A report in The New York Times says fashion designer Giorgio Armani has signed a deal with a real estate developer based in Dubai to help produce 14 Armani-brand hotels.
Armani's participation would include contributing more than $100 million of his Casa home furnishings line for buildings planned in Dubai, and London, New York, Paris and Tokyo, among other locations. The Times quoted an Armani aide as saying that although the team was still scouting locations, it was committed to building six hotels and two resorts in the next five years.
In a lengthy interview with The Times, Armani also said global sales of Giorgio Armani S.A. — 1.26 billion euros ($1.58 billion) in 2003, down from 1.3 billion euros the previous year — have remained fairly constant and that most of the company's American department store business has actually increased in the last year.
While conceding that American department stores contribute less to the company's overall business (28 percent in 2002, compared with 31 percent in 2001), Armani says it is because the business elsewhere, particularly Europe, is growing. According to the company, Armani sales at Saks Fifth Avenue stores were up 8.3 percent last year, up 5.6 percent at Neiman-Marcus stores and up 5.1 percent at the various Bloomingdales. The only major American fashion store where sales declined, Armani says, was at Bergdorf Goodman, the retailer owned by Neiman-Marcus, where they were down 4.6 percent. But Bergdorf has put the new Armani on its reconstructed second floor, alongside Gucci, Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana.
“We could have put them on the fourth floor, next to the more traditional names — Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera — but we didn't,” said fashion director Robert Burke. “We talked with [Armani], we've worked with them. We have been proven right. We are getting a lot more young people.”