Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer who cut the stuffing out of men’s heavily constructed suits for a softer yet sophisticated look that revolutionized the shape of fashion for men and women for decades to come, has died at home, his fashion house confirmed Thursday on social media. He was 91.

“Il Signor Armani, as he was always respectfully and admiringly called by employees and collaborators, passed away peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones,” his team said on Instagram. “Indefatigable to the end, he worked until his final days, dedicating himself to the company, the collections, and the many ongoing and future projects.”

Armani came onto the fashion scene in the mid-1970s with a small menswear collection that broke all the rules. The centerpiece of his line soon became an executive class “power suit” with broad shoulders and narrow hips to recall Cary Grant in the 1940s. He continued to refine the shape through the 1980s, gradually easing the “wedge shape” jacket into a more relaxed silhouette with sloped shoulders and lower lapels.

The look became the unofficial uniform of the wealthy avant-garde, in a striking contrast with the fitted English tailoring that had dominated menswear for a century.

He had his own ideas about color and fabric as well. While the expected range went from black to charcoal and silver gray and on to his beloved beige, his colors were artfully off the mark. In an effort to describe them, fashion writers mentioned blackened silver and beach fog. Shades resembling minerals, stones and grasses compared to custom blended paints. His taste in fabrics was unconventional as well. He often mixed silk and wool or silk and linen for a softer alternative to the heavy, stiff gabardines and worsted wools that were typical for men’s suits and jackets.

“You could read into it what you wanted to: power, nonchalance, sexual cool, entitlement,” Judith Thurman wrote in the New Yorker.

The fashion industry was dazzled.

He used the same approach when he adopted menswear for career women. Neutral colors, luxurious fabrics, artful but unadorned effects.

The look was all the more striking compared with the leading fashion influences of the day. At the time, fantasy and costume perfected by French designer Yves St. Laurent ruled womenswear. Armani had a different plan.

“I wanted a style in women’s dressing that was closer to reality,” he explained. A work wardrobe should be “more comfortable for a woman, clothes to make her more credible in a business meeting,” he said.

His first jackets for women were designs he created for men and then recast in a woman’s proportions. Some of the earliest were unlined and so slightly constructed they had the feel of a linen shirt.

Not that he alone showed menswear looks on women. St. Laurent thrilled his admirers with pants suits and evening tuxedos from the early 1960s. He excelled at curvaceous silhouettes, jewel and floral colors, rich wool or satin fabrics.

Armani preferred straighter lines, subtler curves and light, fluid fabrics, to the point where his eveningwear gradually evolved into semi-sheer dresses that seemed to wrap the body in fine netting. He often added tiny beads that shimmered like distant stars.

Armani was his own best model. Perennially tan with silver hair, deep blue eyes and a body-sculpted physique, he dressed in fitted T-shirts or pullover sweaters more often than a shirt and tie.

His look became the gold standard for the Hollywood executives of the 1980s.

In a masterstroke of marketing, he built his bridge to the movie industry with a clear intention. He opened a boutique in Beverly Hills in 1988 and courted major stars, outfitting them for the Academy Awards and Golden Globes, dressing everyone from Jessica Tandy to Richard Gere.

Martin Scorsese, Anjelica Huston and Steve Martin were among his first and most faithful U.S. customers, along with then-Laker coach Pat Riley, who wore Armani suits courtside in the 1980s.

By the end of the decade, Armani-clad actors and actresses — Diane Keaton, Billy Crystal, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer — filled the fashion layouts accompanying news coverage of Hollywood parties and award shows.

Hollywood’s growing admiration led Armani to a number of movie assignments. He contributed wardrobe to some films and received a costume designer credit for others. One of the first was “American Gigolo,” a 1980 film that has often been compared to an infomercial for Armani menswear. In one scene, Gere’s character empties his closet and tosses his wardrobe on the bed in an airborne fashion show of Armani’s line.

Seven years later, Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” was a how-to for men drawn to a ‘40s fashion trend that Armani helped reinvent. Actors Kevin Costner, Sean Connery and Andy Garcia wore his stylish take on the era of broad shoulders and nipped waistlines.

Much as he admired actors, he was nearly as enamored of socialites. From the late 1980s, Princess Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was Armani’s special events coordinator in the United States. The Duchess of Kent, an Armani customer, was his guest at the Royal College of Art when he received an honorary doctorate in 1992.

To suggest the sort of treatment his best customers expected, he displayed his ready-to-wear collections in a private setting, much as French couturiers had done for decades. His shows were held in a theater inside his headquarters on Milan’s Via Borgonuovo.

Built to his specifications, it was a hushed and intimate space with comfortable chairs where he controlled every aspect of his presentations. Store buyers said it was like going to church.

From that costly, prototype collection, he began to spin off less expensive versions under separate labels. The idea of knocking himself off at lower prices was not unique in fashion, but no one in the business was then more successful at it.

By the mid-1980s, he had opened close to 20 Giorgio Armani boutiques worldwide for his highest-priced collections and more than 50 Emporio Armani shops that carried a lower-priced label based on his signature line. By the turn of the century he had added A/X Armani Exchange weekend wear, fragrances for men and women and home furnishings in what had grown to a multibillion-dollar empire.

“Everybody copied Armani,” fashion historian Steele recalled. “The look of unconstructed, softly shaped menswear became part of American mainstream fashion.”

His skirts for women suggested sarongs. More often, he showed pants for women as day and evening wear. He also played down feminine curves, telling buxom models to wear a breast wrap for his fashion shows, and all models to resist the hip-swinging runway strut. He wanted his clothes, not his models, to be the star of the show.

If he returned to a past era to inspire his collections it often was the ‘30s, the decade when he was a little boy.

“It’s not a love for the past,” he told Vanity Fair in 1988. “It’s a search for an image that’s less violent than what people normally show today, something less aggressive, less avant-garde. What I’m taking from the past is a sense of reassurance.”

He was born in Piancenza, south of Milan, on July 11, 1934, a time when security was scarce. As a child during World War II he grew up with air raids, bomb shelters and death reports about young soldiers from his region. He later designed uniforms for the Italian Air Force.

He was the second of three children. Armani’s father, Ugo, was a truck company manager. His mother, Maria, expected her second son one day to become an architect or interior designer. As a boy he bought antiques for the family and made careful drawings that showed where to place them.

Hoping for greater financial security for their children than they had known, Armani’s parents steered him toward medical school. He had no definite plan of his own and so he went. Medicine interested him, but not the sight of blood.

He had always been infatuated with movies and movie stars. In postwar Europe, Italian films were his introduction to fashion. “The cinema in those early days was my only source of style,” Armani recalled.

After two years he left school for a year of obligatory military service in the Air Force. When he finished in 1954 he went to work at La Rinasente, a large department store chain in Milan. It was there that he learned the business. “It’s one thing to design clothes, it’s something else again to hang around the salesrooms watching the public react to them,” Armani told Time magazine in 1982.

Seven years later, the Italian designer Nino Cerruti hired Armani as an assistant designer. “I fell in love with fabrics and began to understand the work behind each yard of fabric,” he said of that experience.

In 1964, at 32, Armani met Sergio Galeotti, a talented businessman, at an Italian seaside resort. Convinced of Armani’s unusual talent, Galeotti encouraged him to start his own business. In 1970, Armani went freelance, designing menswear for several Italian companies, including Ermenegildo Zegna. Four years later, with Galeotti as his business partner, he launched his first collection under his own name.

Galeotti, who was fun-loving and talkative, loosened up Armani, who was more serious by nature. Armani’s sister Rosanna, a former fashion model, also joined the company as director of communications.

They rode the tide of an Italian fashion revival that stole the fire from the French for a full decade. Italian labels including Krizia, Genny and Fendi, and later, Dolce & Gabanna and Prada, all set trends in the 1980s and gave Armani a run for his money. Through the decade, however, his toughest competition was Gianni Versace, his fashion opposite.

Armani was cerebral and spare, Versace brash and body-worshipping. Each was a genius in his way and they were on friendlier terms than they let on. When Versace was murdered outside his Florida mansion in 1997, Armani attended his funeral.

Armani showed his combative side to the press at an early point in his career. After fashion reporters criticized one of his collections, he banned the press from his show in 1982.

In what proved to be a determining factor in Armani’s personal life and his career, his business partner and lover Galeotti died of complications from AIDS at 40, in 1985. Armani, inward by nature, became more remote. He took greater control of the empire and buried himself in his work.

“After Sergio died, I discovered a strength but also many weaknesses: the fear of living, the fear of being alone, the fear of seeing the people I love disappear,” he told Vanity Fair.

With strangers, Armani was consistently quiet and remote. His staff meanwhile described him as a demanding workaholic. “With him you have to pass a test every day,” Gabriella Forte, Armani’s longtime press liaison, said of her boss in 1988. “Every morning you have to prove yourself all over again.”

If, however, at lunch in a restaurant near his Beverly Hills boutique during one of his occasional visits, a screen idol stopped by his table, he melted into schoolboy smiles and blushing laughter.

In 2000 the Guggenheim Museum in New York City mounted a retrospective exhibit of his work, the first costume exhibit in the museum’s history. At the time, Armani was first among Italy’s leading fashion companies in sales.

Soon after the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Krens, proposed the exhibition to Armani, he suggested the designer become a museum sponsor. Armani responded with an undisclosed contribution said to be in the range of $15 million.

The press raised questions about propriety. Such a blatant link between a major exhibit and a large financial contribution looked like a payoff. “We’ll never know whether, without his eight-figure pledge, the Guggenheim would have mounted a retrospective on the work of Giorgio Armani,” architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, who died in 2007, wrote in a 2000 review of the exhibit for the New York Times.

Such questions didn’t stop Isabella Rosselini, Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Liam Neeson and other A-list celebrities from attending the gala opening.

The clothes on view were so consistent in their style that reviewers found it difficult to guess the decade each outfit represented. The evening dresses, fluid, spare, body molded, proved to be the surprise of the exhibit. The man known for tailored daywear had quietly built a repertoire of exquisite evening clothes, many of them on loan from their famous owners for the Guggenheim exhibit.

Armani in his 70s was still working out with weights for an hour and a half a day and settled into a lasting relationship with Leo Dell’Orco, head of the Armani menswear design studio. He rarely did anything that wasn’t business-related and said he relaxed on weekends in his country retreat at Broni, an 18th century-style villa near Milan that he called his “mini-Versailles.” He got around the grounds in a golf cart.

In 2002, Armani and longtime friend Scorsese made a documentary film. The subject was one they shared a passion for, Italian movies from the post-World War II era. Armani invested $250,000 in the project, got credited on screen as the executive producer and took a hand in selecting movie footage by Vittorio DiSica, Roberto Rossilini, Frederico Fellini and others.

“I’m a frustrated actor, director, producer and even cameraman. I wanted to be all those things,” Armani said.

Two years later, his mother’s prediction about a future in interior design surfaced. He teamed with real estate developers Emaar Properties to build hotels and resorts in seven cities around the world. His partners in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, would carry development costs. Armani was to oversee the hotel interiors, down to staff wardrobe and furnishings from his Armani Casa collection.

A few months before his 70th birthday Armani launched a major new project. He opened a trio of boutiques in Shanghai’s luxury shopping complex, Three on the Bund, with plans to open 30 more stores in China within five years. His popularity among celebrities seemed as strong as ever and he managed to keep attracting new, young talents to add to his starry list. He dressed Ashley Judd for her role in the 2004 movie “De-Lovely” and pop stars Alicia Keys and Christiana Aguilerafor performances.

He was the same micromanager he had always been, going through his headquarters turning off lights if a room was empty. When he wasn’t working, he was shuttling between his nine residences in Europe, the U.S. and the Caribbean, a staggering collection likely best explained by his disdain for hotel rooms. Decorative flamboyance or even a sink mounted too high left him dismayed.

“I could continue to work for another 15 years but I have to prepare the house for a future without me,” he told Time magazine. Until late in life, he was still pondering who that successor might be.

Armani’s “funeral chamber” will be open 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. this Saturday and Sunday in Milan, inside the Armani/Teatro. The funeral will be private, in line with Armani’s “explicit wishes,” his fashion house said.

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Rourke is a former Times staff writer.

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