HOWZAT

He is moving into the car business by designing bespoke interiors for Mercedes-Benz, and food is on the menu, with more joint ventures with Japanese sushi chef Nobu Matsuhisa, and there is even an Armani sweet shop. By this time next year he will be the first designer to sell suits, suites and sweets.

Although he is not contemplating his retirement, others are. Would-be bidders are circling Armani, like young bucks waiting for fashion’s old bull to be cast out into the wilderness.

Bernard Arnault, boss of the French luxury-goods giant LVMH, and Domenico De Sole, formerly Tom Ford’s business right-hand man at the Gucci Group, have each approached Armani. They want to buy the brand and could easily afford the £2 billion tag. But Armani has spurned their offers.

He acknowledges that he will have to sell one day. He does not want to give his two nieces and his nephew who work for him “the huge responsibility” of taking over the family firm, he rejects a stock-market listing and the vast price tag rules out a management buyout. But he is determined that the world’s best-known and most consistently profitable label will not be swallowed up by one of the luxury-goods conglomerates.

“I admire Monsieur Arnault and Mr De Sole. They have created something great, something emotional,” he said. “But the idea of Armani as one brand in a multi-brand group does not seem convincing.”

For the same reason, he has also ruled out selling to a beauty group, such as L’Oréal, which has the licence to produce Armani perfumes and cosmetics.

Instead, he is looking for a wealthy investor, a white knight to ensure that his minimalist aesthetic survives his retirement.

“Maybe it could be someone with a lot of cash, someone incredibly wealthy who wants to invest in something to give them a veneer of sophistication but who does not want to manage it because they know it is not their area of expertise.”

Such generous, hands-off investors are few and far between but last week Armani hinted that Dubai — home of his new property partner, Emaar — could be the place to find one. “People in Dubai are the ones with cash and they don’t know what to do with it. They live in great palaces in an ultra-modern country and they want to conquer the world. They could buy Armani. To them, buying Armani would be like putting on a beautiful hat.”

To prepare for an eventual sale and to safeguard his legacy, Armani has begun strengthening his design team. “I am making the Armani brand so strong that I can ensure continuity. I have been training a group of people on the creative side for many years. They know what choice I might have made in front of two different designs. That is how I see the future of the company going. You don’t need a genius to come into my shoes.”

His strategy has won support from analysts. Jacques-Franck Dossin at Goldman Sachs said brands as powerful as Armani could survive without a figurehead because “people buy the brand rather than the designer”.

After spending two days with Armani in Milan last week it is clear that, while he knows he will have to let go of the firm he founded 30 years ago, he cannot face up to it. Yet.