New Dubai Clockwise from top left: Burj Khalifa towers over Dubai; at the Armani/ Privé club; bustier cocktail dress from Armani’s Privé collection; the Armani Dubai Suite; chef Alessandro Salvatico at Armani/Ristorante.
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10,000 fireworks helped mark the topping off of the US$1.5 billion reflectiveglass tower designed by Adrian Smith of Chicago-based architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Originally named Burj Dubai, it was rechristened Burj Khalifa on opening night, in honor of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates and the emir of Abu Dhabi, the neighboring oil-rich emirate that came to Dubai’s 11th-hour rescue last November, when the emirate was unable to make payments for its US$59 billion debt. A decade of profligate spending and impossible-to-sustain development had finally undone Dubai, as the flashy emirate had very publicly treated itself to posh trinkets (CityCenter, Las Vegas, US$5.1 billion; Barneys New York, US$942 million; the Queen Elizabeth 2, US$100 million) and endless construction projects, including the US$20 billion development Downtown Dubai, home to the Burj Khalifa. The 200 hectares house a massive aquarium, an Olympic-size ice-skating rink, the US$12.1 million Dubai Mall, the world’s largest indoor gold souk, a 12-hectare man-made lake and, at the center of that lake, a kinetic US$218 million fountain that shoots water more than 150 meters into the air while lights flash and Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli is heard singing an impassioned rendition of “Con te partirò.” It is being billed, in the hyperbolic spirit of Dubai, as “the most prestigious square kilometer on earth.” “Downtown Dubai is our flagship project,” says Mohamed Ali Alabbar, who is chairman of the » ome
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