Italian fashion icon Giorgio Armani is to receive France's most prestigious award, becoming a member of the Legion d'Honneur, it was announced Friday.
The 73-year-old designer will receive the award from French Premier and Grand Master of the order, Nicolas Sarkozy, at a ceremony in Paris on July 3 and the event will be followed by a gala dinner in Armani's honour.
Armani's award comes two years after fellow Italian designer Valentino was made a member of the order.
Piacenza-born Armani began his career working for the Nino Cerruti fashion house before branching out on his own in 1975, with the financial and emotional support of his partner Sergio Galleotti.
He enjoyed early success in Italy but his loose, unstructured style only really came to international attention after the hit 1980 film, American Gigolo, which saw a young, Armani-clad Richard Gere obsess about his appearance.
Since then, he has become designer to the stars, dressing Madonna, Tina Turner, Kevin Spacey and Samuel L. Jackson among others.
Jodie Foster has said of the stylist that: ''he gave me the elegance I had in my head but couldn't transfer to my body'', while Harrison Ford commented simply: ''Armani has become an adjective''.
Forbes has twice named Armani the most successful Italian designer, with his estimated net worth now close to five billion euros, and he was the 2006 winner of the Leonardo prize, an honour given to entrepreneurs judged to have done the most for Italy's image and prestige in the world.
In addition to his clothing range, he also has his own furniture design company, and next year will open his first two hotels, in Dubai and Milan, as part of a deal with the Emaar Properties Group.
Other Italians who have received the Legion d'Honneur decoration include actress Sophia Loren, film directors Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, novelists Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, industrialist and financier Carlo De Benedetti, and pharmacologist Silvio Garattini.
