Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by Giorgio Armani

"I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet"

About this Quote

Armani’s line flatters the simplest garment in the closet, then quietly reasserts his entire worldview: real style starts where decoration ends. Calling the T-shirt the “Alpha and Omega” borrows biblical finality to crown an object designed to be almost invisible. That tension is the point. The T-shirt is both nothing and everything - a blank, democratic square of cotton that can read as underwear, uniform, protest placard, luxury item, or calculated nonchalance. Armani’s genius was always in making that nonchalance expensive without making it loud.

The phrase “fashion alphabet” is doing sly work. An alphabet is a system; it’s learnable, repeatable, foundational. Armani isn’t romanticizing fashion as pure self-expression. He’s framing it as literacy: if you can’t “speak” T-shirt, you can’t really speak fashion. It’s a gentle rebuke to trend-chasing and over-designed spectacle. Start with the most basic letter, master it, then build a sentence.

Context matters: Armani built an empire on modern minimalism and the soft power of tailoring that moved with bodies and careers, not runways. In the late-20th-century shift from formalwear to casualization, the T-shirt became the emblem of new status - the ability to look unbothered. By naming it both beginning and end, Armani signals that the future of luxury isn’t in novelty; it’s in perfecting the baseline, where taste is measured in fit, fabric, and restraint.

Quote Details

TopicArt
SourceHelp us find the source
CiteCite this Quote

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Armani, Giorgio. (2026, January 18). I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-always-thought-of-the-t-shirt-as-the-alpha-23206/

Chicago Style
Armani, Giorgio. "I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-always-thought-of-the-t-shirt-as-the-alpha-23206/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-always-thought-of-the-t-shirt-as-the-alpha-23206/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Giorgio Add to List
Armani: The T-Shirt as the Alpha and Omega of Fashion
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Giorgio Armani

Giorgio Armani (July 11, 1934 - September 4, 2025) was a Designer from Italy.

13 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Siobhan Fahey, Musician
Edward Gibbon, Historian
Edward Gibbon