by Deborah Ball
American department stores were enthusiastic buyers of the new Italian designers. They loved the clean lines of the Italian clothes, particularly the jerseys and the prints, which were feminine and elegant without the stuffiness of the French designers’ works. The new jersey fabrics that skimmed and flattered a woman’s body and came in fun, colorful patterns were easy to sell to American women, who wanted relaxed clothes that still looked good.
In Milan, Gianni drank up the new volatile, cosmopolitan atmosphere, bringing it into his life and his designs. With its concerts, films, and theater, the city represented everything that was new and free for Gianni, a place where his ambitions were welcomed, not squelched as they had been in the south. He drank up everything the city had to offer, spending his evenings listening to jazz at the Osteria dei Binari, a club frequented by the young Milanese intellectuals, and going to lunch on Saturdays at Bice, a homey trattoria on a side street off Via Montenapoleone.
Reggio felt far away, and Gianni kept it at a distance. He made a clean break with Calabria, cutting off old friends and embracing his new life in Milan. Nonetheless, he suffered from the city’s rampant antisouthern prejudice, flinching when he heard the Milanese disparage the terroni, an insulting term for southerners that roughly translates as “peasant.” He soon shed his Calabrian accent. After his success at Florentine Flowers, Gianni was looking for other contracts and, fighting a natural shyness, he latched on to anyone who could help him.
“He really wanted to meet people,” said one textile designer who was an early supporter of his work. “I tried to introduce him to the Milan scene, but there was a certain amount of jealousy among the fashion crowd then. And the fact that he came from Reggio Calabria didn’t help in Milan in those days. But he was willing to sell a piece of himself in order to be successful.”16
In 1973, Gianni received another new opportunity: The owner of Genny, a clothing line that largely consisted of abiti da cerimonia, or matronly dresses and tailored jackets and skirts for occasions such as baptisms and weddings, approached him to revamp the company to appeal to a younger audience.
“I saw this young man who had this dark beard and fair skin,” the owner’s wife, Donatella Girombelli, recalled. “He seemed so terribly shy, almost scared.” She and her husband, Arnaldo, offered him a contract to design for Genny. Gianni hesitated before accepting. He found Genny very provincial, and he had offers from more established houses. But Arnaldo Girombelli, who rode around in a chauffeured Bentley, offered him a high salary and a budget for everything from costly fabrics to special finishings, something he could only have dreamed of at most other companies.
Working for a large enterprise for the first time was a new challenge for Gianni—one that revealed his lack of professional design training. Unlike many other working designers of the era, Gianni didn’t know how to sketch in a formal way. At Genny he scratched out boxy silhouettes and worked with a group of assistants who fleshed them out into finished sketches that pattern cutters then turned into garment models rendered in cheap fabric. Gianni found inspiration once he had a real sample garment in his hands. He pinned and snipped at it, adding details such as beading or changing the cut of a skirt. Often—in a method that would become his distinctive way of working—he draped the fabric on a mannequin and pinned, trimmed, and arranged it until a dress took shape, almost as if it were a sculpture.
At Genny, Gianni displayed the first flashes of inspiration that would later become his signature looks. He was a man of mixtures, combining masculine with feminine, sportswear with dressier items, leather with silk—and thus breaking long-standing rules of fashion. In one early collection, he made a brown and white jacket of Prince of Wales fabric, a check fabric used for men’s suits, to wear over a silk shirt printed with roses. He had lace embroidered into pied-de-poule fabric, that staple of ladylike suits. His clothes were sweet—clean, but with “a touch of poetry,” according to Girombelli—displaying little of the aggressively sexy look he would later become famous for.
Department stores, particularly in the United States, snapped the collections up. Between 1973 and 1980, Genny’s sales tripled to ten billion lire ($6 million). Gianni soon took on another contract, with the manufacturer that produced Callaghan, a rather bland ready-to-wear line. Recognition now came swiftly. In 1975, Italian Vogue featured his clothes in a spread dubbed “Versace Versatile.” The next year, French Vogue highlighted several of his Callaghan designs, saying, “With its youthful stamp, Versace’s style is beginning to represent Italian fashion at the cutting edge. Unknown just three years ago, he is one of the designers that people are talking most about.”17
Gianni worked tirelessly, as if he had to grasp his sudden opportunities before they vanished. He often woke in the middle of the night, struck by an idea, and started throwing down rough sketches. He rose at dawn to visit fabric suppliers and check on the samples at Callaghan’s factory in Novara. Always a reluctant driver, he frequently rear-ended cars in front of him because his mind was on work. During the week before a fashion show, he would work as late as 4 a.m., obsessing about which clothes to show and making last-minute alterations. He was so nervous then that his voice trembled when he spoke.18
“He was a Stakhanovist, an overflowing river,” recalled the owner of Callaghan. “He could work for hours and hours, until something was perfect.”19
Gianni constantly observed how women dressed, trying to work out what they wanted and how he could improve on it. One August while on vacation in Capri, he took a walk with a friend around the legendary Piazzetta. He had recently designed a jersey dress—the sort popularized in the film Saturday Night Fever—with lace at the cuffs and the neckline. He’d shown the dress in silk on the runway but had it produced in jersey, so that it didn’t wrinkle when tucked into a suitcase. He counted the number of women he saw wearing the dress.
“Ten, eleven, twelve!” he said to his friend. “Look, it’s selling.”20
But while the early collections were wearable and sold well, they hardly heralded the arrival of the revolutionary designer Gianni would become—the man who would invent new fabrics and new ways of dressing that would shock and surprise, and go on to redefine fashion’s vocabulary. While he came up with some inspired ideas, he still made mistakes in color and his cut, and his collections varied greatly in quality and theme from season to season.
Gianni’s early designs “were always sort of skittish and sexy and immediately comprehensible,” said Joan Juliet Buck, the editor of Women’s Wear Daily in the 1970s and later the editor of French Vogue. “There was nothing intellectual about them—they were like candy.”21
Franca Versace was immensely proud of the son she had nurtured and encouraged to strike out on his own, leaving behind the refuge of family and the comfortable bourgeois achievement of Elle di Francesca Versace. Yet a worsening health problem tempered her ability to enjoy her son’s success.
By the mid-1970s, Franca had been chronically ill for nearly a decade. In 1965, she had had an operation that sparked an infection that lingered in her liver and developed into cirrhosis, a condition that arose despite the fact that Franca had been a teetotaler. Over the years she grew sicker and sicker, and the doctors in Reggio didn’t know how to treat her. Soon after Gianni left for Milan, Santo took Franca to a clinic in Modena, near Bologna, that specialized in liver disease. There, the doctors told him his mother was gravely ill. Franca began to shuttle between Reggio and the Modena clinic, where she submitted to debilitating treatments. Gianni, devastated, visited often, bringing her packs of newspapers and magazines to distract her from her misery. She loved to play cards, keeping a deck in her nightshirt, and she and her younger son played for hours in her hospital room.
Whenever she felt well enough, Franca visited Milan, spending weeks at a time with Gianni, who took her to meetings with business partners. She sat in the audience at his shows and eavesdropped on what other people said about her son’s collection, then relayed it all—both positive
and negative—to Gianni.22 (To Gianni’s disappointment, Nino felt entirely out of place in his son’s new world and refused to attend any of his shows.)
Though pale and clearly very ill, she insisted on helping during the stressful days before her son’s runway shows. A woman accustomed to the quality and care of handmade garments, she grew agitated during her visits to the Genny and Callaghan factories, pointing out imperfections, insisting that the workers redo garments. “How can you send this thing onto the runway?” she would ask Gianni. “Just look at this hem!”
When Gianni’s best pattern cutter fell ill and an assistant botched a series of skirts, “she repinned them and had me hold up an edge,” recalled Franco Lussana, one of Gianni’s first employees. “She took a pair of scissors and sliced off an edge. They were perfect.”23 At the end of some of Gianni’s first shows, Franca would burst into tears as she rushed backstage, immensely proud of her son. Gianni, exhausted, would hug her hard, cracking jokes to keep from crying himself.24
“I don’t even know where to begin to describe what Gianni is becoming!” Franca, shaking her head, told friends when she went home to Reggio. “There were so many people there! Who knows what he could become one day?”
four
Sister, Playmate, Confidante
bY HIS THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY IN 1976, GIANNI VERSACE HAD achieved a level of success that Franca—or Nino—had never expected for him. His contracts paid him the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—an impressive sum at the time for the fashion industry. Yet, he was still just one of many Italian designers creating for commercial houses. Moreover, little in the style of his clothes made him hugely distinctive. Still a journeyman, one of the many fashion folk thriving in the fast, mercurial, and uncharted territory of Milanese fashion—which itself was still an outlying province in the world of fashion—Gianni had to find his own vision if he wanted to become a designing force.
Early on, Gianni’s search for a stylish new ideal settled on his little sister. Even when she was a little girl, Gianni saw her as his emerging muse. By the time Donatella was about eleven and Gianni was twenty, he had already started to make her over in his image of a modern, free-spirited woman. Gianni convinced the preteen to have highlights put in her light brown hair. He brought her to a young hairdresser who was a close friend of Gianni’s. As Donatella got older, her brother kept pushing her to go lighter and lighter. “At 14, I was a little blonde,” she recalled. “At 16, I was platinum. Gianni was delighted. My mother was not.”1
Growing up, Donatella wasn’t the prettiest young woman in Reggio; her best feature was a smooth alabaster complexion that tanned easily. Like most Calabrian women, Donatella was petite—no more than five foot three—but she had the thick hands and chunky legs characteristic of many southerners. Starting in her girlhood and continuing through the rest of her life, she hated her stubby legs, and as a teenager she took to wearing towering heels. Egged on by Gianni, Donatella got up at 6 a.m. to style her hair and apply heavy makeup before going to school. Her big brother then helped sneak her out of the house to avoid Franca’s wrath should she see her adolescent daughter made up like Cleopatra.2
“I was terrified of my mother—much more than my father,” Donatella would relate years later. “She was the one who would say something about what I was wearing, not my father. She could give me this look. But at the same time, she was a very open-minded person.”3
Like most Calabrian teenagers, she lived at the beach. Starting in the spring, she and her girlfriends spent hours on the wide, sandy shores on the Ionic coast, roasting under the southern sun without even an umbrella or lounge chair. Sometimes, just hours before heading to the beach, she would buy fabric at a shop, take it to her mother’s seamstresses, and ask them to whip up a bikini for her. The seamstresses would, of course, comply; from her parents to their employees to her two brothers, everyone in young Donatella’s life would spoil her straight through her adolescence. For instance, as a teenager, Donatella developed a love for face and body creams that would nearly become an obsession as an adult. She often stopped at a local profumeria near her house and stocked up on the latest potions, with little regard for the cost. “Santo will come by to pay the bill,” she told the shop owner. Without fail, her older brother duly complied.
For his part, when he still lived in Reggio, Gianni treated Donatella like an adult, taking her to discos and concerts on the beach when she was not yet a teen. While Donatella’s girlfriends were rarely allowed to go to nightclubs as young women, Franca gave in because she knew Gianni would be with her. On many evenings, Donatella and Gianni would stay up late talking in the living room, and then go out, not to return until nearly dawn.
“They would go out for a walk after dinner and wouldn’t come home until 4 a.m.,” Zia Nora remembered. “I was so worried. I used to stay up and wait for them.”4 Franca, too, would worry, concerned about the risks involved in growing up too fast—risks that Gianni made real.
“He had me do things that were impossible at my age,” Donatella recalled. “By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I was already an adult. My mother was furious.”5
For Gianni, Donatella was not just an inspiring and vivacious female but a useful companion around town. His growing bond with his little sister helped ease the problem of being gay in Reggio. While he never spoke of his homosexuality with Santo, he confided most things to Donatella, and his emergent sexual orientation was obvious to her. He was happy to take her with him everywhere because the presence of a girl helped draw attention away from the fact that he was always hanging out with other young men. He was feeling more and more suffocated in Reggio, and Donatella, who was maturing into a hip teenager, was like oxygen to him. As confidante, muse, and alter ego, Donatella would flourish in her brother’s company for more than a decade before she would start to chafe at the confines of that intimacy. During those early years in Reggio, it was as if Donatella “had come from Gianni, like a rib taken from his side,” according to one journalist. “She was the gay man’s version of a trophy wife—a trophy sister.”6
From its beginning, their bond left little space for outsiders; the intimacy between them came at a cost to their relationships with others. That pattern was established early. At fifteen, Donatella started dating Enzo Crupi, a local boy with black curly hair and a short, compact physique who was five years her senior. Gianni took an instant dislike to Enzo, who was from a modest family background and was sometimes churlish with Donatella, and he nagged his sister to dump him. He found an ally in Franca, who cared little for Enzo herself. Franca began to push Donatella to consider going to college far away from Reggio, to free her daughter not just from Enzo but from Gianni’s fast-living influence.
“My mother couldn’t wait until Gianni moved away because she thought he was ruining me,” Donatella said. “I didn’t get along with kids my own age, because I was so used to hanging out with people older than me.”7
Like Gianni, Donatella found delight and meaning in the Elle di Francesca Versace—not because she wanted to design, but because the boutique was her personal treasure trove. The shop sat right across from the family’s new home, on Via Tommaso Gulli, a side street that ran between the Piazza del Duomo and the boardwalk. The airy eight-room apartment had ten-foot ceilings and thick walls that kept out the noise and the heat. After finishing her studies in a small room off the kitchen, Donatella often went down to the shop, which became a natural hangout for her and her friends. She spent hours there, trying on the new clothes, fixing her makeup in the mirrors, and chatting with the shopgirls and her mother’s clients.
But thanks to Gianni, Donatella was not limited to sporting the sort of clothes favored by the ladies of Reggio. On his buying trips to Rome and Milan—and later London and Paris—Gianni picked out clothes that he thought would suit his little sister. While she wasn’t tall, she was very thin—an Italian size thirty-eight, or an American size four—and could pull off daring outfits. He filled his suitcase
s with clothes for Donatella that were far more fashionable—long knit skirts that fell to the ankle or high leather boots—than anything other teenage girls in Reggio could dream of wearing. By the time she was about twenty, Donatella was already wearing clothes by Kenzo, a Japanese designer working in Paris who was known for his avant-garde styles. Once, Gianni bought the two of them full-length leather coats that made them stand out like Manhattanites in their one-horse town.
Even by the more liberal standards of the 1970s, Donatella drew stares in Reggio for the outré look that Gianni molded for her. He sometimes sketched outfits for her and brought them to his mother’s seamstresses to make.
“Gianni always treated me like an adult, never my age,” Donatella told one journalist. “He once made me a miniskirt in patent leather, black, and a bright-yellow top, with patent-leather boots and blond hair to here. I was so young. We were lying about my age, telling everyone I was older.”8
While Donatella was shy and wary around outsiders, she was warm and generous with people close to her. She grew close to some of the girls who worked in her mother’s shop, who confided their personal problems to her. Donatella was also remarkably generous. If a shopgirl admired something Donatella was wearing, she often gave it to her. When one of the employees got engaged, Franca always let her choose any bridal gown from the boutique, including dresses by couturiers such as Yves Saint Laurent. Donatella would happily fuss over the girls for weeks, helping them choose their bridal outfits, shoes, and jewelry, and like her mother with her clients, she would come to their homes the morning of the wedding to help with makeup and button them into their gowns.