity offers a new value proposition beyond copyright and even trademark law for those consumers who prioritize such values. Consider the Armani/Archivio project. This project, presented before Mr. Armani’s death, digitizes past Armani fashions, including Mr. Armani’s early suits, presenting these past fashions as both digital artifacts and boutique displays which consumers can explore through Armani’s own lens of authenticity, without resorting to another brand’s copy or even to a license grounded in Mr. Armani’s intellectual property rights.
An Armani suit in the Armani/Archivio project
Mr. Armani’s will creatively structured the ownership of intellectual property rights in his creative outputs, pre-empting any intellectual property rights gaps that otherwise frustrated his control of his creative outputs. Giving his 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 assures that the use of the brand’s intellectual property rights owned by the Giorgio Armani company will follow Mr. Armani’s wider auratic narrative that he grounded in his notion of authenticity. While Mr. Armani might not have been able to own his blue-grey color palette as a trademark, he shaped the narrative of elegance and modernity around his use of the color palette and made sure his Foundation would follow the narrative he crafted after his death. By making his Foundation the primary vehicle for the management of his company, Mr. Armani assured that how he defined the cultural importance of his fashion would still inform any vote to approve the license of an intellectual property right or the use of an unprotected creative output.
The moving last piece of the Spring/Summer 2026 Giorgio Armani fashion show in the Pinacoteca brought home the importance of deploying Mr. Armani’s authenticity narrative alongside any intellectual property rights to communicate his legacy as a designer. Mr. Armani’s face appeared on the bodice of a glittering yet un-trademarkable and un-copyrightable blue gown as the culmination of the fashion show. This design choice uniquely combined a copyrightable work of authorship (the image of Mr. Armani’s face) with Mr. Armani’s right of publicity (using his likeness for commercial purposes) with Armani’s signature yet untrademarked colors and an uncopyrightable dress design. This combination of an authentic narrative about Mr. Armani and his brand’s impact with intellectual property rights and public domain creative outputs provided a mechanism to control the distinctly cultural message about the historic importance of this particular Armani fashion show and the fashion Mr. Armani created for it.
The last piece of fashion shown as part of the Spring/Summer 2026 Armani show