Giorgio Armani is not a man given to flamboyant emotionalism. In this he resembles, physically and by temperament, the clothes that he has so expertly tailored for what is now three decades. He is compact - if, to his eternal chagrin, a little short. He is spare, in the sense of adhering always to simplicity. "The essence of style," he has said, "is a simple way of saying something complex." (Armani's own wardrobe is simple to the point of self-effacement, consisting of an infinite number of midnight-blue T-shirts and endless identical black or beige trousers.) And he is discreet. He values discretion above all things, he tells me. "It is the enemy of vulgarity." He has based his entire style on discretion and risen to the height of his profession on that style. Armani remains, aged 70, the sole owner of his $2bn empire and, what's more, he says he has never owed anyone a penny. He keeps a $300m float in his business account. To detractors who say that you cannot tell a vintage Armani of, say, 20 years ago from an Armani of today - a criticism that was levelled against him after his major retrospective in New York a few years ago - he would cite the word "consistency".
If a definition of fashion is something of the moment, preoccupied with the new, then Armani has spent a career being devotedly anti-fashion. People in the business are constantly predicting his demise, but it doesn't happen. He has the reputation of being something of a potentate. He is also said to be a hard taskmaster - someone who won't tolerate imperfections (I watched him spend 20 minutes practising his signature before deciding which pen he was going to use for a book signing) - but is equally known to pay his staff extremely well. Like a lot of very successful people, he seems to combine the demagogic with the democratic - he has the common touch. A friend of his described him to me as "someone who is perfectly sure of who he is and what he does, and this certainty makes him completely free". But when I put this to him he demurred, if only slightly. "That's not clever. You have to have doubts. I have collaborators I work with. I listen and then I decide. That's how it works."
I recently spent four nervous-making days with him in New York. Nervous not because he is frightening - on the contrary, he goes out of his way to be affable and polite, and anyway he gives the impression of being someone who would absent himself from any situation that didn't suit. Nervous because of the sheer pace of the itinerary. Every day is crammed with promotional events, beginning with a 9am breakfast and going through to midnight - when Armani, who, with the exception of work, practises moderation in all things, unfailingly goes to bed. "Time is time," he says. "There is never enough time."
Armani always travels with a large retinue. On this occasion a handful of publicity people, a number of his senior executives, his personal assistant, bodyguards, family - his two nieces and his nephew - and friends. This is very pleasant, seductive even, because after a short while it takes on the easy familiarity of an extended family. Everyone calls everyone by their first name (except for Mr Armani, who is always referred to and addressed as Mr Armani). Logistics are not a problem because every time you step out of doors any number of black limousines are waiting. Clothes, also, are taken care of. I was gently advised that it would be easier if I borrowed an Armani wardrobe for the trip and so, after an extended fitting session, I did. And it was easier. It was, in fact, heavenly. To arrive at Eugenia Silva's luncheon for Mr Armani, held in his flagship store on Madison Avenue; at the Vanity Fair celebrity dinner, with "100 VVIPs", given by editor Graydon Carter and his new fiancee in Armani's honour; and most particularly at the black-tie Fashion Group International awards ceremony, at the massive Cipriani building on East 42nd Street, where Armani received the lifetime achievement award and where, I couldn't help noticing, American Vogue editor Anna Wintour was seated at the table behind us - and to know, to have full assurance, that you looked right, you could feel comfortable. To have none of that self-consciousness or stage fright normally associated with dress.
To take the terror out of fashion - this was Armani's revolution, his revelation 30 years ago, when he took the skeleton out of the traditional Savile Row suit, dispensed with the lining, moved the buttons, changed the proportions of the lapels, softened the shoulders, and invented, as if, hey presto, the deconstructed jacket. He gave us fluidity where previously only stiffness had been.
His suits were sexy, just like the planes and the cars that the executives who wore them travelled in. His style became a statement about personal elegance which, like a kind of Freud of fashion, relieved us of the anxiety of having to dress ourselves.
And, of course, he was lucky. With the timing - the rising feminism of the 1970s helped. Clothes had traditionally been seen as a symbol of the oppression of women. His innovation was casual chic - it's often said he introduced gentleness to men, and strength to women. To which other designer would the new female executive, with her enhanced sense of her own seriousness, turn?
And he was never luckier than in the casting of Richard Gere in Paul Schrader's 1980 film, the extraordinarily good American Gigolo. It was meant to be John Travolta who played the main role but by 1980 he was out of fashion - Gere was his late replacement. Dandyish, narcissistic, the ultimate parvenu, Gere's Julian Kaye intuits all our social insecurities. In public, armoured head to foot in Armani's free-flowing suits, he is effortlessly assured. In private, folding and unfolding his wardrobe, he is like someone rehearsing their personality.
Giorgio Armani is shy, as his friend, the actor Michelle Pfeiffer, points out in her congratulation speech at the Fashion Award ceremony, "I don't know who is the more shy, you or me." And to me he agrees, happily, that he prefers to live smiling behind the walls of his reputation, securely hemmed in by his achievement. "I am happiest in public, working in my world. Then I can be the star. That I can do. When I am not working I am more guarded, set apart. It's not my life, that. I like interactions, but interaction that is not forced." This was clear at the Vanity Fair dinner where, seated at the high table, Mr and Mrs De Niro to his right, Liam Neeson opposite, Armani looked on as if he would rather be anywhere else. (It is the case that he doesn't speak English, has always refused to learn - though he is bilingual, in Italian and French.) Throughout the evening, he kept getting up to check on his friends, sitting at a table in the social equivalent of Siberia, and seemed reluctant to return to his seat.
There was what looked like a difficult moment when one of the Italian guests came over to his table to question De Niro about why he had failed to turn up in Milan to receive the freedom of the city. De Niro, clearly angry, and not prepared to reply, turned his back. The guest told me later that Armani had said to him that he thought he was perfectly right - he had wanted to know the answer himself.
There is nothing sycophantic in Armani and nothing exclusive either. At a private lunch, full of wealthy young potential customers - exactly the clientele you would think he would want to woo - he retreated into a back room. "I like America," he said, "but sometimes I find it a bit much. They can't even bring you a glass of water without a mountain of ice." But the next day, on the second floor of Bergdorf Goodman, Fifth Avenue, signing copies of the Vanity Fair book, a collection of photographs called Oscar Night - to which he has written a brief foreword - he was in his element, beaming, content to stay as long as he could. And much longer than any of his entourage would have had him do. A queue of fans stretched through the store - men his own age; young kids who clearly had no intention of making a $75 purchase; Madison Avenue grandes dames who bought three. Every one was pecked on the cheek and posed for pictures while the assembled paparazzi called "Giorgio! Giorgio!" - the only time I heard him called by his first name. These were interactions that he would call real - each individual a surprise, each with their own story, a live audience.
He looked contented, too, if a bit tired, at the fashion show of his spring 2005 collection, which he staged at the cavernous hangar of Pier 94. His "gift" to New York, he said. Unusually, for a fashion show, he invited not only the fashion press but also the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Before the show he spent hours backstage orchestrating everything from the make-up to the lighting design - and, as he went round, with his nervous fastidiousness, he'd be reassuring the models, correcting their walk, touching them, patting their cheeks.
Even as a small boy, growing up in the ancient city of Piacenza in northern Italy, he used to long for physical intimacy, Armani says. This was partly conditioned by the times. He was born in July 1934, at the height of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship and one year before his army invaded Ethiopia - an action that ultimately precipitated Italy's disastrous entry into the second world war on the side of the Nazis - "that war that was so dreadful for everybody". It was a time of pervasive insecurity - bombs in the night that meant, as children, they would be led from their beds into shelters. Two of his young friends were killed in one of these bombardments. After the war he was seriously injured himself when he and a group of teenage friends found a bag of explosives, which they threw on to a lighted brasier. "Before this I'd had curly hair. It went dead straight and remained straight, as you see." He risked losing his eyes and had to lie in a shaded room for 20 days with both eyes closed. (Until he told me this, I had thought his insistence on wearing sunglasses in the merest light was an act of vanity. It is not.) "My eyes were never as good again."
But the need derived also, he says, from his personal circumstances. He was the middle child of three; his brother Sergio was four years older. And though they were close, there was, inevitably, a rivalry between the brothers, in which Giorgio knew he could never be the victor. "He was the favourite of my mother. He was tall, he had girlfriends. He looked a lot like Joseph Cotten." (Interestingly, a close colleague of Armani told me that one of his strongest character traits is that he has no envy. "Competition fuels him but he is not eaten up by it. He is the least envious person I have ever known.")
His father worked as an accountant for a transport company - "He made the money" - but his mother was the dominant influence. "That's how it is a lot in Italy. The father behind the mother." And, though he stresses that she was not unkind, he says, "She was very hard, very exigent. I don't remember her cuddling me except once: I was three, she took me in her arms and sang me a song." He is not being mawkish. The war imposed all sorts of constraints, he says. "We were hungry often. We had nothing ..." Truly, there was barely time for emotion. But it is to this lack that he attributes his first professional instinct, which was to be a doctor. "I was fascinated by anatomy, by proximity to the human body, even when I was very small. I lived by my hands. I would make dolls out of mud with a coffee bean hidden inside." Which he would then excise with a kitchen knife, giving himself marks out of 10 for surgical precision.
Following school, he spent three years studying medicine at the university of Piacenza, interrupted by two years' compulsory military training, after which he did not return to medicine. He says the reason was that he was no good at studying. "I had trouble at that time synthesising ideas." But he also felt a need to earn his own money, not to be a burden on his parents - he lived at home until the age of 25. And his family's never very propitious circumstances received a blow when, after the war, his father was imprisoned for his fascist sympathies. "He was implicated in fascism ... like almost everyone at that time." He spent nine months in prison - Armani remembers visiting him there. "I remember his distress and that he cried, I remember that ... I can't remember all of it ... but the feeling of it, certainly." At the same time his brother Sergio had to go into hiding, also "for some months". "He was in uniform but then everyone was in uniform ..." Soon after this, the family left Piacenza for Milan.
So, to answer the question, 'Where did the Armani revolution originate?', it came of course from his aesthetic - his desire to break open structures, to make everything fluid. But it must also have come from his ethics. A reaction against hierarchy, a distrust of conformity and rigidity in all its incarnations. As a child he had seen first-hand the perils of a uniform - he must have understood the psychological comfort and equally the danger in such conformity. I asked him if he could sum up the essence of his style. "To give confidence but not to define the personality," he said.
Armani's rise to become the most commercially successful designer in postwar European history began in the late 1950s when he was employed at the department store La Rinascente, first as a window-dresser and later as the buyer's assistant. In 1961 he was spotted by Nino Cerruti and hired as the designer for his new menswear line, Hitman. He went freelance in 1970, starting his own label in 1974.
He met Sergio Galeotti, the man who was to become the biggest influence in his life and in his work, when he was in his 30s and, he says, still unsure of himself. He found in Galeotti the reassurance, the love even, that was so absent in his childhood home. "It was Serge Galeotti who gave me strength, huge strength." They met in Milan - Galeotti was also a provincial boy - excited by the opportunities of the city. It was at Galeotti's insistence that he established his own label, though typically Armani's lack of self-assurance made him occasionally doubt even Galeotti's faith in him. "Sometimes I felt that he was too easily pleased." The business expanded - in 1983 Armani became the first designer to establish an office in Hollywood dedicated to attracting celebrities. It was in a sense an actor, Richard Gere, who had made him an international name and Armani was quick to realise not only the promotional value of celebrity to his label but, more to the point, the value that he could be to the stars. Actors are used to being dressed for a part; they are unaccustomed - as insecure as the rest of us, perhaps even more so - to appearing in public as themselves. In 1985 his mid-range brand Emporio Armani was established. But by this time Galeotti was terminally ill.
Consistency is one word regularly applied to Armani - another would be fidelity. When he talks about his friend and partner, he lingers as though he would like to say more but cannot bring himself to. Galeotti, he explains, was the businessman, the brains. With his death everyone assumed Armani would not have the financial expertise to continue. For himself, he didn't know if he had the will. "I could have given up easily. I had enough money, enough for myself anyway. But I always gave Serge the impression that I would continue. I'd say, 'We'll do this, we'll do that,' and he'd say, 'Yes, yes.' " This is what Galeotti needed to hear from him, he says. And later, after he died, there was no reason to renounce his word. He had nothing else. He considers the business, Giorgio Armani, a testament to himself and Serge. "He saw too little. He died too soon."
What is certain is that were Galeotti alive today, he would scarcely recognise the fashion house he helped to create. From initial sales of $14,000 in its first year, 1975, the company grew to sales of $100m only a decade later. Today it has an annual turnover of close to $2bn. There are 305 shops in 35 countries, and five brands that straddle age groups from 18 to 55. He is now diversifying into household goods, with his Armani Casa line. Earlier this year he signed a contract with a Dubai company to create 14 branded Armani hotels. Soon we will be able to wake up, eat breakfast off Armani china, dress, go to work wearing Armani sunglasses and watch, come home to an Armani bed and take holidays in an Armani resort. Did he really want all this? He didn't predict it, he says. "When we started it was just one line, men and women; it was slow, we had time. It was much less aggressive 20 years ago, more balanced." But the entire fashion business has changed. Fashion is no longer the exclusive resort of the rich and whereas once, aside from clothes, it extended only to ephemera - handbags, pens, anything with a relatively short life, it has grown to embrace every aspect of lifestyle. Everything is susceptible to fashion now.
He has been pushed by the fashion conglomerates - in particular, he says, by Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH) and Gucci. "The big internationals try to have everything. They buy everything. Before Mr Arnault it was quieter, certainly." But he likes the competition. "I have to be better than others. If people hear that my competitors are doing better they will be very disillusioned."
He has 5,000 employees worldwide. "That's a big responsibility." And he has his clients. He knows he is criticised in the press for not being avant garde, "But that was never my intention. There are many different ways of doing fashion. I have always tried to make fashion that people wear. For me that is what counts. Otherwise what is it about? It's just a game. Worth nothing."
But is it possible for a business of this size to be so identified with one individual? And if it is, isn't there a risk that so much diversity will dilute the brand? So far it has proved itself to be extraordinarily elastic, and there is no evidence of his clientele deserting him. Can he continue to have it both ways and maintain this balance between exclusivity and elasticity? As he says, he has built the business entirely on his name - he has never been tempted, like other companies, to acquire other brands.
He is proud of his clients' devotion. "I have never had anything to do with the kind of fashion that is influenced by the press or identified with the spirit of the season. My clients come for me, they come back each season for my spirit. That's the reality." And so far the market trend appears to be proving him right. Because as consumerism grows, so does the power of the consumer. Every purchase involves a subjective choice, and people have continued to choose Armani. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with in January when, for the first time, he'll have a collection at the Paris couture shows.
In 1999, under growing pressure, he completely restructured his management team, bringing in executives from other fashion houses - like his commercial director, John Hooks, from Jil Sander. He has invested $700m in buying back factories from licencees in order to have total control over his own production. He may have missed some opportunities. "He probably should have gone into China sooner," Hooks says (although Armani was one of the first to have a presence there). "But he hasn't made many mistakes. He is a very good entrepreneur. He takes risks." But he has never changed his ethic. "I have never compromised. I learned to get where I am by work, I learned slowly. I wasn't certain of succeeding."
Now there is the issue of succession. Who will take over when Armani retires, as he must? To be a fashion designer at 85, he has said, would be absurd. "I say no to many propositions. Things that would have been convenient for me in one sense. I could have had a lot of money." But so far he has not wanted to relinquish control. "I have always wanted to be free. For it to be me who decides. Mine is the last generation who will keep this spirit. I know this. The conglomerates have much more importance now. It's nothing to do with the person. We speak of Dior but Dior lives no longer. Chanel still exists thanks to Mr Lagerfeld. I hope Armani can exist without me."
He has never named a successor but he has let it be known that he is not interested in taking the company public himself. And although he would like his nieces and nephew to remain connected to the business, it is too big now, he says, too much of a burden to hand over to individuals. He admits that sometimes even he finds it all "a bit too much". "You know I am here in New York, in a city I love, where I have friends and I haven't been out - not to a museum, to go shopping, nothing. I do this work for others now, not for me."
He has a beautiful apartment overlooking Central Park - "And I am never there." In the four years that he has owned it he has spent only 20 nights there. "I am here but I am not here." And looking around the flat, this is true. It is neutral to the point of invisibility. Very tasteful - white walls, wood floors - but nothing to denote anything personal. The bookcases are empty. It is a strange life. One that appears to have been hijacked by all his commitments, by his obsessional work habits. By his devotion to the promise he made that "I will go on."
He says that he is now learning to relax a bit more. "I have so many things in my life. I have money, I am very famous. When I walk down the street everyone knows me - it's like Madonna. It's very funny." Recently he bought himself a $20m yacht, the Mariu. It took him 20 years to decide. "I started to rent a boat after Serge died. But then I thought, why shouldn't I buy one if I want to? I have the money. It's the one real luxury I allow myself." He goes to his villa outside his home town of Piacenza most weekends. "It represents a bit of a dream for me. There, I play the landowner. I have animals, friends, there is hunting." Then, "I return to Milan where I am Mr Armani again." And where, as he says, "Je me cache derrière moi" - I hide behind myself.