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

by Deborah Ball

  Gianni’s relationship with Elton, while driven by genuine friendship, was an early instance of the burgeoning love affair between fashion designers and celebrities that would, by the early 1990s, prove a gold mine for all involved. Gianni would lead the parade, as his clothes became must-haves for movie stars, supermodels, certain members of royalty, and even some grandees of the corporate world. This pairing came just as press coverage of the rich and famous was exploding. Finding themselves in the media’s unblinking eye, celebrities quickly grasped the chance to work with designers to burnish their images. At the same time, the blanket coverage of the stars—and what they were wearing—influenced shoppers’ tastes more and more. It would be a match made in heaven.

  Gianni’s relationship with VIPs had gotten off to a slow start, with his clothes’ popularity confined largely to Italian television celebrities and pop singers. Early in his career, he had a few hits with international luminaries, virtually all men. In 1983, Versace dressed Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson for their “Say Say Say” music video. But Gianni, enormously busy with his many collections, had little time or patience to butter up stars. Indeed, with the exception of Elton (and, later, Sting), he found much of the celebrity world to be tedious. He was a happy workaholic who was content to go to bed early rather than stay out all night clubbing with the stars. Instead, Donatella was becoming a bigger part of the celebrity scene, and she quickly saw that celebrities could be a boon for her brother. While Gianni frequented the theater and ballet in his little free time, Donatella, a passionate pop music fan, was hanging out backstage with rock stars after their concerts. In the early 1980s, she approached Sting following a concert during his European tour and later charmed Bruce Springsteen, lending him the villa in Como for his 1985 honeymoon. After wearing Versace for his Born in the USA tour, he began talking up the Versace brand to his fellow musicians.

  But winning fans among female stars was the real ticket to press coverage—and at this Gianni struggled, as Armani established himself as the designer to Hollywood. Armani had stepped neatly into a fashion gap in the entertainment business that had been growing for years. Until the 1970s, Hollywood studios had their costume designers make actresses’ gowns for red-carpet events such as the Oscars. (MGM’s chief costumer even made Grace Kelly’s wedding dress.) But when the studios disbanded their costume departments, actresses were left to buy dresses on their own. The result was a series of frontpage fashion flops throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with stars dressing in “oversize this, thrift-shop that,” as Graydon Carter wrote in Vogue. 3

  After American Gigolo, Armani saw gold in Hollywood’s hills. In 1988, he opened a thirteen-thousand-square-foot boutique in Beverly Hills to cater to celebrities and hired as its publicist a former society columnist with a Rolodex full of the private numbers of major Hollywood celebrities. His sleek outfits were a safe option for nervous stars on an evening when millions were watching.

  “When you dress in Armani, you can be sure you’ll never look like a Christmas tree,” said Sophia Loren. The 1990 Oscars were an Armani fashion show. He dressed Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, and Jessica Lange, as well as six leading men, including Denzel Washington.4 Gianni knew it would take more than friendship with Elton John to win the kind of celebrity following that could turbo-charge his business. And he thought the way to popular success might be to give the stars the sort of showstopping clothes they couldn’t resist.

  So, even as Armani was orchestrating his triumphant 1990 Oscar showing, Versace was more than five thousand miles away, at the Ritz in Paris, preparing for his first-ever runway show of Versace haute couture. It was a chilly January day and Gianni and Donatella had barely slept since arriving a few days before. They had worked until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. each night, snatching a few hours of sleep before starting again at 9 a.m. (On Gianni’s arrival, Karl Lagerfeld, a prolific designer and talented artist, sent over a sketch he had made of Gianni, with a note offering warm wishes for his debut.)5 The week before, a caravan of about a dozen seamstresses and other assistants had made the trip from Milan, lugging sewing machines, irons, and large coffinlike cases full of hundreds of garments, shoes, bags, belts, and jewelry. Counting the press people, marketing executives, and Gianni’s team, at least a hundred Versace employees made the trip to the Ritz.

  Gianni was taking a big leap, and he knew it. It was rare for a ready-to-wear designer to launch a couture line, and only the most confident would take on the burden and expense of showing dozens of painstakingly handmade dresses twice a year. (Indeed, Santo’s main lieutenant in the business quit the company in part because he felt such a young enterprise was risking too much in adding a couture line.) But with couture, everything clicked for Gianni. During the 1980s, his atelier had grown to two dozen seamstresses who started out adding hand-finishing to dresses made at the factory but were soon making one-of-a-kind outfits. Gianni had also been experimenting with his theater costumes and was eager to apply new cuts, shapes, and embellishments to his own lines. He long harbored a dream of re-creating his mother’s workshop in grand style, so his new couture line was enormously gratifying to him. Moreover, his decision to launch couture would unlock the treasure chest of celebrities for him, and with them, fix a strong, bracing image of the Versace brand in the minds of millions of consumers around the world.

  Gianni staged his show in the pool area of the storied Ritz Hotel, which had double spiral staircases on either end, frescoed ceilings, and a plush bar area. Days before, Ritz workers had donned scuba gear to slip poles into holes at the bottom of the pool to support a runway that would cover the turquoise water. In a kitchen area behind the pool, on the day of the show, the top makeup artist first made up Donatella, then went to work on the models, poking, combing, and painting them for as long as five hours to transform them into Versace glamour girls. The “backstage” was a tiny space just behind the staircase that the models descended to reach the runway. The space crackled with stress. Gianni’s team, who normally cleared a path for their boss as he snapped orders during the intense hours before a show, struggled to get out of his way. Gianni felt enormous pressure, worried that his debut before the notoriously critical Parisians would be a bust. “Look at the creases in these dresses!” Gianni exploded. Last-minute manhandling had wrinkled the dresses, but the backstage area was too small for ironing boards.

  Outside, three hundred guests descended white marble steps to the pool area. At the far end of the pool hung a large medusa logo on the landing of the double staircase that led to the backstage. When the house lights went down, a spotlight flashed onto the first model, lighting up her elaborately embroidered bodice like a blaze as she walked down the pristine white runway. A stream of models followed, dressed in pinstriped miniskirts topped with glittering bodices covered in beads, rhinestones, and pearls. Many of the girls were black or Latino, and their dark, oiled skin glowed under the spotlights. As the music morphed from Prince to Puccini’s aria “Vincerò,” the clothes built from miniskirted day suits to embroidered cocktail dresses, shown with voluminous silk Little Red Riding Hood capes lined in lemon yellow or neon pink.

  At the end of the forty-five-minute show, Gianni emerged, visibly drained but smiling. When he heard the cascade of applause that greeted him, he knew that his collection had been a success. As he took his bow and felt the adrenaline of the previous days ebb, he reveled in the moment, knowing that he and his brand had entered a new realm—one that even his mother could never have dreamed of for him while she was alive. Indeed, with the advent of his couture collection, Gianni’s great technical ability to make well-crafted dresses melded with his natural showmanship to produce clothes that were stunning in their imagery. During the early 1990s, images from his semiannual shows at the Ritz became instantly recognizable as Versace, disseminating a look that, while polarizing, was hardly boring.

  Gianni’s decision to launch a couture line gave a jolt to a stodgy business. The traditional Parisian couture houses were d
ying as women increasingly took their cues from trends bubbling up from pop music, urban teenagers, and the counterculture. Gianni’s genius was to co-opt these forces and project them onto his clothes, something that earned him the envy of the French couturiers, who would struggle to compete with such bracing, exciting designs. In doing so, he pulled the curtain on fashion as an elite, rarefied enterprise and recast it as a topic of bottomless interest to the masses.

  “Versace moved fashion into the public domain in the most strident way,” said Hamish Bowles, former European editor-at-large for Vogue. 6

  He carved out a clutch of themes that he used over and over to great effect, from his “Wild Baroque” pieces with their raucous mix of leopard print and gold-leaf whorls, to second-skin bodysuits—inspired by Donatella’s love of stretchy leggings—featuring clashing, gaudy colors and gold-colored chains. He created outfits that were like jewels, cramming beads, sequins, large stones, and silk embroidery into wild patterns, often using a technique applied by nineteenth-century Parisian ateliers in which craftswomen used wire supports to create layer after layer of beaded appliqués, giving bodices a rich, three-dimensional look.

  In kaleidoscopic fashion, Gianni dipped into and mixed popular culture, fine arts, and couture history, making the most dissonant images look right together. Billowing eighteenth-century skirts in riotous pastel patterns were combined with cowgirl’s denim shirts top-stitched in gold. He translated one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most famous paintings by putting giant letters spelling “WHAAM!” on a yellow devoré evening gown. He adorned a silk halter-neck gown with Andy Warhol’s celebrated images of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.

  Gianni spilled the full force of his creativity onto his prints and surpassed the work done by Emilio Pucci, considered the great postwar innovator of prints. Gianni transposed all manner of images to foulards, silk shirts, and dresses—a portrait of Elton John, postcardlike images of Miami’s South Beach neighborhood, rich Byzantine Madonnas. It took great skill to know how to design and place a print so that it looked right on the cut of a shirt or the drape of a dress. His wild designs were painstaking to execute. Before computer-assisted design, prints were made by using engraved rollers or screens, one for each color. Gianni’s most elaborate prints had twenty-three colors, rivaling only Hermès’s legendary foulards.

  “I used to go to him with five designs and I left with orders to make a dozen,” recalled one Versace printmaker. “I did three hundred or four hundred designs a year for him—a tremendous amount.”7

  Gianni’s evening gowns were showstoppers. He cut filmy materials such as chiffon and georgette into fine column dresses that slid easily over the body, and he used punk-inspired pins to gather up masses of light organza into ball gowns, holding up the whole confections with overalls-like suspenders. The dresses fit wonderfully.

  “One had only to try on a Versace dress to find that one’s tits went up, and one’s ass went out, and one’s waist went in,” declared longtime Vogue writer and editor Joan Juliet Buck. “Gianni Versace’s evening dresses had these zips, and so the body changed. It worked because of that kind of inner architecture.”8

  Some commentators blasted his couture collections for their cartoon glamour and happy-hooker imagery. They found his plundering of Klimt, Picasso, and Warhol facile, and branded him “Copyace.” His horror vacui decorations were, for some, an assault on the eyes. They found his clothes gimmicky and out of touch with real women—but Gianni himself had a different audience in mind with some of his most extravagant creations; they were intended more for the media than for sale. For instance, a series of catsuits and dresses adorned with images of Vogue covers were meant to be catnip for the fashion press. At times, Gianni seemed to provoke his harshest critics deliberately. In 1992, he presented a collection inspired by sadomasochism and gay leather bars, complete with black leather straps, harness bodices, and studded leather skirts. At the show, he sent as many as eight girls, hoisted in dominatrix-style leather dresses, big hair, and bold makeup, on the runway at once, a visual punch in the eye. Critics were split on whether Versace was a creative genius or a moral scandal.

  “There were people who loved it, who thought it was brilliant, the greatest thing he had ever done,” Holly Brubach, the fashion critic at the New Yorker at the time, said afterward. “And others of us, mostly women, could barely evaluate the design aspect of it because we were so offended. I have to say that I hated it.”9

  Gianni’s salespeople struggled to sell the clothes, even in watered-down versions with many of the harnesses and buckles removed. But it hardly mattered. The dustup earned him reams of press coverage. The Versaces were not just dressing celebrities; they had become a media phenomenon—celebrities themselves. Vogue editor Anna Wintour recalled the one hundredth anniversary party for the magazine at the New York Public Library in 1992, a black-tie event with a guest list including Hollywood stars, media moguls, and the world’s top designers. “I was standing at the top of the stairs and there were a lot of paparazzi and photographers,” she said. “Then there was this roar that you could have heard in Washington. It was Donatella and Gianni arriving. Donatella was in one of those bondage dresses. She was absolutely it.”10

  Gianni’s hyperbolic style appealed initially to the parvenus in cities such as Miami, Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong, who lacked a strong sense of inner style but wanted to revel in the cutting-edge cachet their new money could buy. (Rich Arab women, happy to spend as much as forty thousand dollars for an opulent Versace wedding gown, were big clients.) In the 1980s, Gianni had suffered because of his disinterest in dressing the Establishment, but during the 1990s, his exuberant, guilt-free clothes mirrored the post—Cold War economic boom spreading around the world. His clothes embraced the rampant consumerism of the decade. Meanwhile, women who had flocked to safe designers such as Armani when they first entered the workforce now wanted to cut loose. As a result, Gianni managed to channel the new yen for fun, exuberant clothes and then gave it shape with collection after collection of clothes that caught women’s imaginations.

  “Armani really represented the rise of the woman in the workforce,” Wintour noted. “But then I think that people started saying, sure, she’s in the workforce. But she can also have some fun.”11

  The 1988 ascent of Anna Wintour to the helm of Vogue gave Gianni an enormous boost. Until then, the American magazines virtually ignored him, even declining to attend some of his dinners and parties in Milan. Wintour set out to loosen up the venerable magazine, putting celebrities on the cover and running features on new styles and more accessible fashions. The UK-born editor found Gianni a breath of fresh air.

  “My predecessor was a Geoffrey Beene and Giorgio Armani fan,” she said. “I think to her eye, Gianni was a bit brash and vulgar, where as to me, it was fun.”12 When Wintour organized a benefit runway show in the early 1990s, she featured Versace, along with Chanel and Lacroix, instead of old-liners such as Valentino and Givenchy. Gianni soon became a mainstay of Vogue’s coverage.

  “That show made him famous,” Donatella recalled, the pride evident in her voice years later. “The Americans had considered him vulgar. He suffered this a lot. Then Anna arrived and realized he wasn’t vulgar—he was ‘glamour.’”13

  Over time, Versace images that had originally seemed jarring became an accepted part of fashion vocabulary. Ideas that may have looked over-the-top or brash on the couture catwalk soon trickled down to more-wearable versions in his ready-to-wear collection or even licensed products that were affordable to many women. As a result, the shocking images from the runway came to influence how women dressed every day. “Try to imagine your wardrobe without the jolt of a print, the vitality of a stiletto, the glamorous bric-a-brac of chains and doodads,” wrote Cathy Horyn, influential fashion critic for the New York Times, in 1997. “This was Versace’s doing. His influence melted and spread far beyond the sexual heat of his runway.”14

  Little more than a year after his debut at the Ritz, Gianni’
s foray into couture paid its first huge dividend. After the couture runway in July 1991, Donatella stayed in Paris after the couture show to shoot the clothes for an ad campaign. She and the photographer were scanning the Polaroid test shots when Sam McKnight, the London-based celebrity hairdresser she’d hired to do the models’ hair, pulled her aside. “Listen, Anna Harvey would like you to send her some of the Polaroids,” he said. “She wants to show them to someone important. She can’t tell you who it is, but, trust me, she’s a very important person.”

  Donatella knew Harvey, a former senior editor at British Vogue, quite well. Perplexed, she gathered up a number of photos, including one of an eggshell blue column dress made of heavy silk and decorated with a swirly pattern of gold-tone studs and colored strass and slipped them in a FedEx package. Once Harvey received them, Donatella’s assistant wheedled the name of the mysterious lady out of her: It was Diana, Princess of Wales.

  Donatella instantly picked up the phone to tell Gianni. Gianni was thrilled. “What are you talking about?” he said, his voice rising in excitement. “You must be kidding!”15

  Not long afterward, Diana appeared in British Harper’s Bazaar in the blue-silk couture dress, in a picture by French photographer Patrick Demarchelier. The pictures showing a relaxed, sexy Diana, shorn of jewelry and wearing the sleek gown, were an instant hit—for her and for the gown’s designer.

  By the time she slipped on that blue dress, Diana was far from the frumpy English girl who burst onto the world’s stage in 1981 with her engagement to Prince Charles. Back then, Shy Di had little sense of style beyond an English-countryside wardrobe of corduroys, flouncy dresses, and Barbour jackets. For the announcement of her engagement, she wore an off-the-rack outfit she had chosen with her mother—an unbecoming blue suit with a scalloped edge and a print blouse with a large pussy-cat bow. Her bunchy wedding gown, with its ten thousand sequins and seed pearls and twenty-five-foot train, hardly heralded the birth of a fashion star. Moreover, rigid royal protocol—hats at public events, tiaras for grand evenings, and dresses cut carefully to prevent a flash of décolleté—made her look like a schoolgirl dressed in her mother’s clothes.