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

by Deborah Ball

  The paps got the shot of Hurley, wearing an I-can’t-believe-it smile, in the showstopping dress. Next to her, Grant peered down at her, appearing slightly baffled as to how she got into the gown. The photo made the front pages of newspapers around the world, turning an unexceptional film premiere into a memorable media event.

  “When Gianni saw the photos, he said, ‘Who on earth is this?’” Angelo Azzena remembered. “I thought he would be angry, but instead he was thrilled. Liz became famous. We made her famous.”23 The free publicity for Versace was priceless, and the safety-pin frock became one of the most famous little black dresses in fashion history. At Gianni’s next show, Grant and Hurley sat in the front row, dressed head to toe in Versace.

  By the time Hurley and Grant sat in Gianni’s front row, Gianni’s show was the undisputed high point of Milan’s fashion week. He began staging them in the courtyard of Via Gesù, where he had an elaborate ten-meter-high iron-and-Plexiglas canopy mounted over a long runway. Gilt chairs with multicolored cushions were squeezed in tight. On each chair sat a slick catalog with photos from Versace ad shoots and celebrity pictures. The catalogs were so popular that fans waited after the show to beg guests for their copies.

  Outside, a pristine red carpet rolled like a tongue from the doors of the palazzo to the curb, with klieg lights mounted on either side. Beefy men in tight black T-shirts attempted to herd the waiting photographers into a secure formation, as one dark Mercedes after another pulled up, unloading the celebrity of the moment. Gianni could have had them arrive through the palazzo’s back door, but he understood the PR value of having them run the gauntlet of photographers and gawkers. Gianni’s show was often the week’s finale, and guests could relax at Via Gesù after the grueling marathon. While Armani showed during the afternoon because his collection was heavy on day suits and dresses, Versace, with his abundance of cocktail dresses and evening gowns, always showed in the evening, adding to the festive air.

  The buzz on the night of his shows was tremendous. Fans hoping for a glimpse of a supermodel or a celebrity ran up and down Via Gesù, from his headquarters to the neighboring Four Seasons Hotel, which, with its fifteenth-century frescoes and standing box at La Scala available to guests, was in such demand from the fashion crowd that the desk discreetly discouraged other travelers from booking that week. Bouquets of flowers overflowed from editors’ and buyers’ suites into the hallway outside. Row after row of embossed shopping bags of expensive gifts filled the lobby. Gianni often had a dress or a day suit waiting in the suite of an important guest, laid out with shoes and a bag, ready to wear to his show. Elton John sometimes thrilled guests by playing the black grand piano in the hotel’s plush lobby. Since Gianni had to stage as many as three shows to meet demand, the supermodels, in full makeup and sexy evening gowns, sprawled on the deep easy chairs in the lobby between one show and another, drawing a crowd of admirers.

  The era was ripe for an entrepreneur like Gianni Versace. The 1990s would be a feast for fashion, as the sudden wealth of the New Economy, globalization, and the explosion of international media combined to give the industry a sharp jolt of growth. While all boom times generate demand for baubles, the nouveaux riches of the 1990s were particularly young and demanded hipper, flashier symbols of their success. The spreading wealth of the Internet economy meant that even the middle class started to trade up to higher levels of quality and taste. At the same time, cheaper and cheaper airline tickets brought hordes of American and Japanese shoppers to Europe, where they got a close-up look at the easy élan of European clothes, shoes, and bags. The traveling shoppers spread the word back home, ratcheting up demand for European labels. American Vogue, which traditionally focused on American designers, began giving European houses much more coverage. By the middle of the decade, the global luxury goods sector was growing by as much as 30 percent annually.

  Press coverage of fashion was also expanding enormously. By the early 1990s, there were fifteen hundred runway shows in the four fashion capitals—New York, Paris, Milan, and London—with hundreds of journalists covering each one.24 The Internet, magazines, and new television programs focusing on fashion brought once-distant foreign names to the living rooms of shoppers around the world. Internet sites such as Vogue’s Style.com broadcast the runway shows in their entirety (along with shots of the after parties and celebrity guests) just hours after the lights went down. The media surge brought pictures of runway shows and fashionable baubles to countries such as South Korea, Russia, and Brazil just as their national incomes were soaring.

  Gianni’s embrace of fashion as high entertainment was perfect for the times. Media showmanship had become indispensable to fashion, and Gianni was a virtuoso performer. His appropriation of everything from fine art to rock music and dance—whipped up with a strong dash of celebrity—was a feast for the media and their voracious appetite for showy images. He would become the first true superstar designer, opening the door for the likes of Tom Ford, Stella McCartney, and John Galliano. (By the mid-1990s, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of luxury goods giant LVMH, emulated Gianni by hiring John Galliano and Alexander McQueen—two technically brilliant designers with a flair for shocking the establishment—to shake up Christian Dior and Givenchy.)

  “Versace knew that fashion could participate in the great Gesamtkunstwerk”—a great mixing of art forms—“of the end of the millennium that had recruited equal parts of rock, special effects, the cult of personality, and unadulterated eroticism,” wrote fashion critic Richard Martin.25

  Gianni primed it all with lavish spending on advertising. At its peak in the mid-1990s, Versace bought about three thousand pages of magazine advertising a year, often taking out nearly a dozen consecutive pages in a single issue. He once had a compact disc made of music from a runway show and paid for several magazines, including Rolling Stone, to carry it as an insert, along with a minicatalog of photos. In the late 1980s, Gianni had adopted a freewheeling approach to mixing advertising and editorial coverage in fashion magazines. He hired photographers that most publications (particularly those in Europe) couldn’t dream of hiring and had them take scores of extra photos. Gianni then offered the shots to newspapers and magazines, who happily published them as editorial layouts. His press office pushed the magazines to run the images just before an ad campaign broke, creating a seamless stream of Versace propaganda. Editors often put a model wearing Versace on the cover just to persuade Gianni to buy ads.

  As a result, a single edition of a glossy magazine was often brimming with Versace images, between the advertisements and editorial spreads, all projecting Gianni’s chosen image or star of the season.

  “Versace pioneered the whole ‘I’ll give you my ad campaign if you make it look like an editorial’ thing, which the American press didn’t buy but the European press went crazy for,” said Patrick McCarthy, executive editor of Women’s Wear Daily and W Magazine. “The London Sunday Times was running Avedon’s pictures of Elton John in Versace on the cover, as editorial. You’d see a magazine with a Versace on the cover, and Versace would have given them the picture, taken the picture, paid for the picture.”26

  Gianni usually played the good cop, charming the top editors of the fashion magazines to convince them to use his clothes. In turn, Emanuela Schmeidler, his longtime head of public relations, played the bad cop if she thought Versace wasn’t getting editorial coverage commensurate with the house’s ad spending. By the mid-1990s, Schmeidler was a legend in fashion circles, infamous for her aggressive treatment of journalists. Lean, with catlike features, a fake-bake tan, and long auburn hair that was always freshly blown out, she dressed like a walking billboard for Versace.

  “When I was at New York magazine, I did this story on the communications directors at the various houses,” Anna Wintour recalled. “I remember doing the girl at Versace and it was head-to-toe suede. That’s what we started knowing Gianni for. It was full on, everything matched.”27

  As Gianni’s shows became a must-see
for journalists, Schmeidler wielded her power like a blunt ax. Once she assigned two top editors from a leading magazine to the same seat at a fashion show. When an associate protested, Schmeidler snorted. “They are very thin,” she said in heavily accented English. “They will both fit.”28

  But Schmeidler was unstinting in the crucial game of lavishing attention on editors who might feature Gianni’s clothes in their magazines. In 1994, when Vicki Woods, then editor of Harpers & Queen, admired a skinny slithery gold mesh dress that Schmeidler wore to a Versace event in London, Schmeidler asked immediately, “You like my dress? I send you one.”

  Woods laughed. “Emanuela, you don’t have one big enough for me,” she replied.

  “Give me your size,” Schmeidler shot back. When Woods told her, Schmeidler, who often marveled at the pear-shaped figures of many British editors, winced theatrically. Woods promptly forgot the exchange.

  A few months later, a deliveryman arrived bearing two huge boxes. Inside, buried in layers of ribbons and crinkly tissue, lay a gold metal mesh skirt and matching top, a copy of Schmeidler’s outfit, but cut much larger—or “eased,” in fashion parlance—around the chest and thighs. In the other box was a black barathea dinner jacket with silk lapels and medusa-head buttons, cut long enough to cover an ample bottom. “With love, Gianni,” read a little note. Such a couture outfit would sell for twenty thousand pounds, Woods reckoned. The editor stood before it agog.29

  Gianni’s campaign to remake fashion, and to capitalize on his creativity worldwide, was succeeding brilliantly. Thousands of pages of advertising, the models caught in bacchanalian poses, appeared every year in the top magazines, shot by the world’s best photographers. The world’s foremost celebrities such as Madonna, Prince, and Sting filled his front rows, wore his camera-ready clothes to red-carpet events, appeared in his advertising, vacationed in his homes, and recorded music for his shows. The women on the catwalk were famous in a way that models would never be again. And Gianni had proved himself the superman of fashion.

  ten

  Diva

  oNE SPRING AFTERNOON IN 1994, DONATELLA STOOD AT THE center of a huge loftlike photography set in downtown Manhattan. Next to her was Richard Avedon, the legendary fashion photographer, hunched behind a large camera under enormous umbrella lights. An array of assistants stood behind the pair, gaping at the spectacle unfolding before them. The subject of their attention was a male model, buck-naked and gyrating wildly to music blasting over the sound system. The man, who had an Atlas-like physique and curly dark hair, was in fact a stripper whom Donatella had spotted in a dance club in Miami. She thought he would be perfect for one of Gianni’s ad campaigns and had flown him to New York.

  As Donatella stared, the stripper turned the show up a notch and began sliding a silk Versace scarf between his legs. Next to her, Avedon, his face a mask of concentrated tension, clicked away. “Oh, my God!” Donatella said, laughing at the scene. “Gianni is going to love this!” The final photo showed the man with his head lolling back, an orgasmic look on his face.

  By then, even as Gianni shirked much of the cosmopolitan, sexually charged lifestyle his clothes had come to represent, his sister was fully embracing the Versace mystique—and nowhere more so than on the Versace ad shoots. Indeed, as Gianni rose, so did Donatella. As the family business became an international success, she would be the lead player in the grand opera that was the Versace brand in the 1990s. By then, Donatella’s natural theatricality served the company well, if expensively. Gianni had begun entrusting Donatella with the advertising campaigns in the 1980s, and a decade later, they were productions worthy of Hollywood films. Under Donatella’s direction, Versace shoots had become notorious for their extravagance, their brazen sexiness, and their illicit fun.

  From the birth of his house, Gianni had always demanded the most extravagant ads he could afford. When he launched his first ad campaign in 1978, he spent his entire budget to hire Richard Avedon, who since the 1940s had been the world’s premier fashion photographer. Working with the top fashion magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, Avedon helped develop an image of women that reflected the times—freer and more flamboyant—with pictures full of drama and spontaneity. In 1955, for example, he shot Dovima at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. Avedon positioned the ephemeral American model in front of two elephants. It became one of the most famous fashion photographs of all time.

  Avedon’s collaboration with Versace would be nearly as iconic as his innovative early work. His theatrical style made Gianni’s clothes come alive. But after initially working with Avedon in one campaign, Gianni had to deputize Donatella to deal with the famous photographer, because Avedon didn’t want the pressure of having the star designer hovering over him. Donatella could channel Gianni’s wishes with a lighter touch.

  “Gianni came once, but he made such havoc,” Donatella said. “It was hard for him to pull back from his clothes and see how a photographer interprets them. He used to say, ‘No, you have to do it this way or that way.’ Finally, Avedon said, ‘You can’t come anymore. Send your sister.’”1

  Over the next twenty years, Avedon, a legendary perfectionist, staged elaborate shots of the Versace female models—for example, falling through the air or riding on the backs of naked men. For one shot showcasing Gianni’s 1996 home furnishings line, Avedon had a dozen massive mattresses made, covered them in bright Versace prints, piled them high, and slid the models in between them, to create a huge princess-and-the-pea effect, with Naomi Campbell and Kristen McMenamy perched on top. In another shoot, he hired a choreographer from Twyla Tharp’s dance troupe to give a jolt of drama and theater to the girls’ movements.

  The shoots, with Donatella orchestrating, involved dozens of people and lasted up to ten days. Avedon often photographed a large group of supermodels at a time, sprinkling in a couple of hunky men for the full sexual charge. The whole collection for the upcoming season hung on a battalion of clothing racks alongside long tables overflowing with shoes, bags, and jewelry. Some seasons, it took three assistants just to lay out the clothes. Avedon’s own Manhattan studio was far too small to accommodate the shoots, so he sometimes rented Silvercup Studios, a sound set in Queens nearly the size of half a city block, where The Sopranos was later shot.

  Donatella spent days assembling the outfits with several assistants, while seamstresses from the Manhattan Versace shop fitted the clothes. Each day of the shoot, hair and makeup artists spent at least six hours dolling up the girls in a mirror image of what was, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Donatella’s own look: strong eye makeup, ultratanned skin, and only a hint of beige lipstick, simulating the style of rich 1960s movie stars. Makeup assistants spent hours covering the models with full-body makeup, a gooey blend of several shades, before fixing it with a powder to keep it from rubbing off on the clothes. They put three or four pairs of false eyelashes on each woman. Donatella herself wore up to five pairs; to her delight, a makeup artist once found 1960s-era lashes made of real mink for her.

  “She was a maximalist,” said François Nars, a top makeup artist who worked on the Avedon shoots. “And the girls ended up looking like her. The more the better.”2

  During the long preparations, Donatella would float off the set to go shopping in New York, often coming back with gifts for the models and her assistants. One season she discovered a new skin cream made with animal placenta and brought back a jar for each one. Other times, she arrived with pricier baubles for herself.

  “If she was thinking of buying a diamond and emerald ring, she would come in and show it to everyone,” recalled Norma Stevens, Avedon’s business partner. “She was wild, with that blond hair and the tight clothes and her figure.”3

  Donatella made sure the opulence and theater of the sets spilled over backstage. Gianni was using the same supermodels season after season, and the atmosphere was like a family reunion. Waiters refreshed buffet tables of food all day. (Once, on a Los Angeles beach set with another photographer, Donatella hired fame
d chef Nobu Matsuhisa to bring sushi for everyone.) She booked masseuses for the models and blasted music to keep the energy high. Sometimes the female models’ boyfriends stopped by; one year, Johnny Depp hung out to watch his girlfriend Kate Moss be photographed. With all the high-drama clothes, gorgeous women and men, and creative frisson, the set was red hot.

  After each carefully arranged shot, an assistant would hand Avedon an oversized photo, and he and Donatella would huddle over it. The photographer would mark up the shot with a black marker, pointing out where the line of the models’ elbows or the flow of the dress broke the harmony. “My role was to tell him which outfits we wanted him to shoot and how,” Donatella said. “He showed me these huge Polaroids and I would say yes or no. It was scary.”4

  Avedon was so exacting that he approved only one or two shots each day. (Today, with digital photos and computer retouching, photographers take scores of images daily, and shoots last no more than three days.) The shoots cost a fortune. “We had a so-called budget,” Donatella said. “But Avedon used to work with the top models, the best set designers, the best hairdressers—all of whom cost a fortune. We just tallied it all up afterward.”5

  As the Versace mystique mounted, Donatella was leading a life of such operatic excess that one imagined she had hired an art director to conjure it all up. Her physical appearance morphed into a gilded Jan-from-the-Muppets look. She was rarely the most beautiful woman in the room—much to her chagrin—but she acquired a sort of mysterious charisma that made her the constant center of attention. Her high-voltage, Vegas-meets—St. Tropez style featured skintight, side-zipped tops in Crayola colors, neon orange nail varnish, chartreuse bikinis, and platform shoes with five-inch heels. She wore lots of sleeveless shift dresses in a variety of colors—but never red, which was Valentino’s color—that showed off arms that were as thin as wands. She chucked her wardrobe at the end of each season and bought all new clothes.