George Davies unveils Per Una in 2001. Photograph: David Sillitoe

He claims it’s a coincidence, but George Davies’s return to the high street bears the hallmarks of a diva.

Davies’s new retail venture GIVe will fling open its doors on Wednesday, pitching the fashion entrepreneur back into the spotlight on the same day his old adversary, Sir Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, is due to face the City with the retailer’s half-year financial results.

The men fell out publicly four years ago over Per Una – the brand Davies created for M&S – with the designer resigning for maximum effect just as Rose announced the retailer’s best sales figures in two years. Davies says there’s no agenda this time around: “I didn’t know [M&S had results].”

“Stuart and I talk,” he adds, suggesting cold war has become detente. “We have a lot in common on a personal level and in truth, I couldn’t do what he does and he probably couldn’t do what I do.”

Like M&S, Davies is part of the fabric of the British high street. In each of the last three decades he has created a mega-brand: Next in the 1980s, George at Asda in the 1990s and, most recently, Per Una. Davies’s clothing brands are estimated to have achieved sales of £54bn, with GIVe, as the brand signals, marking a fourth stab at spinning high-street gold.

It is without doubt a high-risk time to launch a new retail venture – not least one that you have ploughed £20m of your own cash into. Although a spate of rights issues and a bubbling FTSE 100 point to a return to something like normal in the City, the retail sector is still doing cold turkey as consumers are frightened off shopping by the credit crunch.

The headlines in the world of retail continue to be dominated by tales of retailer distress, as last year’s spate of administrations is replaced by a vogue for company voluntary arrangements (CVAs), a different kind of insolvency that to date has saved groups such as JJB and Focus DIY, and is now on the cards at Blacks Leisure.

Recent government statistics showed UK retail sales were flat in August, making the uptick in consumer spending look tentative at best. And Rose, whose £9bn turnover business sees 21m customers pass through its doors each week, is not expected to trumpet a recovery any time soon when he updates the City on second-quarter sales. Many retailers have already said they expect this year’s Christmas peak – the final months of the year are known as the golden quarter as many retailers generate the bulk of their profits in this period – to be smaller than in 2008.

But Davies, a self-made man who grew up on Merseyside, says he saw a window of opportunity open up back in February. “You have just got to strike when you think the time is right. Who knows where the economy is going – it could be like this for quite a while.”

Davies trusts his instincts. He frequently gets “feelings” about retail such as “I don’t know why I felt strongly about padded shoulders ahead of this season but I did”. Unlike previous efforts, GIVe does not attack the mass-market chains such as M&S. Instead it seeks to prosper in a niche by bringing “affordable luxury” to the high street, stealing cues from designer brands such as Armani and Dolce & Gabbana to create desirable clothes for women over 30.

At George, Davies pioneered the value-fashion ethos that now pervades the high street, with chains such as Primark only increasing in stature. But this time around the designer’s perspective is different: “Previously when I have been looking at the market I have known what prices I wanted to sell at before I started. This time I didn’t want to restrict myself.”

Instead, Davies has run riot with luxurious fabrics such as Italian wool, silk jersey and taffeta, with extra details like velvet-finished seams that help justify price tags of more than £200 on a coat, compared with £35 from George at Asda. Unlike designer brands which showcase one range a season, Davies says 30% of GIVe’s 150-piece collection, designed with his daughter Emma, will change in the first month.

As the biggest womenswear retailer, and trapped in the mid-market, M&S was always going to be most vulnerable to a downturn, but Rose has admitted that at least some of its problems have been self-inflicted.

Earlier this year analyst Tony Shiret at Credit Suisse produced a vast piece of research suggesting that M&S’s biggest problem was that its shoppers were ageing fast and it was doing nothing to address the problem. Last year, he said, nearly half of M&S’s clothing sales came from over-45s. Clothing sales to over-55s, he added, were up nearly a third over the past decade. Shiret suggested splitting the company in two, with big stores targeted at older shoppers and a new “more relevant young chain” created for the group’s smaller outlets.

Shiret’s suggestion may have been extreme – Rose certainly pooh-poohed it, but M&S’s response has been to sign up John Sergeant, Joanna Lumley and Stephen Fry – combined age 180 – for its key Christmas advertising campaign, alongside 60-year-old Twiggy.

When Rose was parachuted into the business in 2004 to fend off a bid from Sir Philip Green, one of the first things he did was cull the number of “sub-brands” on the shop floor. It was crucial, he said, to rekindle the appeal of the main M&S brand. That year he also bought Davies out of Per Una – by that time its biggest fashion brand with sales of more than £500m – for £125m. However history has started to repeat itself at M&S, as new sub-brand collections such as Indigo, Limited Collection and Portfolio proliferate.

There are once again problems in the boardroom. M&S directors have something of a history of fighting like ferrets in a sack, and the latest problems were kicked off when Rose decided that, contrary to corporate governance guidelines, he would step up to become executive chairman, doing the jobs of both chairman and chief executive. From this loftier perch, he explained, he would be better able to identify his successor.

Investors were seriously unimpressed, and are still angry. Rose has promised a new chief executive by next summer, and would like to appoint a candidate from within – probably newly promoted food boss and Rose’s former personal assistant John Dixon or finance director Ian Dyson. Rose then plans to stay on for a while as non-executive chairman.

Investors, however, are increasingly keen on an external candidate. The names in the frame include Asda’s Andy Bond, Sainsbury’s Justin King or Charlie Mayfield from John Lewis, but shareholders are concerned that Rose’s determination to stay in the chairman’s office might put off a top operator from outside. Bond, King and Mayfield have all said they don’t want the job, although one name that might suit Rose and M&S shareholders is Charles Wilson, a former key lieutenant of Rose with a reputation as a quiet hard man, who quit M&S to run cash-and-carry chain Booker.

Rose’s elevation to the chairman’s suite is not exactly assured either. His current deputy chairman, former Hilton hotels boss David Michels, is snapping at his heels, having made it clear he would like the top job too. The Local Authority Pension Fund Forum – which gathered 38% shareholder support for Rose to step down as chairman by next summer at this year’s annual meeting – has already thrown its weight behind Michels, saying that he would be “perfect for the job”. The situation is a sharp contrast to the way the UK’s second-biggest clothing retailer, Next, has been run for the past decade, with apparently seamless handovers between chief executives and chairmen and no public boardroom bickering.

Davies says he can understand why M&S is launching new brands but says they need to be distinct. “Brands need identities and I’m sure M&S understand that. I think you have only built a brand when you own two or three brain cells in 80% of the public’s mind.

GIVe hopes to steal the march on its rivals by offering a made-to-measure experience – employing in-store style advisers and tailors to make alterations. It is also using Roman numerals rather than conventional sizes, to remove the stigma of bigger sizes. The style press, including Grazia, has already given the thumbs-up to its stretch leather trousers, which cost more than £300, and after buying cautiously Davies is already thinking about whether to put more on order. He hopes the company will break even within two years.

Davies, who is worth an estimated £105m, is bankrolling GIVe, with the first six stores in prominent locations including Regent Street in London’s West End and shopping centres such as Liverpool One and Bluewater in Kent. It will also be available in 17 regional department stores and independents, as well as through its own website. Unlike Next, which has more than 500 stores in the UK and Ireland, Davies does not plan to open more than 20 GIVe outlets here – although he is already sizing up international markets.

Some analysts had thought GIVe was a nod to George IV who, like Davies, was famed for his sometimes outrageous behaviour. Like the Prince Regent, Davies, who is thrice married and divorced with seven children, has done his share of high living. Other than buying a few clothes, Davies says he leads a quiet life, having “never forgotten the value of money” – with his private jet more about business than pleasure. Although, like most rich men, he also has a fleet of fast cars and a yacht, he says: “I hate wasting money and I don’t spend a lot of it.”

Characters like Rose and Davies, whose feisty dispositions are legend, make retail interesting. The florid Davies cuts a stocky figure compared with Rose’s lean frame, although as he approaches his 68th birthday he is feeling fit, having seen off a brain tumour and cancer of the colon as well as bouts of severe depression.

The bust-ups are the flipside of Davies’s success, as his creativity is matched by his short temper. He was ousted from Next in a midnight boardroom coup after over-expansion sent profits into reverse, and would be the first to admit he is difficult to work with due to his obsession with detail and sometimes “nutty” behaviour. He finds big corporates, with their endless meetings, stifling and that is perhaps why his stints at Next and M&S ended badly. Although GIVe has about 60 people involved, Davies says the chain of command is mercifully short.

Would he like to get his hands on Per Una again? It seems not: “The people at Per Una are my friends and I want them to do well. It’s like when your kids grow up and become independent.”