Giorgio Armani S.p. A. is an Italian luxury fashion house founded by Giorgio Armani which designs, manufactures and retails haute couture, ready-to-wear, leather goods, watches, accessories, eyewear and home interiors. The brand markets these products under several labels: Giorgio Armani Privé, Giorgio Armani, Armani Collezioni, Emporio Armani, Armani Jeans, Armani Junior, Armani Exchange; the brand utilizes the association of the Armani name with high-fashion, benefiting from its prestige in the fashion industry. In 2016, estimated sales of the company were around $2.65 billion. In 2017, Giorgio Armani announced that his company will close two of its fashion labels, Armani Collezioni and Armani Jeans, as part of the restructuring process for his company. While Armani Collezioni will merge back into the "Giorgio Armani" line, Armani Jeans will be mixed with the Emporio Armani line due to their similarities in styles and the use of the same brand logo. Giorgio Armani is in collaboration with Emaar Properties, a chain of luxury hotels and resorts in several big cities including Milan, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Dubai.

The company operates a range of cafés worldwide, in addition to a bar and nightclub. Giorgio Armani is a high-end label specializing in men's and women's ready-to-wear, glasses and perfumes, it is available only in Giorgio Armani boutiques, specialty clothiers and select high-end department stores. The logo is a curved "G" completing a curved "A". In 2016, the fashion house stopped using animal fur in all of its collections, citing the availability of "valid alternatives at our disposition that render the use of cruel practices unnecessary as regards animals."According to The Wall Street Journal and other influential sources, in addition to couture line Armani Privé, Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani are company's ready-to-wear lines that show at Milan fashion week. In addition, selling at lower prices are Armani Exchange and Armani Jeans. Emporio Armani is the second brand of Armani family, features ready-to-wear and runway collections. Emporio Armani focuses on modern traits. Emporio Armani along with Giorgio Armani are the only two ready-to-wear brands that are designed by Giorgio Armani himself, has a spotlight at Milan Fashion Week every year while Armani Collezioni, Armani Jeans, Armani Exchange do not.

Emporio Armani is only sold in freestanding Emporio Armani boutiques and its official website. David Beckham starred in four Emporio Armani underwear campaigns from Spring/Summer 2008 to Fall/Winter 2009-2010. David Beckham appeared with his wife, former Spice Girl Victoria, in the campaigns twice in 2009. All campaigns were photographed by Marcus Piggott. In January 2010, football star Cristiano Ronaldo and Hollywood movie star Megan Fox became the male and female face and body of Emporio Armani. In 2011, Megan Fox was replaced with Rihanna and Ronaldo was replaced by tennis athlete Rafael Nadal. Emporio Armani has teamed up with Reebok to create fashion shoes under the label EA7. In 2019, Emporio Armani released a new series centered around Shawn Mendes; the black-and-white advertisement featured an instrumental version of his song, "In My Blood". Emporio Armani has boutiques in Toronto, Frankfurt, Bahrain, Bogotá, Tokyo, Madrid, Paris, Glasgow, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Lima, Singapore, New York, São Paulo, New Delhi, many other cities around the world.

Armani Collezioni was the diffusion line of Giorgio Armani that retails at a lower price than Giorgio Armani and the haute couture line, Armani Privé. The logo was displayed black written on a white label, but varies. "Armani" being larger and "Collezioni" underneath it. It has provided made-to-measure tailored shirts where every element can be chosen. In addition to being sold in the two freestanding boutiques in Milan and Paris, Armani Collezioni sold in department stores and outlets while Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani only sold in freestanding boutiques. Last year, a sporty line of this label has appeared named "Armani Collezioni Active" in the same way as the EA7 line from Emporio Armani line. A|X Armani Exchange was launched in 1991 in the U. S, it retails fashion and lifestyle products and is known for its provocative ad campaigns. Inspired by street-chic culture and dance music, it is targeted as the more accessible Armani brand. To accelerate development of the nascent line, Giorgio Armani co-established the joint venture company Presidio Holdings Ltd in 2005 alongside Como Holdings, the company owned by the Singaporean tycoon Ong Beng Seng that, since 1994, has held the production and distribution license for A/X Armani Exchange in the United States, Canada and South America and Asia-Pacific.

The Italian company held 25% of Presidio Holdings, the remaining 75% in the hands of Como Holdings. In 2008, Giorgio Armani acquired an additional 25% stake. In 2014, it acquired the remaining 50% "ensuring full ownership of the brand, which has 270 stores and over 3,000 employees", the company said in a statement. Armani Exchange products are available in 270 stores in 31 countries and on the brand's website. Giorgio Armani designs products made for babies and teenagers up to sixteen years old. Therefore, he came up with a new label called Armani Junior with a separate label wit

The phrase temperament ordinaire is a term for musical intonation the tempered tuning of keyboard instruments. In modern usage, it refers to temperaments falling within the range of tunings now known as "well-tempered"; the expression occurs in French-language works of the 17th and 18th centuries concerning theory and practice of musical intonation with regard to keyboard instruments. It is discussed again, in the same or a similar musical application, in modern literature concerned with historical practices relating to keyboard instruments and performance. One of the early historical documents in which the phrase was used is Christiaan Huygens' "Lettre touchant le cycle harmonique", of 1691; this refers several times, in a comparative way, to "temperament ordinaire". The main purpose of Huygens' letter was to describe and discuss an unconventional 31-fold division of the octave, he did this by first recapitulating a conventional known temperament of his time, he compared that with his new scheme.

Huygens' description of the conventional arrangement was quite precise, it is identifiable with what is now classified as meantone temperament. Huygens referred to this conventional arrangement, variously, in the course of his comparisons, as "the Temperament that I have just explained", "the Temperament", "the ordinary Temperament", "the Ordinary Temperament", by mentioning "the new Temperament" as contrasted with "the one that everyone uses". Accordingly, it does appear that for Huygens in 1691, "temperament ordinaire" was a phrase denoting just the temperament in ordinary use, with no sign that he was using this expression as a proper or conventional name or label; the term was used in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert, published in Paris in 1751–1772, which contains an article on temperament written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The article discusses the contrasting merits of equal temperament and of an arrangement referred to as "temperament ordinaire", "temperament", as "the common rule of temperament", gives practical instructions how to tune a keyboard to this temperament.

In regard to the use of the expressions denoting the temperament in this article, it is noticeable that while all occurrences of the word'temperament' in the original article stand italicized, the accompanying words, including'ordinaire', never are. That seems to show that Rousseau was using the phrase just to denote descriptively what he regarded as usual, rather than as a proper name or conventional designatory label; as for the nature and identity of the temperament that Rousseau called the common one, the content of the article leaves it clear that it was a circulating temperament, rather than the quarter-comma meantone referred to by Huygens about 60 years previously. It is relevant to reproduce here the actual instructions from the Encyclopedie for tuning to "the common rule of temperament", so as to leave it clear where they are specific, where they are vague: "To do this: 1st, start with the middle C of the keyboard, narrow the first four fifths going up, until the fourth, E, makes a true major third with the first note C.

2nd, Continuing to tune by fifths, as soon as one has arrived at the sharp notes, one widens the fifths – though the thirds suffer by it – and one stops when one has arrived at G#. 3rd, Return to C and tune the fifths going down, that is, F, B flat, so on, widening them all the time, until one has arrived at D flat, which – when taken as C# - ought to be in harmony as a fifth with the G# where one stopped before. The final fifths will be a little too wide, like the thirds, but the harshness will be tolerable if the tuning across the octaves is done properly, besides, these fifths are so situated that they are used." Among the notable points of this description: 1: there is a possible misprint or similar thoughtless mistake, or else an instruction to cover some of the ground twice, in that the third-stage stopping point, D flat, would have been tuned as C# before the G#, so the expected stopping point of the third stage might more be E flat/D#, to be checked against the G#. So D flat might have been a misprint etc. for E flat.

2: There might have been no need for the user to widen any of the fifths, if only the ones between CGDAE had been narrowed: things should have worked out if all the others had just been left pure. This

Stapleton is a neighborhood in northeastern Staten Island in New York City in the United States. It is located along the waterfront of Upper New York Bay bounded on the north by Tompkinsville at Grant Street, on the south by Clifton at Vanderbilt Avenue, on the west by St. Paul's Avenue and Van Duzer Street, which form the border with the community of Grymes Hill. Stapleton is one of the older waterfront neighborhoods of the borough, built in the 1830s on land once owned by the Vanderbilt family, it was a long-time commercial center of the island, but has struggled to revive after several decades of neglect following the 1964 construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, which shifted the commercial development of the island to its interior. Stapleton is part of Staten Island Community District 1 and its ZIP Codes are 10304 and 10301. Stapleton is patrolled by the 120th Precinct of the New York City Police Department; the neighborhood was the site of the farm where Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up, at the location of the present-day Paramount Theater building on Bay Street.

In the early 19th century it became the commercial center of Southfield Township. In 1832 William J. Staples, a merchant from Manhattan for whom the neighborhood is named, as well as Minthorne Tompkins, the son of Vice President Daniel D. Tompkins, acquired land from the Vanderbilts and laid out the streets. Staples and Tompkins started a ferry service from the neighborhood waterfront to Manhattan and began advertising their new village in 1836. Seaman's Retreat, a hospital for sailors entering New York Harbor, opened in 1832 and became Bayley Seton Hospital, the largest employer in the neighborhood until the Sisters of Charity, an order of Roman Catholic nuns which operated the facility, closed it in 2004, it was for many years the site of a United States Public Health Service hospital. The neighborhood was the location of several springs which led to the establishment of several German-American breweries in the middle 19th century; the last brewery closed in 1963. In 1884, Stapleton was incorporated as the village of Edgewater.

The old Village Hall still stands. In 1884, the Staten Island Railway extended its track from the neighborhood northward to St. George, with a stop at Stapleton station. Direct ferry service from the neighborhood to Manhattan was halted two years in 1886. Between 1929 and 1931, Stapleton had the Staten Island Stapletons. In their last two years they were known as the Staten Island Stapes; this professional American football team was founded in 1915 and played in the National Football League from 1929 to 1932. Jack Shapiro, a blocking back for the Stapletons, was the shortest player in NFL history. In 1963, I. S.49, which sits across from the Stapleton Houses, opened. The Houses, a housing project sponsored by the State of New York, had opened two years earlier; the city built piers in 1920, but they were never exploited. From 1937 to 1942 several of the piers were used as the first Foreign Trade Zone in the United States. From 1942 to 1945, they became the Staten Island Terminal facility of the Army's New York Port of Embarkation.

After World War II, the piers once again became a foreign trade zone, but their use declined and most of the piers were demolished by the 1970s. The last, used for fishing, was removed when the U. S. Navy proposed to build a base in Stapleton in the 1980s. In 1983, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman selected Stapleton to be the homeport for a naval unit headed by the battleship USS Iowa, as part of the dispersal of the navy during a military build up ordered by President Ronald Reagan; this proposal became controversial throughout Staten Island when analysis of the proposal showed a net loss of civilian jobs on Staten Island. It was controversial because of the belief that the Tomahawk cruise missiles aboard the Iowa and an accompanying Aegis cruiser would, in at least some cases, be carrying nuclear warheads. Following years of debate, which slowed development of the base, the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a major cutback in military spending, the still incomplete base was cancelled in 1993.

Shortly thereafter, a plan was floated to build a race-track on the site, to be used by NASCAR. The plan was forgotten. Headquartered at the site is one of three fireboats, FDNY Marine company 9; the site is now used as part of the annual Fleet Week in New York City. After sitting empty for a couple of years, the base site was used by a bagel manufacturer briefly. A proposal was made to have a movie studio occupy a 6-acre portion of the site. For never-explained reasons the city administration opposed this, some of the civil courts took over a small part of the site, leaving most unused while various proposals were made for housing, an educational complex, among others. On October 26, 2006, the New York City Council approved a massive redevelopment plan for the site, it will be transformed into a new community with 350 housing units, parks, a recreation center and farmers' market. The City Council pushed the project through its final regulatory hurdle when it approved the $66 million blueprint for the former Navy base.

The city will use the money and an additional $1.1 million state grant to create streets, utilities and a m