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

by Deborah Ball

  The house seemed to be on the mend. The debt dropped to 20 million euros and the sales were stabilized. The year 2006 was about selling the new Versace to the outside world. Di Risio and his sales executives began to court the powerful department stores in the United States. The American buyers sat in the front rows of Donatella’s shows and came for private viewings of the collection in the showroom. But the memory of Versace’s travails was too fresh for them to risk their budgets on the house. Versace executives continued to press their case. They brought buyers to see the improvements in the house’s own boutiques, including the new range of plush leather bags designed by a new accessories design team. The ready-to-wear collection had plenty of stylish basics such as pantsuits, pencil skirts, day dresses, and sheaths. The house proved it was serious about rejoining the ranks of deluxe brands such as Chanel and Christian Dior by dropping the cheap licensed stuff, thus forgoing rich royalty payments. A modern new warehouse packaged a store’s entire order—from dresses to leather belts—in a single crate and delivered it on time.

  In the fall of 2006, Versace announced it had broken even for the first six months, well ahead of Di Risio’s schedule. The austerity campaign had worked, but it came at a heavy price. The debt was close to zero, but the elimination of unprofitable lines such as swimwear, underwear, and children’s clothing shrank the house drastically. The staff was half the size it had been when Di Risio arrived. For 2006, Versace sales were just 288 million euros—a fifth the size of Armani’s—and its profit was 19 million euros, a tiny fraction of those of bigger houses. Versace was off life support, but it was still a shadow of its former self.

  In February 2007, Di Risio, Donatella, and Santo flew to Los Angeles on a rare trip together. Donatella and her late brother were to receive the Rodeo Drive Walk of Style award. With three successful years to her credit, Donatella was finally receiving the acclaim of her peers. The evening would be a celebration of one of the industry’s great comeback stories.

  Donatella stayed in Bungalow 1A of the Beverly Hills Hotel. A salon-style chair had been moved into one bedroom. Her assistant, Bruce, a handsome Frenchman, hovered with a Bluetooth headset wedged into his ear, while Donatella’s hairdresser and makeup artist fussed over her incessantly. She even hired a hairdresser for some of the journalists attending the party that evening.3

  In the days before the award ceremony, Donatella smoothly ran through a parade of interviews. Asked about Gianni, she deliberately played down the comparison with her brother. “I don’t feel I am good enough for an award,” she said. A chauffeured car bearing license plate “DIVA 11” ferried her to an appearance on Access Hollywood. The anchor asked about the infamous honeymoon party Donatella threw for Jennifer Lopez soon after September 11, 2001. Donatella impatiently waved for the cameras to stop. “That was two husbands ago,” she said protectively. “We can’t talk about that.”4

  On the evening of the award ceremony, an eye-popping crowd of superstars, including Jennifer Lopez, Eva Longoria, Tyra Banks, Prince, Demi Moore, Drew Barrymore, and Stevie Wonder, lounged on white Versace leather couches in a roped-in mosh pit under an enormous tent. The 1990s-era supermodels, clad in Versace couture gowns, turned out in force. Donatella, wearing a mermaid-style gown, expertly held court, bussing each celebrity guest on both cheeks and patiently butting up against star after star for the waiting photographers. On giant screens, images of Gianni and his spectacular runway shows played over and over again. But in truth, it was Donatella’s night. Santo and his daughter, Francesca, sat alone at a table off to the side. Di Risio hovered anonymously nearby.

  Sharon Stone ran the auction, lacing her patter with a profanity-laced Donatella impersonation. About one Versace-designed Lamborghini, she cracked, “I love it so much my boobies stay right up.” In a show of good sportsmanship, Donatella chose Saturday Night Live star Maya Rudolph to introduce her. When the designer finally took the stage, she dedicated the award to her children.5 Elton John wiped away a tear as he sang Gianni’s favorite songs. Guns N’ Roses sang “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” while Donatella danced, her eyes closed and her arms swaying above her head, lost in the music.

  A few weeks later in Milan, Donatella sent one of her best collections yet onto the runway, with exaggerated A-line coats, gowns in white silk, and silver shift dresses. “Ms. Versace’s collection was a real testament to her brother’s genius,” wrote Cathy Horyn in the New York Times, labeling the collection “outstanding.”6 The morning after the show, Patrick Guadagno, the head of Versace’s American business, received a message on his cell phone. It was the head of Bergdorf Goodman. “Congratulations on a truly beautiful show,” he said. “We’re ready to move forward. Let’s schedule a meeting as soon as possible.”7

  Nearly three years after hitting bottom, it was all coming together. Donatella’s image had been rehabilitated. A larger design team was churning out fresh, sharp collections that were beefy enough to fill the boutiques, and deliveries were arriving on time. One by one, American department stores placed new orders. Bergdorf even put Versace on the cover of its catalog. Not long after the Milan runway show, Saks scheduled a personal appearance with Donatella for the launch of a new perfume, holding it in the center of its main floor on Fifth Avenue. For some personal appearances, the department store has to stock the line with staff because too few customers turn up. But Donatella was like a rock star, signing autographs and graciously posing for pictures for two hours. The store sold $35,000 worth of perfume.8

  The house’s new approach to celebrity dressing was also paying off. Given its limited budget, Versace had to be selective in targeting a small number of stars. At the Oscars ceremony that February, Penelope Cruz wore a spectacular rose-colored gown with a sweeping feathered train that was featured over and over again on the best-dressed lists.

  Even as Donatella celebrated the house’s bull run, she worried about Allegra. By then, Allegra had dropped out of Brown and was settled in Los Angeles, riding her bike on Venice Beach on the weekends and socializing with a tight circle of close friends. She was invited to the hot parties thrown by her mother’s celebrity friends, but she shied away from them. On the rare occasions she went clubbing in Hollywood, she avoided the celebrity-brat set and virtually never appeared in the gossip columns. Journalists frequently asked for interviews, hoping for a profile of the reclusive Versace heiress, but with the exception of an anodyne article for one fashion magazine, she turned them all down.

  Donatella flew to Los Angeles for monthly visits with her daughter, taking her shopping for clothes and CDs and trying to coax her into an occasional dinner at Matsuhisa, a hot sushi spot. When Donatella was in town, Allegra scouted out movies beforehand to see whether her mother would like something enough to sit for two hours without smoking. Even as Allegra approached her twenty-first birthday, Donatella still hovered, keeping close track of what she was doing and whom she was hanging out with. She even forbade Allegra from driving a car. “Why should she have to park?” she told a journalist once. “Who wants to deal with that?”9

  Allegra had been conspicuously absent from the February 2007 Walk of Style celebrations. Around the same time, rumors regarding her health began circulating on the Internet. One site claimed she was “barely hanging on to life” and weighed less than eighty pounds. In recent years, Allegra had become an icon worthy of worship on so-called thinspo or pro-ana sites, where anorexics posted photos of superthin celebrities such as Mary-Kate Olsen and Kate Bosworth as inspiration to starve themselves.

  By the spring of 2007, Donatella and Paul could no longer ignore the speculation. For the first time, they confirmed publicly that Allegra suffered from anorexia, but they denied her life was in danger and said she was receiving help. Their statement got huge coverage in the press, coming as it did in the wake of the death of two models from anorexia and a heated public debate about whether the ultrathin mannequins on the catwalks contributed to the disease.

  Allegra remained out of the public eye
until July 2007, when a commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Gianni’s death was planned at La Scala opera house in Milan. Most of the women in the celebrity crowd wore revealing low-cut Versace gowns. But despite the suffocating heat, Allegra was covered from head to toe. She wore a loose, black bell-shaped dress with long sleeves and a hem falling to her calves. Thick black tights covered her legs. Donatella stuck close by Allegra’s side the whole time, flanked by a bodyguard also dressed in black. Allegra dutifully posed for the waiting photographers, but refused to smile.

  The evening was also marred by a contretemps with Antonio D’Amico. Gianni’s boyfriend had struggled for years after the murder, trying his hand at launching his own fashion line and later opening a restaurant in the Italian countryside. He had even attempted suicide before finally coming to terms with the loss of Gianni. He and Donatella had scrupulously avoided each other over the years. When Elton John married his longtime boyfriend in the United Kingdom in 2005, the singer invited them both. But Antonio declined to go, unwilling to see Donatella. When the La Scala celebration rolled around, the family claimed to have invited him. “That’s a lie and they know it,” he retorted to the Italian press. “I wasn’t invited. Gianni wouldn’t be happy if he knew that I wasn’t there.”

  twenty

  A New Beginning

  mORE THAN TEN YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE GLANNL’S death, and Donatella continued to think of him every day. When she was nervous, she fingered that iron key to the gate of the Miami mansion. Despite the improvement in the collections, she batted away comparisons with her virtuosic brother, still keenly aware of her limits as a designer.

  Nonetheless, the anniversary marked a new beginning for Donatella. Santo often reveled in the past, happy to recount war stories from Gianni’s glory days. Donatella was more chastened but had made a certain peace with her failures and achievements. By 2007, the narrative of the renewed Versace, of a battered house rising from the ashes, had taken root. Journalists were gentle with Donatella, dutifully noting her lost years, but they spared her too many uncomfortable questions. She submitted to interviews with practiced patience, parrying the same questions over and over again with grace and good manners, flipping her Barbie doll hair as she served up the telling quip. She exhibited far less of the verve and flamboyance that she had showed in the past. She often spoke soberly about her own mothering skills, opening a window into the guilt she felt about how little time she’d had for Daniel and Allegra over the years. At times, she seemed almost fragile, her hands shaking slightly as she sipped an espresso from a Versace bone china cup, and she still became endearingly nervous during television appearances.

  The fashion business, with its bottomless hunger for something new, had become a treadmill for designers who must churn out frequent flash collections in between their semiannual runway shows. Donatella worked hard, going months at a time without a day off. Long-haul airplane trips became a rare escape, when she was unreachable for hours. She rarely dated and she admitted a certain loneliness, but she had long grown fatalistic about relationships.

  She still visited the limestone grotto on the grounds of the villa in Como that housed the gilt box containing Gianni’s ashes, next to a framed photograph and a silver crucifix. On the day of the tenth anniversary, Donatella had sent to Villa Fontanelle five dozen red roses—Gianni would have been sixty that year—along with a single gardenia slipped in at the request of Allegra. But otherwise, Santo and Donatella rarely went to the Lake Como retreat.

  For months at a time, the house that had sheltered the family’s best private and public moments—Allegra’s baptism, Donatella’s wedding, lazy visits with celebrity friends, a garden full of toys and children’s laughter, and many dazzling parties—was an empty shell. The large salon where a huge Christmas tree used to stand each year was barren, the maids dusting off Gianni’s beloved books and the desk where he sketched for hours. In the garden, the gliding swing under a magnolia tree where Gianni and Donatella often sat together was empty. In the living room, the speed dial on the phone was like a clock that stopped the moment Gianni died: New York Casa, Miami Casa, A. Wintour, Avedon Studio.1 The villa was a reminder of what life might have been had Gianni not been murdered that awful summer. Donatella and Santo had long stopped celebrating holidays together there. Indeed, Santo went there less and less often as he considered a new career in Italian politics, and his children left to attend college in New York and London. (In spring 2008, Santo was elected a member of parliament, representing Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right party.)

  Ten years after Gianni’s murder, Santo and Donatella decided it was time to sell Villa Fontanelle. In early 2008, a Russian millionaire bought it for 35 million euros. Before handing over the villa, the siblings moved their brother’s ashes to a small mausoleum deep inside the gardens of Via Gesù.

  Versace’s success remained uncertain in the years that followed. The violent economic downturn in the fall of 2008 hit the luxury sector hard. That holiday season was the worst in memory. By Thanksgiving weekend, department stores such as Saks had slashed the prices of its fall clothing, bags, and shoes by as much as 70 percent. Global sales of luxury goods dropped by one-fourth that month. Bulgari canceled virtually all of its planned new store openings, while Prada wallets turned up in the discount bins of Walmart. Yet the rebirth of Versace left it on far more solid ground to face the dire economic situation than would have been the case several years earlier. Back then, a recession of that magnitude would doubtlessly have swept away the company. Instead, Versace’s sales even rose slightly for 2008 to 336 million euros. But its profit was tiny at just nine million euros, boosted largely by the sale of Villa Fontanelle.

  Giancarlo Di Risio hoped his strategy of pushing Versace into the priciest products would safeguard the house, betting that ultra-rich shoppers would hardly feel the downturn. Versace began designing the interiors of Lamborghinis, including one half-million-dollar model, as well as yachts, private jets, and helicopters: five million dollars would buy a bird complete with gold handles, plasma TVs, and plush leather Versace seats embellished with a Greek frieze motif, one of the house’s signature designs. The house was also working on designing a seven-star hotel in Dubai, complete with an underground system to cool the sand. Donatella’s collections continued to win kudos with the fashion press, although some pieces look so toned-down and genteel that they seem to have little Versace soul. Her team was churning out six collections a year that sold at stores such as Neiman Marcus, Saks, Barneys, and Nordstrom. The accessories business had grown from nothing in 2004 to 40 percent of sales, and Versace bags often had pride of place near Chanel in American department stores.

  But as the recession deepened in 2009, there were signs that Versace was struggling. The men’s line limped along, struggling to find a clientele. Stronger houses such as Chanel began staging elaborate runway shows even for their winter cruise collection, while Versace could afford no more than a private showing with clients. For catwalk shows in Milan, modeling agencies favored houses such as Dolce & Gabbana over Versace, which hired far fewer girls. Indeed, the March 2009 season in Milan represented a sort of role reversal for Versace. The house had conspicuously few celebrities, planting just a couple of Italian soccer stars in the front row. A few blocks away, Dolce & Gabbana’s show resembled one of Gianni’s spectacles from his heyday, with Eva Mendes, Kate Hudson, Scarlett Johansson, Naomi Watts, and Lauren Hutton in the front row, along with Eva Herzigova and Claudia Schiffer, both former Versace models.

  Versace’s lost years still dog the company, making it virtually impossible to close the gap with its rivals. Louis Vuitton’s shop on Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris makes as much as 90 million euros a year alone, more than a quarter of Versace’s entire revenue. And as in so many businesses, the new frontier lies in markets such as China, India, and Russia, which are all churning out thousands of new millionaires every year. The challenge is to sink millions into new shops and new advertising in these markets, whi
le still keeping up in traditional regions in Europe and the United States. Versace has opened fifteen shops in China so far, but that pales in comparison to Armani’s fifty-five.

  In the spring of 2009, a bombshell landed. After five years at the helm of the house, Giancarlo Di Risio announced his resignation. For months, he and Donatella had been at loggerheads over how the brand should react to the deep crisis.

  For a number of years after her stint in rehab, Donatella had been happy to step back and let Di Risio have the upper hand in the house. The pressure of running the house after Gianni’s death was still fresh in Donatella’s mind, and she was relieved to be free of much of the burden for a time. Newly sober and feeling well for the first time in years, she was glad to have the space and freedom to tend to herself, as well as to Allegra, visiting the young woman frequently in the United States. Indeed, as Donatella celebrated one year after another of sobriety, the relationship between mother and daughter appeared to improve. Donatella and Allegra attended dinners and parties more frequently together, and Allegra began acting as a virtual cohost at Versace events, schmoozing a bit with retail executives, celebrities, and fashion editors. Meanwhile, Allegra herself became somewhat less reclusive, even turning up occasionally at nightclubs, once making the rounds of the hot spots of London with Kate Moss.

  As Donatella felt more sure of herself, and Allegra seemed more settled, she grew increasingly impatient with deferring to Di Risio. Di Risio had set up large teams of designers for the accessories business and homeware products that reported straight to him, not to Donatella, who sometimes didn’t see the items until they were virtually ready to go on the market. For several years, she also quietly assented when Di Risio asked for changes in her ready-to-wear line.