It had been dark for several hours when Giorgio Armani—the sole head of a $350 million fashion empire—decided to go home. He walked out of the hospital-white office, down a long blank-walled white corridor, and into the blankwalled white apartment on top of the Via Borgonuovo palazzo which houses his Milan headquarters.

There is little appreciable difference between the spaces Armani has allotted himself for working and for living. In the apartment, two floors above the piccolo teatro where he stages his fashion shows, there are a few Oriental rugs, an oversize wooden English rocking horse, an antique radio, but these all look curiously provisional, like a stylist's props. Otherwise, the low neutral-colored tables and sofas—designed by Armani himself—are much the same as in the rest of the building. The palazzo used to contain another apartment. It belonged to Sergio Galeotti, with whom Armani created his business thirteen years ago. In addition to the regulation Armani furniture, it had two pinball machines, a Roman bust, and a collection of elephants. Galeotti lived there for a total of three weeks before he died in 1985. Armani describes their relationship as one of "perfect understanding.'' They would often argue loudly and enjoyably. Now, when the staff has gone home, it gets very quiet.

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On this particular night the fifty-three-year-old designer was clad, as usual, in a dark pullover sweater and slacks, and he sat down, as usual, to a sauceless and spiceless dinner at a plastic-topped table lit from beneath in a way that eerily resembled the runway in his basement theater. Afterward, Armani, two of his inner staff, and I adjourned to a small gray-and-beige sitting room dominated by an immense television screen, from which Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments cast a lurid glow. Armani periodically interrupted the conversation—about fashion, mostly, and the difficulty of designing low-key clothes in an age of sartorial flamboyance—to point out how actors on the screen resembled past and present Armani employees.

I began to feel that I had entered a closed universe, like something invented by Borges, self-contained and endlessly self-referential. Suddenly, Armani's attention was fixed on the screen: Charlton Heston was pointing a bronzed arm against a butterscotch sky. "Hollywood!" cried Armani gleefully. "That's very Hollywood, isn't it?" His small-featured, donnish face was rapt, golden from an image that seemed as far from the land of Armani as California itself.

Dissolve to: Hollywood, one month later. Well, technically, downtown Los Angeles, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. But the crowd was, indeed, very

Hollywood. Richard Gere, Anjelica Huston, Loretta Young, Martin Scorsese, Merv Griffin and Eva Gabor, Amy Irving and Steven Spielberg. There were women with expensively mussed hair and men with pink-striped tuxedo shirts. There was also, improbably enough, Giorgio Armani, greeting arrivals with Lee Radziwill, the cigarette-thin former princess and now Armani's American "special-events coordinator." Cameras flashed, and Armani efficiently lowered his chin, producing the small triangular smile he wears in press photos. Armani was hosting a dinner dance to present his new collection to three hundred guests. The strict invitation list—in a city of benefit galas, where one usually pays for one's seat—had created a desperate social tempest. With food by Spago and music by Peter Duchin, it was all rumored to be costing about $350,000. By any estimate, it was atypical of Armani's determinedly soft-spoken public-relations style.

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Armani's first L.A. boutique opens in August on Rodeo Drive, and the MOCA gala was a strobe-illuminated calling card, left for a city which likes its words writ in neon. Armani does about $7 million in retail business there, and hopes the shop will swell it to $17 million. The party was the designer's first public U.S. appearance in seven years. "Do we need it? No," said Gabriella Forte, Armani's staunch right hand, of the event. "Does it create a little bit more aura and credibility that people finally get to see him sometimes? Yes."

In Milan, Forte had speculated on how Armani would weather a social whirlwind staged outside the walls of his palazzo. "For him, anything too foreign becomes a trauma," she said. "Giorgio always has to be in control of everything. He would control this plant" —she pointed to one—"the way it grows, if he could." She sighed. "In the United States, he'll have to rely on someone else being in control."

But, arriving in L.A., Armani did step into a carefully arranged world. An Armani team assembled from New York, Milan, and Paris—seventeen, by the end of the trip—had established base camp at the Biltmore Hotel. Wearing clean-cut ensembles of navy, khaki, and olive (and for the women, always, classic pearls), they were as identifiable as the badgesprouting Herbalife conventioneers also in residence. Under Forte's brisk supervision, designers and technicians had recreated Armani's piccolo teatro in MOCA's North Gallery. All the accoutrements of Armani's post-collection dinners

in Milan—tailored waiter's jackets, quilted chair covers, tablecloths, even silver service plates—had arrived from Italy. MOCA itself, white walls stripped of any distracting art, seemed the perfect chapel for the Armani gospel of discreet dressing. And thirty-two models had been handpicked by Armani's sister, Rosanna, forty-eight.

Armani was arriving several days later than originally scheduled (a last-minute invitation from King Juan Carlos to receive Spain's Balenciaga Award). Dinners which had been planned by Betsy Bloomingdale and Jane Nathanson went off with Radziwill and Dreda Mele, the director of Armani in France, representing the house. All that was left for the designer was work. Which, he says ruefully, is basically all he knows in life.

Getting off the plane the day before the show, Armani began re-creating the world according to Armani in unlikely L.A. First, the mannequins. With his hands on their hair, shoulders, hips, he kneaded them into something resembling an Armani sketch: insouciant, self-contained, a tad boyish. (For the buxom, he prescribed breast wraps.) "Too much," he said, using one of his few English phrases, to anyone the least vampish. Four hours later, at MOCA, he had the pastel lighting in the entrance changed and, after examining their effect on Radziwill's and Mele's complexions, had the lights spotting the palm trees in the dining area removed ("Troppo Palm Beach"). Later, while Marc Nathanson was toasting the designer at a dinner for seventy in his honor at the Nathansons' modem-art-stuffed Bel Air home, twenty miles away Armani himself finished the fittings on the five male models and went to bed surrounded by the unfamiliar chintz of his hotel suite.

He was at MOCA by eight the next day, going over lighting cues. He also taught the models how to walk: Don't swing your shoulders, don't sway your hips, don't look at the audience (the people, as he once said to a strutting mannequin in Milan, are not here to sleep with you). In the afternoon, he instructed the hair-andmakeup crew on how to groom the models, then repainted the faces of most of them himself, toning down, simplifying. ("Troppo Dallas." "Troppo Miami Vice." "Troppo Joan Collins.") He was euphoric with concentrated energy, parenthetically teasing the models in short, delighted jokes, like the only brother in a household of women.

The show, that night, was a signature display of calculated understatement. So were the galleries in which cocktails and dinner were served. Only the audience seemed overstated. "Personally, I look at the clothes and I look at the audience, and I see no relation," Forte said the next day. "These things take time and education; little by little they evolve."

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Except possibly Ralph Lauren, no fashion designer projects a more consistent image, on every level of operation, than Giorgio Armani. The self-effacing, courteous doormen in dark jackets at the Via Borgothe hazily focused portraits of serene men and women in his ad campaigns; the geometrically articulated, coolly lit boutiques throughout the world; the seamlessly staged seasonal shows, which have become, as Saks Fifth Avenue's Ellin Saltzman describes it, "like going to church" for fashion's pilgrims. All this sophisticated, multilevel seduction of the consumer and the press is carried on, always, sotto voce. Even the secretaries and seamstresses know the dicta which govern this hypnotic process. "Discreet, quiet," an Armani employee will say if you ask about the company's image. For the uniformly attractive young boutique salespeople, there is even a guidebook listing rules of appearance, down to the hair and makeup, a la Disneyland: "The Armani image consists of fresh, non-pretentious elegance and ease. . .. Sales staff must at all times be representative of this concept."

The clothes themselves are almost arrogantly restrained. From his first collections, Armani's ingenious and elaborate tailoring created a deceptive sense of simplicity. Using the lavish, multi-textured materials which revolutionized fashion's approach to fabric, they are clothes which slouch, ostentatious only in their rich comfort. They have been monumentally influential in deconstructing rigid conventional tailoring, and in their subtle androgyny. As Dawn Mello, president of Bergdorf Goodman, where Armani is perennially one of the top three sellers, puts it, "His tailoring changed the way women dress; he put us in suits, and gave us the freedom of expression in tailored clothes." For men, he provided a sensual, previously female suppleness— minimal linings, soft drapes. Armani himself explains what he was first reacting against when he describes Yves Saint Laurent's work; "He's someone I admire a lot, but his fabrics are too hard, too stiff. Even the lapels, even the shoulders. It's not natural. It's like a box.. .1 have to have things that move with me."

These free-moving clothes are expensive, from $450 to $6,000 for his highest-priced line. They are spoken of by the upwardly mobile with the covetousness reserved for Lalique and Porthault. Saltzman describes them as "high-echelon, senior-management" clothes, with "a stamp that makes people feel secure."

They certainly generate revenue: roughly $350 million wholesale in 1987, with an estimated gross profit of $55 million. By the end of 1988, there will be twenty-two Armani boutiques worldwide and ninety shops for Emporio Armani, a lower-priced, younger collection. Last fall Armani signed a deal to create 125 more in Japan over five years, with an annual target of $28 million. The U.S. totals about 28 percent of Armani's sales—he is the top European seller in many stores. For five years he has perhaps been the most consistently successful, both commercially and critically, of any European designer in America, despite his sometimes bucking trends. Bloomingdale's Kal Ruttenstein says that for last year's short-skirted fall season Armani's was the only designer line "that went long and still sold."

Though fans speak of the "security" an Armani outfit instills, Armani himself is far from secure. Though he stayed doggedly discreet when fashion went flashy— anticipating the return to "sober chic" at the latest collections—he worries about "finding myself too much apart, too isolated." Though he can painlessly create men's collections—which is how his career began—designing a women's line is an exercise in angst. Though he usually finishes the collection several weeks before it's shown, in the interim he is often found in his bathrobe in the early morning brooding among the racks of clothes. He does not suffer silently. The beginning of any women's collection, says Forte, is "like a rape of the staff."

Well-timed criticism can engender an intense storm of self-doubts. A woman in a restaurant once told him she found it difficult to wear his subdued colors. He returned to the office in a frenzy, complaining to his staff that for years they had forced him to do only gray. For three days he prepared a collection in uncharacteristically brilliant shades. By the end of the week, however, most of the bright colors had disappeared, like a feverish dream.

Armani does fine-tune his collection in response to general changes in style, but subtly. Increased femininity in world fashion prompted him to soften his colors and silhouettes and, in 1985, to expand into a range of dramatic evening wear. The rococo excesses of Parisian couture depressed him: "Camouflage," he says, "clothes made for a theater," designed for people living in a culturally vacuous time, "who want to escape because they're surrounded by nothing." He speaks of his rigorous aesthetic like a religion. He talks of the importance of "choosing a path, an idea" and remaining true to it. "It's not just a matter of making dresses," he says gravely. "It's what embodies my thought, my spirit, what I like in life."

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This philosophy is expressed to Armani's satisfaction only in his shows and in his vigilantly overseen advertisements, both magazine (usually by the same photographer, Aldo Fallai) and film (including one directed by Scorsese). Even at his own shows, things can go wrong: "A model who puts her hands on her hips can kill the whole atmosphere." And he says he is "never happy" visiting his own boutiques, because the displays never correspond to the images in his head.

The Armani team is notoriously tough in its supervision of store space and, whenever possible, editorial fashion layouts. In the early eighties Armani stopped previewing his clothes to the press (which got him blackballed for a year from Women's Wear Daily), and for three seasons dispensed with shows—in protest, he said later, against the emphasis on spectacle over fashion. He then became the first Milanese designer to show apart from the collective presentations, in his specially constructed theater.

Gabriella Forte, thirty-nine, lays down the Armani law to the outside world. A short, intense woman with a subversive smile and a perfect schoolgirl part down the center of her head, she approaches her work with both a witty detachment and a ferocious sense of commitment. Retailers and magazine editors admire her insistent professionalism and fear her wrath. Her relationship with Armani is passionate, operatic, endlessly argumentative. "With him, you have to pass a test every day," she says. "Every morning you have to prove yourself all over again."

That holds for anyone who works closely with the designer. "For Giorgio, it makes no difference whether you're his sister or his doorman," says Rosanna Armani. "In work, if you make a mistake, or didn't think things out well, he kills you no matter what. And the closer you are to him, the more violent he becomes." Such dedication's only reward is the satisfaction of approaching perfection. "Giorgio Armani is not big on compliments," says Forte. "The first thing he says to you in the morning is 'You need a face-lift, you look destroyed.' He never says at the end of a day, 'You did a good job.' When we finished the Japan deal— we'd worked for months—he just signed and walked away. And if you said that to him, he'd say, 'But why are you here?' "

Forte is still there, in an inner circle as emotionally complicated and rabidly loyal as any close-knit family. Armani directly employs four hundred people worldwide, but he keeps the number of close colleagues very small. He is unnerved by new faces. "I don't like to have people around me I don't know. The day I hire ten assistants and ten managers is the day I quit Armani." In turn, his intimate band cluster around him in an insulating shield. They may complain about his severity, his demands, but on some level they are usually in love with him. And, like lovers, they seem to feel a passionate need to protect him.

As a child, his family say, Giorgio exud^Ved vulnerability. Growing up in Piacenza, in provincial Northern Italy, one of three children of a shipping manager, he was the member of the family most traumatized by the bombing during World War II. He retains, Rosanna says, a profound fear "of violence of any kind." Sergio, his older brother, adds, "Although he may be the

most prominent one in the family, all of us would do anything to protect him, because we know he's the most susceptible to fear."

His mother, Maria—now a seventy-nine-year-old widow living in Armani's previous apartment—recalls a "reserved" child fond of staging puppet shows and passionately neat. When the family moved to Milan, the adolescent Armani independently bought antiques for the new house, meticulously drawing plans of where each piece would go. His mother assumed he'd become an architect or an interior decorator. Armani now says he had little sense of what he wanted to do. While his sister was traveling Europe as one of Italy's top cover girls, Giorgio stayed home with his parents, marking time. He did the obligatory military stint and studied for two years to be a doctor, but the sight of blood made him sick. In 1957, still with no particular interest in fashion, he became a buyer for a department store and, he says, his metier chose him. In 1964, he was hired by Nino Cerruti, where he began designing the trendy Hitman line. Then, in 1966, at the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi, he met, as they say in the movies, the man who would change his life.

Sergio Galeotti was eleven years Armani's junior, a cocky provincial architecture student with an unblinking belief that anything was possible. After several years of cajoling, he persuaded Armani to leave Cerruti. "I'd often thought about doing it," says Armani, "but I needed someone to tell me, 'You have to do it.' He was so sure of himself, but he also had confidence in me." Armani worked freelance, then, in 1974, showed his first collection of men's wear under his own name, with a women's line the following season.

Retailers describe Galeotti as the financial visionary and ruthless bargain driver largely responsible for turning the organization into an empire. He was as flamboyant, optimistic, and daring as Armani was reserved, moody, and cautious. "Every day," recalls Armani of his partner, "he would say, 'Giorgio, you are beautiful, young, and rich. What more do you want?' " To the staff, he would chant like a cheerleader, "Are we not the youngest, the best, the happiest company?" Galeotti dealt directly with most employees, encasing the designer in a creative cocoon. Galeotti's death at forty, after a long illness, was epoch-making for the company. Several key employees left, and Forte—then head of U.S. operations in New York—moved to Milan. Many people were convinced the business would not survive. "Everyone," as Armani puts it, "was at the window to see what was going to happen." The fashion shows before and after Galeotti's death were so charged with an emotional tension some of the audience were in tears. It was, says Kal Ruttenstein, like "seeing collections in mourning.'' But the designs remained impressive, the clothes still sold, and the empire continued—more cautiously, perhaps—to expand.

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Today there is a strong sense of people reverently carrying out what they perceive to be Galeotti's wishes. The Paris boutique, opened in 1986; the elaborate Japanese contract; even the hiring of Radziwill, whose glamour had appealed to Galeotti— all were initially projects of the late businessman's. His name is still listed in the office directory, and people talk about holding meetings "in Galeotti's office.'' The apartment in which he lived briefly has become Forte's office. It was there, late one night with Forte and me, that Armani, still at work, held a folded measuring stick above his head like a crown. "At this hour,'' he said, "Galeotti would do this.''

Since the death, Armani has been forced to confront a world from which he was previously sheltered. He is now an active business executive, swimming with the sharks. "Sergio avoided problems for me," he said. "When he died, I had to start to make human contact. I learned I didn't even know the people who were working for me. . . . It's not easy for me to talk to lawyers or financial consultants. They seem like enemies, the way they speak.. . . But, at the same time, it amuses me." Adds Forte, "Before, Giorgio never carried a wallet, never had a credit card. Now, for the first time, when he goes out he has his first address book with telephone numbers to call. . . . It's taught him the reality of how the rest of the human species lives."

The personal effects on Armani of Galeotti's death are less quantifiable. "It's like half of him is missing," says Rosanna. "When he laughs, he doesn't laugh all the way. It's always a halflaugh." Armani himself says, "After Sergio died, I discovered a strength, but also many weaknesses: the fear of living, the fear of being alone, the fear of seeing the people I love disappear." When he sees a person or object he likes, he says, his instinct now is to think immediately, "What's going to become of this when I'm dead, when I'm not here anymore?"

A sense of the ephemeral pervades even his designs, and the images that promote them. The clothes for women are softer-edged now, almost fragile, and the print advertising is steeped in a wistful, unspecified nostalgia. There is, perhaps, a touch of the thirties, the decade in which Armani was born. "It's not a love for the past," he says. "It's a search for an image that's less violent than what people normally show today—something less aggressive, less avant-garde. ... I don't like what I see around me at this point. What I'm taking from the past is a sense of reassurance."

Armani used to fight with Galeotti "because Sergio refused to be conditioned by my system of life. He would say, 'You can't leave your work, so your work is your life.' " Now he thinks Galeotti was right. "The years pass, and I'm scared I'm missing something. Of losing contact with people, of finding out there might be things outside of work that I like. ... My life is always very serious, very regimented.... I'm too hard on myself, absolutely too hard. But it's become a habit. For me, it's normal. I don't think that's good."

Armani remembers calling the hospital every night from the new Via Borgonuovo apartment to see how his partner was. He recalls staring through the window at a tree weighted with snow and thinking, "I'm here and he's in hospital."

That image, he says, will always be associated with the place: "I would like to change everything here. Not just the decor, but even the walls." He does not consider it a home. "It's beautiful, but it's not intimate. . . . It's too open. . . . You don't know when the private life and the work life begin and end. It's always the same circle." Armani also has three vacation houses—a beach compound on the island of Pantelleria, a pine-screened home in Forte dei Marmi, and a villa on the river Po in Broni. He doesn't think of any of these as home either.

"When I work, I have to have physical order around me," he says. "But sometimes in my private life, I'd like to have a little disorder. I've seen pictures of the houses of Valentino or Oscar de la Renta, places filled with little things, tiny elephants bought at some market in I-don't-know-where. ... Sometimes I think I'd like to have a house filled with memories."

Only once in his life, says Armani, did he feel he had a home of his own. It was the place he moved into with Galeotti when he left his parents' house. He was in his thirties then, and the days of empire were years ahead. "It was an apartment in a mansard house," says Armani. "It was cute, not big, and appeared to me to cost a fortune, since I didn't have much money. But it was my first house. I still dream about it."