by Deborah Ball
On the other side of Diana sat Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, who was covered in an oversized peasant-style black veil that wrapped over each shoulder. Arrayed behind them was the royalty of fashion. Her signature sunglasses firmly in place despite the gloom of the cathedral, Anna Wintour, powerful editor in chief of American Vogue, sat next to André Leon Talley, Vogue’s influential editor at large, who stole curious glances at Diana throughout the Mass. On the other side of her, Karl Lagerfeld, the imperious designer of Chanel and a close friend of Gianni’s, stared straight ahead, his chalk-white hair tucked back into his signature ponytail. Behind them sat the editors of French, British, and Italian Vogue.
Also behind Diana was Giorgio Armani, dressed in his usual uniform of a long-sleeved, dark stretch sweater, dark pleated pants, and white tennis shoes. Armani and Versace were the yin and yang of Italian fashion, setting out two distinct looks that would come to define the two extremes of Milanese style. For more than two decades they had embraced different aesthetics and succeeded equally at them. Both had broken from the pack of aspiring designers at virtually the same time in the mid-1970s. In their different ways, they each created a fresh style of dressing for a new generation of independent, professional women who didn’t want to be trussed up in the stuffy French designs their mothers wore. In later years, when they’d both reached global fame, it was said that Armani dressed the wife, and Versace the mistress.
Armani and Versace shared a prodigious work ethic and hunger for success; both men lived in apartments above their studios in order to devote as much time to work as possible. But otherwise, the two could hardly have been more different. If Versace’s shows were exuberant, Armani’s shows were ostentatiously muted. Gianni Versace’s homes were overflowing baroque containers for all manner of art, furniture, and homoerotic sculptures; Armani’s were spare in their elegance, the walls bare of paintings, the occasional orchid a rare adornment. While Gianni spun an elaborate tale of his childhood as the son of a provincial seamstress, Armani scrupulously refused to embellish his own modest origins.
Armani may have been grieving the violent death of his rival at the funeral Mass, but by no measure were the men friends. Milan would never have become a fashion mecca without the both of them, yet the pair nonetheless loathed each other. To Armani, Versace, with his sadomasochistic flourishes, punk collections, and general garishness, was an abomination, an insult to women. Armani had been public in his criticism, declaring that Versace presents women “as bait for men, the incarnation of vulgar sex fantasies, a sort of nightclub where they do strip teases for local hoods.”6
Versace, in turn, found Armani tedious and lacking in passion. “I dress a woman who is more beautiful, more glamorous,” Gianni told the New Yorker shortly before his death. “He, on the other hand, has a type of woman who is always a little somber, a little dull. They call it chic. I’ve never seen it as chic, but everyone has his own opinion.”7
The funeral audience fumbled with their programs as Don Mayo read his sermon. “Today’s service isn’t something driven by opportunism, or, worse still, a spectacle,” he said, with perhaps more cautionary hopefulness than accuracy. “It is a gesture of faith, rich with meaning. … We share in the sorrow of Donatella and Santo with discretion and respect.”
Next came the testaments, musical and otherwise, from Gianni’s spectacular friends. A Versace assistant gave Sting and Elton John the signal, and the pair slipped out of the pew. They crossed in front of the altar, Sting kneeling quickly to make the sign of the cross, Elton giving a curt bow. They climbed the three steps to the spot where a microphone stood. Don Mayo had warned against anything except religious music at the service, so the press office had chosen “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” Despite the simplicity of the psalm, the seventy-eight-year-old priest who directed the cathedral’s choir had demanded that Sting and Elton John audition before he gave permission for them to sing.
Clutching the lyrics, the pair sang unaccompanied. For an instant, Elton choked up, and Sting put a hand on his back to steady him. Donatella broke down in tears. Santo, for the first time during the Mass, buried his face in his hands, sobbing. As the last strains of the psalm faded, a line slowly formed for those taking Communion, many of them gawkers grabbing the chance to approach the altar and steal a look at the stars.
After hours penned behind the wooden barricades, the press at last got the money shot they’d been waiting for when, during Communion, Elton broke down in heaving sobs. Diana quickly turned to embrace him. Flashes popped as the paparazzi snapped the photo that would make the front pages of the next day’s newspapers around the world.
As the men’s choir sang the last psalm, Don Mayo made his way over to the Versace family. Donatella roused herself, giving the priest a piteous look as she murmured her thanks. Santo bent on one knee to kiss the elderly priest’s hand. Allegra began to cry again. A bevy of Versace assistants sprang into action, shepherding the mourners, many with tears streaming down their faces, into a sort of receiving line in front of the family. A posse of six bodyguards stepped forward to escort Diana out of the church, setting off an explosion of flashbulbs. The more minor luminaries followed. Valentino, his hair slicked back in a frozen bouffant that framed his sun-baked face, exited alone. A gaggle of supermodels, looking modestly pretty, with little makeup and loose hair, stopped to speak with the family. Carla Bruni, her eyes rimmed red and her hair parted simply in the middle and hanging loose around her shoulders, lingered a moment with Antonio, who clutched his arms across his chest to control himself. Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, clad in a slim black trousers suit, her long blond hair streaming down her back, mixed with the Aga Khan, Rupert Everett, Carla Fendi, and Eva Herzigova, as the photographers scrambled to get shots of the stream of VIPs.
As the celebrities drifted away and the photographers began to pack away their gear, Donatella and Santo clung to each other and made their way to the black chauffeured car waiting outside.
With any death, the trying times truly begin after the funeral, when the family struggles with the vacuum left by the absence of the loved one and begins the painful task of constructing a new life. But in the following months and years, the death of Gianni Versace would bring his family to the brink of professional and personal ruin. Gianni had provided the center of gravity for the entire clan, his genius the animating force that steadied their lives. His murder would send them spinning out of orbit. Without him, the deep dysfunction that had remained hidden for two decades bubbled over quickly, threatening to overwhelm the entire Versace clan.
Even as they mourned their brother that hot July day in Milan’s Duomo, Donatella and Santo knew the whole world was already wondering whether they were up to the task of sustaining Gianni’s legacy. Gianni had died at his peak; the Versace name had achieved the status of icon, becoming shorthand for the exuberantly sexy style that helped define the 1990s. More than any other designer, Gianni Versace satisfied the public’s hunger for sex, fame, and money that characterized the burgeoning global prosperity of that decade.
A restless son of a provincial seamstress, Gianni had achieved his breakthrough by marrying the raw energy of the street to the finely cut elegance of couture, plundering for inspiration everything from Pop Art to ancient Greece. For him, clothes were meant to be fun, fabulous, and fast. He chose as his muse the prostitute; he raised vulgarity to an art form. Sometimes he stepped over the line, and his detractors dubbed his vision “hooker’s haute couture.” His clothes never evoked indifference. His S&M collection, with leather dog collars and studded harnesslike bodices, offended even fashion sophisticates. But his clothes sold and were worn. By the late 1990s, he had changed the vocabulary of fashion.
Gianni also bridged the gap between fashion and celebrity, melding two currents of pop culture and harnessing the growing power of the media. A master at public relations, he conjured up lush, flamboyant images that compelled the gaze: Elizabeth Hurley in a black dress held precariously together with gold safet
y pins; Madonna clad in a Versace bathing suit while painting the nails of a poodle; Claudia Schiffer nude except for a carefully positioned Versace dinner plate. He turned fashion models into full-fledged stars. His clothes and celebrity friends reflected his carefree ethos, a determination to devour everything life offered.
His designs, for all their sexual sport, their antic sampling of history and art, and their brass, appealed to a human need for freedom that ran deeper than fashion—an urge bursting to the surface of society in the sexualized, globalized, postreligious late twentieth century. Gianni “was the great post-Freudian designer—one who had no guilt whatsoever,” said Richard Martin, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.8 For Gianni, sex was a celebration of life itself, and by the 1990s, Western society had caught up with him. His blend of high and low culture, his fierce individuality, and his impatience with decorum and class strictures also spoke to the new moneyed class that was springing up in Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and Moscow, who loved his épater la bourgeoisie creed. At the same time, his designs appealed to baby boomers’ daughters who were coming of age and felt freer than ever to brandish their sexuality and independence without fear of losing their power.
Yet Gianni’s death came just as the world itself was changing. Such sexually loaded designs and images were beginning to run their course, having lost the initial frisson of excitement and novelty. Fashion was turning toward a more restrained, knowing style, and minimalist designers such as Miuccia Prada, with her prim, retro designs and love of high-tech materials, were ascendant.
Moreover, enormous changes in the global fashion business were already emerging, forces that would challenge family-owned companies such as Versace. Globalization, the easy money of the 1990s, the media’s mounting obsession with fashion and its celebrity clients—changes wrought or harnessed in part by Versace himself—forever altered the game for fashion companies. Successful luxury brands needed a worldwide network of opulent stores, a constant stream of new products, and thousands of pages of advertising a year just to compete. Top fashion companies were now big corporations that had the budgets and management depth to sustain and supply the sprawling machine that was the new worldwide business of selling style.
Gianni had fed and unleashed a beast that threatened, in turn, to devour his surviving siblings. As long as Gianni was alive, Donatella and Santo could count on the bedrock of his talent to hide the cracks in the house’s glittering façade. Now, as Donatella stepped into Gianni’s place as creative director and Santo had to make crucial business decisions alone, his absence opened a Pandora’s box of troubles.
His death would throw a harsh spotlight on Donatella, the flighty kid sister whose meager talents and self-destructive personality would, over the next decade, come close to sinking the company, destroying her family, and killing the woman herself. Santo, the diligent eldest sibling, would struggle to salvage two decades of hard work. But it was Allegra, Donatella’s delicate eleven-year-old daughter, whose life would change the most. Just months before his death, in one angry, resentful, rash decision, Gianni had unknowingly condemned his beloved niece—his principessa—to many years of woe. The Versaces had risen far and fast from the rocky poverty of Calabria, to conquer all of Italy and the world. The near-fall of their empire, and its tentative salvation, would come even more quickly.
two
The Black Sheep
gIANNI VERSACE, FETED AT THE END OF HIS LIFE BY ROCK AND royalty, could hardly have come from more humble origins. He was a son of Italy’s deep south, a forlorn region perennially trapped in a cycle of poverty, corruption, and relentless emigration. Calabria, the region of his birth, covers the tip of the toe of the Italian boot; it is a territory overrun for centuries by foreign invaders and buffeted by torrential rains, deadly droughts, and earthquakes. Malaria was a constant scourge; shopkeepers regularly stocked antimalaria tablets until the 1940s. In the isolated villages high in the Aspromonte mountains, the final surge of the Apennine chain that runs down the spine of the Italian peninsula, a system of sharecropping survived until the 1960s. Poor, illiterate families worked vast tracts of clay-tinged land owned by a few wealthy clans, and starting at age six children were sent into the hills to herd animals. They didn’t speak proper Italian but a dialect gleaned from the Greek, Spanish, and Arab tongues of Calabria’s invaders, a linguistic distinction that would further isolate them from the rest of Italy throughout the twentieth century.
In such hopeless conditions, emigration spread like a plague. In the late 1800s, a third of Calabrians emigrated, many to America, a flow that continued well into the 1980s. The region’s hardscrabble frontier air forged a Calabrian character that is dogged, rough, and tinged with melancholy, while family ties are fierce even by southern Italian standards. Those characteristics would also define the Versace clan, contributing to both their success and their tribulation.
Reggio di Calabria, the area’s largest city, is a port town jammed into a narrow crystalline coastline that runs like a ribbon around the foot of the Aspromonte mountains. The northeast tip of Sicily almost touches Calabria, and the strait in front of Reggio is often as still as a lake, affording a clear view of Mount Etna, its peak blanketed in snow in the winter. Despite its natural beauty, Reggio’s isolated position—the highway to the nearest large city wasn’t built until 1963—made it an exceedingly provincial town, lacking the noble history of its southern sister cities, Palermo and Naples. Gianni Versace would chafe at his isolation almost as soon as he was old enough to walk.
Reggio bore the forbidding weight of natural tragedy: An earthquake in 1908 killed two-thirds of the population and collapsed the city. By the 1930s, city planners had rebuilt Reggio from scratch in a bland Liberty style punctuated with a few intimidating, Fascist-era buildings and had laid the streets in a tidy crosshatch style. Lining the boardwalk were magnolia bushes, palms, and jasmine flowers, which gave off an intoxicating perfume that is characteristic of the Mediterranean spring.
The Versaces were not originally from Reggio; their provenance was even more remote than that of the region’s city. Antonio Versace, known to everyone as Nino, was born in 1915, the youngest of five children, in a family that hailed from Santo Stefano, a tiny farming town high in the Aspromonte. Nino’s family were the poor relatives of a wealthy clan—a distant relative was later kidnapped for ransom in the 1950s—and his father was forced to sell firewood to scrape out a living. Lean and fair skinned, with blondish hair and angular features, Nino was a serious, solitary young man. He was, however, a gifted and passionate athlete. He played semiprofessional soccer, where he earned the nickname U Carro Armato, or “The Tank,” and was also an avid bicyclist, competing often in races in Calabria and Sicily, where he bested professional racers who competed in the Tour de France.
In 1938, after his obligatory two years of military service with Mussolini’s Fascist army, he fell in love with a local girl—much to the consternation of his family: The young woman’s family had a poor reputation in Reggio. “Don’t you know a nice girl for Nino?” his brother asked his wife, hoping to derail the romance. She thought of a serious, hardworking young woman who had just begun working as a seamstress and arranged for Nino to have a garment made by her. Her name was Francesca Olandese.1
Francesca, known as Franca, was born in 1920 in Reggio to a family of higher social standing than the Versaces. Her father, Giovanni, a shoemaker, had an iconoclastic streak. As a young man, he had joined the Anarchist Party, a hard-left group that was a precursor of the Italian Socialist Party, and he mixed with anti-Fascist activists. According to Versace family legend, the local police would throw Giovanni in jail whenever a leader of the Fascist Party from Rome came to Reggio for a visit.
Franca, the youngest of five children, had the most forceful character among her siblings, and, despite her youth, became a natural leader in the family. Possessed of her father’s determination and stubbornness, she dreamed of becoming a doctor, possibly a gyne
cologist. However, Calabrian mores were so oppressive that women could hardly dream of getting a university education, much less having a profession. They weren’t allowed to walk through town unaccompanied. The morning after a wedding, the bride’s family would flourish bloody sheets from their window to prove to neighbors that their daughter had been a virgin. Police even turned a blind eye to il delitto d’onore, or honor killing, whereby a husband could kill an adulterous wife. When Franca told her father she hoped to be a doctor, he would hear none of it.
“Franca, you’re a girl, a signorina,” her father told her one day. “You can’t go to school with boys. You can’t work in a place where there are men. Go learn a trade.”2 She was allowed to attend school only until her early teens.
One of the few respectable trades for a woman in prewar Italy was sewing, and at the age of thirteen girls went to the local seamstress to learn how to sew as part of their preparation to manage a household. Before the war, one of the leading seamstresses of Reggio was a woman known as La Parigina, or the Parisian, because legend had it she had trained in a couture house in Paris. Franca convinced her to take her on as a trainee. The teenager’s meager income from her work with La Parigina helped support her family. But Franca soon exhibited the entrepreneurial spirit she would pass on to her children. By 1940, when Franca was twenty, she had opened her own shop.
Soon after she met Nino, war broke out in Italy, and he was drafted for a second time by the Fascist regime to fight. But because he was one of the few young men in the city who could read, he spent the war in a desk job in Reggio and never saw combat, which allowed him to court the ambitious young woman. Franca and Nino fell in love despite their contrasting personalities—she was extroverted and curious, while he was quiet and withdrawn to the point of coolness. However, they shared a prodigious work ethic. In late 1942, Nino and Franca married in a spare wartime ceremony. In November 1943, the young couple’s first child arrived and, following tradition, they named her Fortunata, after Nino’s mother. Because Nino’s brother had also named his first daughter Fortunata, Franca and Nino nicknamed their daughter Tinuccia.3
