Giorgetto
Giugiaro
Moving to Turin, Giorgetto switched from art to technical drawing, attending both graduate school and evening classes. June 1955 marked a turning point: at the end-of-year exhibition of the technical drawing course, Dante Giacosa, Fiat’s technical director, noticed his sketches. In September of that year Giorgetto joined Fiat in its Special Vehicles Design Studies Department, headed by Fabio Luigi Rapi.
After sending a number of studies and sketches to the Bertone body shop, he became Head of the Bertone Style Center in December 1959, thanks to the trust immediately placed in him by owner Nuccio.
After six very intense years under Bertone’s wing, in November 1965 Giorgetto left to join the management of Ghia, another firm of famous coachbuilders active in the Turin design world. Here he was in charge of the style center and prototyping division: to this period date some of the first models that would become iconic and representative of Giugiaro’s production. The association with Ghia proves particularly fertile, but a desire for independence grows in Giorgetto.
Together with engineer Aldo Mantovani, long active in FIAT, Giorgetto founded Italdesign-Giugiaro in Turin on February 13, 1968, under the original name of SIRP Società Italiana Realizzazione Prototipi S.p.A. Under this brand Giugiaro officially designed more than 200 cars later mass-produced, as well as developing many others for the world’s top manufacturers.
Starting in the 1970s, many car manufacturers turned to Italdesign for the creation of new models. In this sense, the first collaboration would be the one between Giugiaro and Volkswagen, which had the merit of revitalizing the German brand then in crisis. But it was during those years that Giugiaro also began to collaborate with the FIAT group, creating some of the brand’s most famous models through the 1990s.
In 1972 he also founded an industrial design unit (Industrial Design Division, soon to be structured under the brand name Giugiaro Design) to create designs for a wide variety of transport, durable and consumer goods sectors (industrial and commercial vehicles, tractors and agricultural machinery, trains, boats, motorcycles, bicycles, household appliances, furniture and lighting items, watches, cameras, office machines, musical and sanitary instruments, sports and leisure equipment, food design, graphics and packaging).
In 1999 he was named Car designer of the century by a jury of 120 international journalists and experts, and he also received the appointment of Cavaliere del lavoro from President of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
Giorgetto Giugiaro served as chairman of the organizing committee for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics.
In 2010 Volkswagen acquired a majority stake in Italdesign, bringing the company into the German group, and then took over the rest of the shares a few years later. Giorgetto resigned from all positions held in the company and in September 2015, together with his son Fabrizio, founded GFG Style, a company totally dedicated to styling projects in the automotive and mobility sectors. Although he is now over 85 years old, he has not yet stopped designing and imaging the future of the automobile.
Giorgetto’s various awards include the SIAD Silver Medal from the British Society of Artists and Industrial Designers (1980), the Compasso d’Oro for Lifetime Achievement (1984), and the Compasso d’Oro for Design (1981, 1991, 1995, 2004), as well as 7 honorary degrees in architecture and design conferred by some of the world’s leading colleges and college universities.
