House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival

by Deborah Ball

  The world started taking notice. American fashion magazines began to promote Italy as charming, sunny, and unstuffy. “The Italian woman of breeding has a certain quality of relaxation which endows her clothes with an easy grace, a free, uninhibited movement,” wrote Vogue in January 1947. “Her thonged sandals help too, for her legs and feet are possibly the best in Europe.”3 The young Gianni Versace soaked up this praise for the less-restrained Italian style. In his mother’s studio, he pored over the movie magazines featuring the Italian and American films that celebrated the sensual pleasures of Italian life.

  About four hundred miles up the coast from Reggio, Rome’s film industry was burgeoning. So many international stars were flocking to Cinecittà, Rome’s fabled studios, that it was dubbed “Hollywood on the Tiber.” The couturiers began to make costumes for the films and got to know the stars, who loved the easy elegance of Roman designs. For a time, Ava Gardner’s contract with her studio required that she wear only clothes made by Sorelle Fontana, an atelier owned by three sisters in Piazza di Spagna. Where the stars went, the press followed. In 1955, Life magazine ran a cover feature entitled “Gina Lollobrigida: A Star’s Wardrobe,” featuring 250 sketches of her clothes, mostly made by Roman couturier Emilio Schuberth. One was a strapless evening gown in delicately pleated silk chiffon that morphed from a soft cream at the bust to a rich moss green at the waist. The play on colors as well as the snug, simple cut emphasized the star’s renowned twenty-two-inch waist. The young Gianni surely saw these designs and was influenced by them—and by the overall glamour of the Italian look that emerged during the 1950s, just in time to shape his nascent fashion sensibility.

  In 1951, the Roman couturiers gained an important new ally in Giovanni Battista Giorgini, a Florentine with a noble hawklike face and an aristocratic pedigree. For nearly thirty years Giorgini had been the leading buyer of Italian craft goods such as linens and fine ceramics for American department stores. Spying an opportunity, he convinced ten Roman designers to hold a runway show in his magnificent home, Villa Torrigiani, in Florence, where they displayed 180 outfits before eight American department store buyers and a host of Florentine aristocrats, who were ordered to wear only Italian designs to the event. The show was a success: Women’s Wear Daily published a front-page article headlined “Italian Style Gains Approval of U.S. Buyers.”

  Within a couple of years, Giorgini moved the shows to a larger space, the Sala Bianca in Palazzo Pitti, a vast, Renaissance-era palace on the south side of the River Arno that was once the seat of the Medici dynasty. After the shows, Giorgini threw sumptuous parties in Renaissance palazzi guaranteed to dazzle, with their coffered ceilings and sumptuous frescoes. The Americans, suitably impressed, soon became the biggest fans of the new Italian look, drawn to the lower prices and cleaner, simpler looks that better suited U.S. tastes than their French counterparts. The Italian couturiers, many of aristocratic birth, also seemed to embody the carefree lifestyle of Italy’s blossoming dolce vita.

  “One season we would all be in Capri or Sardinia, and the next Saint Moritz—with trips to New York wedged in between,” recalled Irene Galitzine, a Russian émigré who set up her own fashion house, threw grand parties in her apartment in Rome,4 and created the famous palazzo pajamas, a wide-legged jumpsuit made of soft silk.

  More important, the regular shows prodded the couture houses into producing more clothes in the factory that were ready-to-wear, rather than painstakingly made by hand. (In 1954, one Italian clothing manufacturer took the measurements of twenty-five thousand women to produce an accurate sizing system for ready-to-wear clothes.5) Giorgini had invited to Palazzo Pitti a small number of so-called boutique labels, or designers who made very high-quality ready-to-wear clothes. The best known of these couturiers was Emilio Pucci.

  Pucci, a Florentine nobleman, had created chic ski and resort wear that was soft and unstructured. His brightly colored prints and tight stretchy trousers were an instant hit, done in exuberant blues and pinks and swirly patterns that looked great with the sandals and tanned bare legs beloved by Vogue. Made with a new synthetic silk-and-nylon material, his superlight jersey dresses were slinky, comfortable, and—perfect for the jet set—didn’t wrinkle. At $39.95 for ski pants and $190 for a dress, Pucci’s designs were very expensive ready-to-wear that was chic enough to compete with couture.6

  By the 1960s, when Versace was a teenager traveling with his mother on her buying trips to Rome and Florence, the first ripples of a youthquake began to wash over fashion. Women worldwide yearned for a new wardrobe to match their growing social freedom. They were no longer willing to spend hours in fittings, and their social calendars didn’t require such formal wardrobes. Initially, the revolution came from London, which spawned a flock of designers catering not to society ladies but girls on the street. These designers launched some of the first collections of ready-to-wear clothes that were fashionable and offered the instant gratification that made-to-measure clothes didn’t—a lesson the young Versace would quickly absorb. He certainly followed the work of the first and most successful of these London designers, Mary Quant, renowned as the “inventor” of the miniskirt, whose pleated dresses and hot pants in wild, pyrotechnic colors defined the Swinging London look. The clothes were photographed on Lolita-like models such as Twiggy, with their long legs and über-slim figures, and were a huge break from the corseted, glove-and-hat style of the 1950s. Better yet, the prices were low enough that a broad swath of young women could now aspire to dress fashionably. The London look was an inspiration to Gianni, who would soon try out the modern new designs on his kid sister.

  The older French couture designers haughtily resisted the new ready-to-wear tsunami. Since France had very few department stores—women bought their clothes in small boutiques—they had never felt the pressure to make clothes for the mass market.

  “Coco Chanel vowed she’d never do ready-to-wear because she didn’t want to dress everybody,” said Gerry Dryansky, a Women’s Wear Daily reporter in the 1960s. “The couturiers’ ambitions weren’t so high. They were rich and lived well, but they never intended to build colossal businesses. Their snobbism was greater than their greed.”7

  Christian Dior famously refused to provide a wedding dress for Brigitte Bardot, considering her too vulgar for his confections. “Couture is for grannies,” retorted Bardot. And many agreed. In 1964, a UK magazine announced the death of couture with fictional obituaries for Balenciaga and Givenchy.

  At the same time, a sharp increase in the cost of skilled seamstresses forced couture prices ever higher. By the 1970s, legend had it that only one hundred women in the world still regularly commissioned haute couture clothes. As Gianni Versace would soon see firsthand, his fellow Italians were quickly stepping into the breach. The change in the fashion business would open the door for his radical talents.

  Franca Versace understood, in a way that her husband did not, that Gianni could succeed on his own terms. So when her son flunked out of high school in 1965, Franca, anxious to see him settled into a profession, decided to open a freestanding boutique next to her atelier. Taking the name from the French fashion magazine, Gianni called it Elle di Francesca Versace.

  The shop was Gianni’s diploma—and his ticket to freedom. Twice a year, he went with Franca to Palazzo Pitti to watch the shows and place orders for the shop. He bought soft knits from Missoni and pleated dresses from Krizia. As the shop grew, he began going to Paris as well, where he fell in love with Chloé, a line that made gauzy blouses, long skirts, and evening dresses that were light as a cloud. He found a kindred spirit in the brand’s young German designer, Karl Lagerfeld, starting what would become a lifelong friendship. Lagerfeld had made a name for himself at storied couture houses such as Balmain and Jean Patou, but by the early 1960s, finding couture out of touch, he began hiring himself out to the new ready-to-wear houses in France and Italy.

  Franca—who had let Gianni tend her clients and had taught him how to make clothes to flatter a woman who
didn’t have a perfect figure, cutting a skirt or a dress in such a way as to hide saddlebags or slim a waist—despaired when she saw some of the trendy clothes that Gianni brought back. She preferred the more traditional designers who served up the sort of mother-of-the-bride outfits—ruffled blouses and staid tailleurs, or tailored suits and dresses—that would appeal to a provincial lady. When Gianni came home with more daring designs, Franca scolded him testily for buying clothes that she thought would be hard to sell.8

  Gradually, however, the new designs attracted Reggio’s younger women. “They were beautiful women, maybe thirty-two or thirty-five years old, already married and with kids, but they had wonderful figures,” said a former shop girl at the Versace boutique in Reggio. “The boutique sold the sort of clothes that Reggio didn’t have until then, because in the past, ladies like them would have worn couture.”

  The boutique catered to Reggio’s alta borghesia (upper crust), including the wives of bankers in search of new cocktail dresses or mothers looking to buy their daughters special dresses for university graduation. Its ground floor had white tables with glass tops and an antique glass and wood case that held small evening purses. Long steel-blue curtains set off creamy white wallpaper. Unlike in the United States, where impersonal department stores dominated and one-on-one service was rare, shopping in Italy was a leisurely affair. Ladies lingered in the Versace shop, browsing through the racks in the air-conditioned coolness, then a rarity in Reggio. Shopgirls fetched drinks, while Franca or her son conferred with the signora to understand what she needed. As a modern touch, Gianni had a stereo system installed, which played the latest songs by Frank Sinatra or Mina, a soulful Italian singer popular in the 1960s.

  Gianni proved to be a skilled salesman with a sharp eye for what best suited a woman, suggesting the accessory or finishing touch that would make her stand out, such as tying a scarf around her waist or fastening a shawl of fluttering voile at her neck with a jeweled brooch. He learned how women saw themselves and how to make them feel attractive.

  “When he dressed you, people would tell you how great you looked and ask you where you shopped,” said Santo Versace.9 The word spread and the boutique grew.

  Encouraged by the success of the shop, Gianni decided to try his hand at designing clothes himself. At first, he commissioned a small clothing manufacturer to make up some relatively staid suits and dresses. He also started making suggestions when he met with clothing manufacturers on his buying trips.

  “Gianni used to come with his mother to buy clothes for his shop,” recalled Laura Biagiotti, a Rome-based clothing manufacturer who later became a prominent designer. “I remember him as a sweet, shy young man. He used to sit at my drawing table and make sketches of what he wanted us to make for him.”10

  Already fiercely determined, he started bringing a folder full of his sketches to the shows at Pitti, hoping to attract the interest of one of the clothing manufacturers that showed there. “I remember this young man, very thin and wide-eyed, armed with a huge desire to succeed and with this big folder full of sketches, trying to sell them,” recalled Beppe Modenese, head of Italy’s fashion trade group. “I’ve rarely seen someone so determined.”11

  At one trip to Pitti in early 1972, Gianni’s sketches attracted the attention of Ezio Nicosia and Salvatore Chiodini, owners of Florentine Flowers, a knitwear company based in Lucca, a small medieval town near the coast in Tuscany. Nicosia’s wife was the line’s designer, but the company had faltered when her clothes failed to appeal to contemporary shoppers. Gianni gave Nicosia and Chiodini some advice as to what might appeal to young people. The two Tuscan businessmen liked his ideas and, desperate for some fresh blood to revive Florentine Flowers, asked Gianni to join the company.

  The offer had to have been a shock to the budding designer. It was the opportunity Gianni had always hoped for, but it meant leaving his home behind, forsaking the familiar and the possibility of modest prosperity for a far more uncertain future. His dream would separate him from Franca and from the local legacy of the Versaces, and give him a foothold in a world he had only dreamed of until then.

  In a move that would determine his professional relationships for the rest of his life, Gianni turned for advice to the man he trusted most: Santo Versace. His brother had just returned from two years of military service and was about to open an accountancy practice on the block next to the family’s home. In what would be the first of innumerable negotiations on Gianni’s behalf, Santo helped broker his brother’s first contract. Gianni, displaying a confidence he didn’t entirely possess, told Santo to ask for the same amount received by the hot new designer Walter Albini. Nicosia agreed.12

  Gianni flew to Tuscany on February 5, 1972. He was twenty-five years old and happy to finally break free from Reggio. He went straight to Florentine Flowers’s yarn supplier to choose the materials for a “flash” spring-summer collection that could prop up sales of the items that were currently in the stores. Gianni was already getting in deeper than he realized, taking a risk that showed his reflexive ingenuity. He knew little about how to work with knitwear; he designed as if he were working with fabric. He asked the factory to weave knits with intricate woven and braided patterns, something they had never done before, and then he cut the knits as if he were working with wool or silk, by, for instance, slicing it on the bias. The minicollection was a hit. Nicosia was so pleased that he bought Gianni a black Volkswagen convertible with a white top.

  “I felt this pressure to show them I could do it immediately,” Gianni would say later. “I wanted a new type of knit, one that was like fabric. It was very difficult, but, when I was discouraged, I thought of my mother, and how she used to stay up all night just to finish a dress.”13

  After just a few months in Tuscany, Gianni left Florentine Flowers to move to Milan, drawn by the rising buzz of the fashion scene there as well as the possibility of winning bigger jobs. That very year, several hot design houses—Krizia, Missoni, and Walter Albini—had abandoned Florence to stage their shows in Milan. The new ready-to-wear designers had grown increasingly unhappy with the Pitti shows. The explosion of new brands meant they had to share a runway and show only sixteen garments in a production so drab that it drained the zest from the designs. Department store buyers and journalists lobbied the designers to show in Milan, which had many more direct flights from the United States and other European capitals. Milan, the birthplace of the Futurist movement in 1909, had become the publishing capital of Italy by then, and was home to the biggest magazines and newspapers. Condé Nast established its Italian headquarters in Milan in the mid-1960s, when it launched Italian Vogue. International ad agencies set up their Italian headquarters in the city. Furthermore, Milan’s proximity to Italy’s textile producers in the north was a huge advantage, not just to manufacturing but to the design process itself.

  By the early 1970s, Italian designers had gained an invaluable edge over their American and French rivals by working directly with the textile producers to create entirely new fabrics that draped differently than simple silk, cotton, or wool, and even had a different touch and sheen. A clutch of designers were staging their first shows in Milan, often using the ballrooms of big hotels. The early shows were little more than amateur hours, where designers drafted family and friends to build the backdrops, dress the models, and help with the lighting. Local hairdressers agreed to do the models’ hair for free in exchange for a mention in a show’s program. At the time, models were so cheap that dozens were hired per show. Gianni attended these shows and watched how they were put together; they would become the model for his own extravaganzas in the years ahead.

  In Milan, the young designer moved into the Principessa Clotilde residence on the east side of the city, in Porta Nuova. His neighbors were penniless aspiring male and female models sent by their agencies, which had secured discounts on the spartan apartments. The residence was soon dubbed Principessa Clitoris, because of the high concentration of beautiful young flesh staying t
here and the horde of Italian playboys they attracted.

  “Girls, guys—that residence was a place of perdition,” Santo recalled.14 Gianni loved the energy and sexuality of it, which would infuse his own life and influence his designs.

  Gianni was becoming a player in a nascent Milanese fashion scene that was something of a Wild West, drawing neophyte models who hadn’t yet managed to break through in New York or Paris, home of the major agencies. New modeling firms were mushrooming in Milan, sometimes established by men looking only to meet pretty girls, encouraging them to attend parties and dinners to generate buzz for their new businesses. These model hounds picked them up at the airport, sent them roses, and brought them to new nightclubs where they were feted with champagne—and, more and more often, cocaine. The young women were often paid little—sometimes just fifty dollars for a fitting and a show.

  “The flower children, the new culture, were coming forward,” said Polly Mellen, a major magazine editor in the 1960s. “It was all parties, drugs and madness, and the girls who chose to be part of it were the girls who were booked.”15

  Gianni was participating in a social revolution in Italy amid violent political unrest, as the nation’s postwar dolce vita mentality burned away in a blaze of bombings, kidnappings, and violent demonstrations. In the first half of the 1970s, more than four thousand acts of political violence occurred in Italy, most of them in Rome, Turin, and Milan, including sixty-three murders, culminating in the killing of Aldo Moro, former prime minister, by the Red Brigades, a Marxist guerrilla group. Along with this upheaval came social changes at warp speed, which transformed how women dressed. Couture became a symbol of the hated bourgeoisie.

  Around the world, the 1970s were a contrarian decade in fashion, as rules of taste were deliberately broken, and outrageous looks—hot pants, platform shoes, maxicoats, and polyester shirts open to the waist—reigned supreme. In Italy, however, such tastelessness was less popular. Certainly, young women shed their twinsets, black leather pumps, and pleated skirts in favor of jeans, Eskimo coats, and tie-dyed shirts. Young people who wore the old styles were suspected of harboring Fascist sympathies and could find themselves the target of bullying. But the zany aspects of 1970s style never really took root in Italy. As the decade wore on, shoppers everywhere looked for more toned-down clothes, particularly for the office, and the Italians were quick to meld the urge for casual dressing with the polish and elegance that had gone missing in the early part of the decade.