by Deborah Ball
Prada then launched a ready-to-wear line consisting of cerebral, pared-down clothes in muted colors that were the very antithesis of Versace’s bold, statement pieces. The unassertive apparel and bags were popular because they looked like nothing. Miuccia Prada, with her dowdy skirts, granny shoes, and almost unkempt brown hair, was a walking refutation of Donatella’s garish style. Women took to Prada because it let them feel beautiful without being perfect. Unlike Donatella, Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, shunned the beau monde of fashion, refusing to throw flashy postshow parties or court spoiled celebrities. In turn, magazine editors, stylists, and department store buyers considered anything Prada made a work of genius.
Minimalism was a foreign language to a man who viewed the world in bright, bold colors. Gianni wryly joked about his fashion friends’ mania for Prada’s designs. But privately, he found Prada’s prim clothes, as well as similar collections at Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and Calvin Klein, passionless and dull.
But Donatella understood the importance of the change. The models, photographers, and makeup artists she hung out with were crazy about minimalism. Donatella, ever sensitive to new vibes, was soon hooked herself. Her own dress style changed. She lost the colorful leggings, wild prints, and baroque jewelry and had Versace seamstresses whip up a series of pared-down Lycra sheaths for her. She embarked on a campaign to convince her brother to find a way to embrace the minimalist trend. Gianni obliged, in part. He came up with a collection of richly embroidered but simple sheaths, day suits, and dresses. But Donatella kept pushing him to go much further. She accused him of being infatuated with his own signature, glitzy style, which to her looked increasingly out of touch with how young, hip shoppers were dressing. “You’re dressing old ladies now!” she shouted at him, leveling a charge she knew would wound him. “You’re not modern. Your designs look old-fashioned. You have to move with the times!” Gianni fumed at her criticism, which made him feel even more defensive as he battled his illness.
Fashion houses had begun to bring in stylists, the highly hip freelance editors at fashion magazines, as consultants to help select the models, makeup, accessories, and music that would make for a hot, attention-grabbing runway show. Donatella flew in the biggest pushers of the new ascetic look from New York and London, hoping they could convince Gianni to change. But Gianni, resenting their interference, ignored them. He was the star designer and he felt that his instinct to resist the minimalist wave was the right one, no matter how many stylists Donatella brought in. With the stylists’ encouragement, Donatella hired runway models that emulated the androgynous, slightly wasted look that the magazine editors now found cool. She understood that the strapping girls whom Gianni loved, with their tanned, oiled limbs and classic pinup sexiness, were as out of place now as the big hair and big shoulders of the previous decade. Unbeknownst to her chemotherapy-depleted brother, she cast a new crop of models who had a quirkiness that verged on ugliness—girls such as Erin O’Connor, with her beaklike nose and boy-short haircut, and Stella Tennant, with her wan complexion and pole-thin physique.
When he saw the girls, Gianni exploded, demanding that she change them. He resented Donatella’s attempt to circumvent his wishes. “Let Prada use those models if they want!” he shouted at her. “I don’t want them.”
In 1995, Gianni planned a single men’s show that would combine Versus with his signature line. As usual, he left the casting of the models to Donatella. During the dress rehearsal, he sat in the front row as the models began filing out. It was a full-on display of Donatella’s favorite new look: pale, haggardly thin models with a punched-out look.
By the fifth model, Gianni was beside himself. “Basta! Basta!” he screamed, jumping up from his seat and waving his arms. He couldn’t stand another moment of the spectacle. “These models are terrible! They don’t even fill the clothes!” After a furious argument, he angrily let Donatella use the new models for Versus, but he made her find hunky guys with classic good looks for his own clothes.
In years past, their clashes had brought out the best in Gianni. But now they deteriorated into bitter battles, as Gianni refused to listen to his sister. As the chemotherapy treatments took their toll, though, he had little choice but to let Donatella lead. One season, Donatella used the new girls—with uncombed hair, little makeup, and dark circles under their eyes—in the ad campaign. When Gianni saw the photos, he despaired. Around the same time, when Gianni was most ill, she came up with a couture collection almost entirely on her own, featuring dresses made of white plastic. Donatella hired Madonna to wear the clothes in ads that year. Gianni hated it.
Meanwhile, as the tensions rose between Donatella and Gianni, problems were also brewing with Santo. One day, after a couture show in Paris, Gianni and Antonio spent an afternoon trolling the antiques galleries in Paris for furnishings for the Miami house. Gianni had been a spendthrift since he was a kid, but now, with the company’s fortunes soaring, he had become an almost compulsive shopper. That afternoon, he bought a Luigi XIV console and a boiserie with pink marble and gold embellishments, among other things. When the pair returned to their top-floor suites at the Ritz, Antonio gasped as he worked out that Gianni had spent 1.2 billion lire ($750,000) in just four hours.
“I’ve got to furnish my houses somehow!” Gianni said in response. “In any case, money is meant to be spent.”4
Just as when they were children, it fell to Santo to keep his prodigal brother in check. “I never told Gianni what he could really spend,” recalled Santo. “If I knew he could afford to spend one hundred, I told him he could spend ten. And then he would spend twenty.” Gianni visited antiques dealers and art galleries, coming away with a long list of objects he’d picked out. Typically, his assistant then sent the list to Santo, who often tried to convince Gianni to drop some items. Gianni hated it when his big brother nagged him to pare back the orders he’d placed. “You’re going to make me look bad!” he shouted, resentful that his brother should try to dictate what he could do.
But more and more frequently, Gianni spent so much that his own dividends from the company didn’t cover his bills, and Santo had to scramble to pay for his brother’s works of art and opulent houses. As a result, he used the company’s money to buy Gianni’s toys so that the company—not Gianni personally—became the owner of the houses and art collection. Gianni’s spending habits infuriated Santo. Gianni made no distinction between the company’s money and his own wealth. The question of whether his siblings, who had large stakes in the house, agreed with how he spent the company’s money didn’t matter to him. Santo had always been scrupulous about keeping his own finances separate from the company’s, while Donatella’s and Gianni’s homes, art work, and personal wealth were mostly on Versace’s books.
But in Gianni’s mind, the company was his, the fruit of his own sweat and tears. He felt his siblings had ridden the coattails of his success for years, and he resented it. He couldn’t countenance Santo’s recriminations about his spending. When they were kids, Santo used to give his little brother money when Gianni had spent all of his allowance; as adults, Gianni still expected Santo to clean up after him.
Antonio sometimes egged Gianni on in his resentments. “I don’t understand why you are the one to do everything and then you have to split it all with your brother and sister, while they take care of themselves,” he told him.
Gianni’s spending increased a notch in 1994. As soon as he finished the lavish Miami villa, he set his sights on a grand new townhouse at Sixty-fourth Street near Fifth Avenue in New York. He spent $7.5 million to buy the eleven-thousand-square-foot spread, which was double the width of a normal brownstone and boasted a ballroom on one floor and a master bathroom that occupied nearly half of another floor. He then sank millions more into restoring it, adding two floors and a roof garden.
He decided the house would be a showcase for his new passion for contemporary art. His name was now famous around the globe, but he wanted to prove to the world that he
had truly arrived. He began commissioning works from hot Manhattan artists such as Julian Schnabel and then went on a shopping spree, snapping up works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Roy Lichtenstein. But it was his fixation with Picasso that sparked a battle royal with Santo. Gianni set out to assemble a world-class collection of the great artist’s works, buying nearly twenty pieces, including Fillette au Bateau, a 1938 painting of the artist’s daughter Maya, and Femme Assise Sur Une Chaise, a portrait of Dora Maar, one of Picasso’s longtime lovers. Perhaps spurred by his brush with mortality, Gianni wanted to assemble a show-stopping collection that would demonstrate that he had reached a new level in terms of fame, wealth, and cultural taste. He could live his days literally surrounded by the work of one of the world’s greatest artists. Meanwhile, some friends privately felt that Gianni was becoming something of a megalomaniac.
But Gianni’s shopping spree cost him dearly at home. In 1996, when Santo saw the bill, he exploded. As Gianni’s spending escalated, Santo, feeling heavy pressure to invest enough in the company to keep up with growing rivals, was losing his patience more and more often with his younger brother. The Picassos were the last straw. “You asked me for three million dollars for the house and then you present me with a bill for twenty-three million?” he shouted at his brother. “Do you know how many shops we could buy with that money?”
“The company is mine!” Gianni retorted. “I built it and I want to enjoy my money.” Gianni knew that he had the last word in arguments over money because he was the driving force at the company, but his brother’s harping bothered him enormously. In turn, Santo could do little except find small ways to exert control over Gianni. Around the same time, when the bank called Santo to say that Gianni had hit the limit on his credit cards, Santo refused to authorize an increase, leaving his brother without credit for the rest of the month. But Santo would take little satisfaction at his petty victory in cutting off Gianni’s credit. Indeed, the battles with his brother over money would soon become the biggest regret of Santo’s life.
In early 1996, Gianni’s doctors found that his cancer had gone into remission, and his health was rapidly returning. The illness had changed him. “When, after the analyses, counteranalyses, CAT scans, and so on, I realized that it was possible that at not even fifty years old I could just … go, I said to myself, ‘Well, every day that I live from now on—it’s my party,’” he later told a journalist.5
He was determined to make some changes. Now that he was stronger than ever, the rising anger he felt toward his siblings boiled over, and he became more heavy-handed and aggressive with Donatella and Santo. He wanted to regain control of his company—starting with their respective stakes in the house.
Years earlier, Santo had engineered the divvying up of the shares, and Gianni, happy at the time to leave the financial side almost entirely to his older brother, had acceded. As a result, Gianni and Santo each had 40 percent of the company, with Donatella holding the remaining 20 percent. But after recovering his health, Gianni decided the division was unfair. The company had become what it was because of his talent, not that of his siblings. Technically, Santo and Donatella could join together to outvote him on big decisions. So he started pushing Santo into ceding some of his shares. Santo soon gave in. In June 1996, he sold 5 percent to Gianni, so that his own stake fell to 35 percent, while Gianni’s rose to 45 percent.
By the following spring, after a series of discussions, Santo agreed to sell Gianni another 5 percent. As a result, Gianni finally controlled 50 percent of the company. He had always known that he had the last word when it came to critical decisions in the company and in disputes within the family, but now his control was unquestioned. It was a significant shift. Nearly twenty years after the birth of Versace, the house was for the first time firmly in his hands. Santo and Donatella were powerless to stop him from making whatever decisions he saw fit.
But before agreeing to the sale, Santo managed to extract an important promise from Gianni—one that someday could rebalance the power alignments within the family. He wanted his brother to change his will to leave the 5 percent to Santo’s son, Antonio. Under heavy pressure from Santo, Gianni finally agreed. But it was a promise he wouldn’t keep.
By then, Versace was growing fast—posting double-digit sales increases every year—but Gianni’s spending on his houses, the art collection, and the flagship stores was growing even faster. The company’s debt was rising, and it was destined to grow further, with Santo’s plans to open more shops fully controlled by Versace. He needed a shot of new money to fuel the company’s next stage of growth. But Gianni was dreaming of buying more art and setting up a foundation to show it off to the world. He’d also embarked on a new real estate venture that alarmed his brother: He was shopping for a grand new house in London. The city, in the midst of the “Cool Britannia” phase that was drawing in hipsters in media, advertising, and the art world, had an edgy buzz it hadn’t enjoyed since the 1960s. Gianni had found a house he liked. “It wasn’t a house—it was a castle,” said one Versace executive. “I think he found it with Elton John. It was always dangerous when the two of them were together.”
There was a problem: Santo wanted to take Versace public. It was a huge leap for the twenty-year-old house. For the first time, outside investors would scrutinize decisions taken by the three siblings, and they would surely object to Gianni’s spending habits. But a stock market listing would give Versace the money to take a big step up in size and growth potential, and the time was clearly right. Santo watched as the stock of the Rome-based jewelry group Bulgari rose nearly fivefold in the two years after its July 1995 initial public offering, while Gucci’s stock market listing gave the company the money it needed for a hugely successful turnaround. He understood that if they hoped to compete, fashion companies needed the sort of money that only the stock market could bring in.
After a series of arguments, Santo and Gianni came to an agreement. Rather than sinking most of the company’s profits back into new shops or factories, they would pay out a larger dividend to the three siblings before they decided on taking the company public. In spring 1997, the company paid a dividend of 37 billion lire ($22 million), twice the previous year’s amount. Half of the money went to Gianni. That way, he could spend his money as he pleased, without any interference from Santo.
By 1997, Versace products sold in three hundred boutiques around the world, as well as four thousand department stores. Total retail sales would top 1.7 trillion lire ($1 billion) in 1997, or about 950 billion lire ($550 million) earned directly by the company. Investment bankers reckoned that Versace was worth between $1.6 and $2 billion. The plan was to sell as much as 40 percent of the company to stock market investors, bringing $300 to $400 million to the company’s coffers, and another $100 to $200 million to the three siblings personally. Half of that would end up in Gianni’s pocket, to be spent as he liked.
But before giving the go-ahead, Santo got a call from an investment banker pitching a tantalizing idea: a merger with Gucci. Gucci’s turnaround was one of the hottest business stories that year. Under the leadership of Domenico De Sole, an Italian-born lawyer, new management had taken a company laid low by family squabbles and made it the trendiest thing in fashion. But its success had also made it a juicy takeover target for a bigger company. De Sole was looking for a way to protect Gucci, and the banker had an idea: If Versace merged with Gucci, a core of shareholders, including the Versace family, could provide a bulwark against a hostile-takeover attempt.
Santo knew that a merger would make sense; Gucci was strong in Asia and in accessories such as handbags, while Versace’s business was largely in clothes and was stronger in Europe. Santo dreamed of an Italian conglomerate big and powerful enough to compete with French fashion colossus LVMH. Giorgio Armani might even be persuaded to join, thought Santo. For months, bankers set up camp in Santo’s offices, poring over the two groups’ books. But in the spring of 1997, Gianni vetoed the idea. Since Gucci and
Versace were roughly the same size, there was no way to engineer the deal and still keep full control. Gianni was unwilling to give up his baby. Versace, he declared, would go public on its own in the summer of 1998.
In August 1996, after the couture shows, a fully recovered Gianni took a short holiday in London. He was also planning a special treat for Zia Nora, who had never been to London. He loved to spoil Nora, flying her to the United States on the Concorde to join him for vacations in New York or Miami. He delighted in her amazement at his jet-set lifestyle, so different from her simple life in Calabria. In London, he put them up at the Dorchester and rented a Bentley, complete with a white-gloved chauffeur, to ferry the sixty-three-year-old Nora around to London’s sights.
When Nora arrived at the luxury hotel, she found hanging in the closet a black evening gown, with a butterfly-shaped pin at the neck covered in diamonds.6
“What’s this, Gianni?” she asked him in Calabrian dialect.
“You’ll see,” he said, smiling coyly. “I have a surprise for you this evening.”
The Bentley carried Nora, Gianni, and Antonio out to Elton John’s spread at Windsor, just outside London. Everyone was in good spirits, after a rare day of summery weather in London, with a bracing blue sky. Elton had planned a lavish dinner, with Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Hurley, and a surprise guest. At 8 p.m., a car pulled up. Princess Diana, who had driven herself, got out. Only days before, her divorce had been declared final with a decree absolute, and the newspapers were bulging with the news. Yet, Diana seemed happy and relaxed, and when she joined the group, the room lit up.
“Gianni, I have to apologize to you,” Diana, who was dressed in a slim jacket and pantsuit, confided with a coy smile as soon as she entered the room. “I’m wearing Moschino this evening. I hope you’ll forgive me!”
