by Deborah Ball
The lights went up on a show that had little of the polish or strut of the big time. To break with the sleepy routine typical of the era, Gianni sent his models out in groups of four or five. Striding casually, the girls bumped into one another on the crowded runway, twirling willy-nilly and tapping their toes distractedly to the blaring disco music. The collection had a floral, romantic theme, with skirts resembling upside-down flowers, their large overlapping petals done in soft wool lined with silk or chiffon. Inspired by the military look that was popular then—in keeping with Italy’s tense political scene that year—Gianni also showed leather trench coats, their masculine aura softened by fuchsia, emerald green, and mustard yellow linings. Backstage, friends and fans mobbed Gianni, who looked tired and slightly stunned. But, despite all his effort, the press largely hated the collection, finding the clothes gimmicky and confused. Privately, Gianni had to agree that it wasn’t his best work. Nonetheless, he was on the map. A few months later, both Italian Vogue and French Vogue picked his trench coats to show in their fashion spreads.
Santo had moved to Milan by the time of Gianni’s first show, giving up an accounting practice he was just getting off the ground in Reggio. After finishing his military service in 1972, Santo had briefly considered going into academics, but instead got a job in a local bank in Reggio. He soon grew bored, however, and quit after just six months to become an accountant. By then, Gianni’s star had begun to rise, and Santo decided to take a leap and ally with his brother. He had another reason to go north. He had met a pretty, dark-haired woman named Cristiana Ragazzi, the daughter of the owners of Il Torchietto, a homey trattoria in Milan’s Navigli neighborhood, an area known for its nightclubs, bars, and restaurants. Instead of living with Gianni, as would be typical with Italian siblings, Santo, perhaps put off by his brother’s sexuality and his high-living ways, rented a 650-square-foot apartment in a quiet residential neighborhood.
“We went out a bit together, but Gianni worked a great deal,” Santo would say more than thirty-five years later. “Plus, he had his tastes and I had mine.”2 He spent evenings instead with the fledgling company’s accounts spread out on a table at Il Torchietto, while Cristiana’s parents brought him dinner. The trattoria soon became a hangout for the fashion crowd.
Gianni found the legal and financial side of his work stultifying; he was happy to leave such tedious details to his brother. Santo convinced a friend from the military to keep the books while he handled business strategy and sales. “That way, Gianni was free to do anything he liked,” Santo recalled.3
He had great faith in his brother’s talent. When a friend of Gianni’s asked Santo, “Why do you want Gianni to go out on his own? He’s already earning a ton with all of these other contracts,” Santo replied, “Because, if we have any luck at all, we’re going to be bigger than Yves Saint Laurent.” Later, when the friend told Gianni what his brother had said, Gianni said, “If Santo said that, he must be right.”4
Along with his siblings, there was a new member of the Versace inner circle for the early shows. Paul Beck was twenty-three years old. Gianni had met him at a casting call for male models the year he showed his first collection. Paul was among the passel of apple-pie Americans who were streaming into Milan as the number of runway shows and advertising shoots soared. He was a child of the American suburbs, having grown up in a spacious single-family home in Lynbrook, a sleepy bedroom town on Long Island, a forty-minute train ride from Manhattan. After earning a degree in environmental biology, he had moved to Italy, where he found modest success as a model—and where his life could hardly be more different from his suburban upbringing. Tall and strapping, with blond hair swept back in a feathery cut, he had the slightly guileless, flat look of an Ivy League jock. A few years later, after he’d lost the blush of youth, Paul would become a dead ringer for television host and soft-rock songster John Tesh.
Gianni loved Paul’s wholesome look and featured him in one of his very first ad campaigns. In one shot, Paul lay sprawled on his back, dressed in a white evening jacket, with a model swathed in a white fox coat straddling him. When Gianni staged a presentation of the men’s collection for buyers in his new showroom, he hired Paul, among other models. The next season, Gianni moved on to men better and more distinctive-looking than Paul, but he retained Paul as his fit model, the one who tries on the samples in the atelier. Paul was at his side during his earliest runway shows and became a fixture among Gianni’s group of friends. Soon, he was practically living at Gianni’s apartment on Via Melegari.
At the cusp of a new decade, fashion was in limbo, caught between the hedonistic, antiestablishment ethos of the 1970s and the glamorous, body-conscious look that would be popularized by the hit television program Dynasty. As the political upheaval of the 1970s ebbed, newly minted young professionals in the United States and Europe wanted a more polished wardrobe. Women were entering the workplace in force; they needed a professional look that was neither frilly nor overly masculine. Italian designers offered clothes that were elegant and crisp yet feminine.
As fashion lurched toward a new era, Gianni also searched for his own idiom. His collections veered from theme to theme—sweet Renaissance-inspired dresses one season, followed by black catsuits covered in Escher-like optical designs the next. Sometimes, the cut of a dress was clumsy or the print on a shirt was slightly askew. But Gianni gradually began to show the flashes of inspiration that set him apart. More and more he dealt in the startling contrasts—the mix of masculine and feminine, hard-edged fabrics and softer materials—that would become his signature. He combined materials that would ordinarily clash—leather and silk, suede and linen, denim and satin—using clever cuts and color to meld the dissonant elements. He paired leather jodhpurs with a wool double-breasted checked jacket and a soft crepe de chine blouse. In another collection, he wrapped a wide floral-patterned belt around a silk pinstriped jacket, the contrast making for an unorthodox but elegant look.
Gianni’s years in his mother’s atelier showed in the way he cut dresses to flatter a woman’s figure. For instance, when making Grecian-style dresses, he draped the soft fabric so that it skimmed the body and concealed extra bulges at the hips or waist. A ruche would smooth the waist and bust into a neat silhouette. He often cut on the bias, creating a flattering shape that flowed off the body and hid a multitude of figure flaws.
Season by season, his clothes grew in definition and popularity. When he made a flouncy skirt and cape in georgette silk in a gray and white Prince of Wales check, Roberto Devorik, an Argentine-born retailer who sold Gianni’s clothes in the United Kingdom, had an idea. Devorik was friendly with Diana, the Princess of Wales, who had recently announced her first pregnancy. The news had set off a frenzy of coverage of the blushing young royal, who was looking for a dress style less stuffy than the Laura Ashley—inspired wardrobe common to the British aristocracy. If Devorik could put Diana in a stylish take on the Prince of Wales theme, it was bound to end up in the newspapers.
“Why don’t you adapt the collection for the princess while she’s pregnant?” Devorik asked Gianni on a visit to Milan. “It would be great publicity.”
“Absolutely not!” Gianni said. He found pregnant women’s bulging bellies grotesque. “I would never dress a pregnant woman. You must be mad.”5
As Gianni developed his style, Santo struggled with the business side of the fledgling brand. He had none of his younger brother’s verve or creative nous, with little interest in, for example, art or architecture. Exuberant yet pragmatic, with an innate love of order and precision, Santo loved being the fixer in the family. He didn’t envy Gianni’s role in the spotlight at all and was happy to know he was the steady hand on the family rudder. He shared his younger brother’s volcanic energy—he slept little, ate quickly, and spoke in a lightning-fast patter. But he was by far the most expansive of the trio and the most charismatic, fixing a guest with his steely blue eyes and proffering a warm handshake or kiss on both cheeks. Unlike Gianni and Donate
lla, he reveled in his Calabrian heritage, enjoyed telling family stories and extolling the virtues of the deep south.
Although he was a born salesman, with a head for numbers and the sharp negotiation skills that Gianni lacked entirely, he got off to a rocky start. Soon after his arrival in Milan, he signed production contracts with the manufacturers who were already making Gianni’s other lines, Genny and Callaghan. But the arrangement was an instant flop. One order for one million dollars’ worth of clothes went unfilled because the factories weren’t ready. Other deliveries didn’t reach the boutiques in time. Crates of Gianni’s designs piled up in warehouses, only to be discarded the following season. Some stores, left in the lurch, refused to buy Gianni’s clothes for years afterward.
Within several months, Santo set about revamping his business model. Even as he was venturing out on his own, Gianni was still designing the other lines, collecting the rich fees that Santo had negotiated for him. Soon he insisted that Gianni receive royalties on them as well, and Gianni’s contract work started earning him millions of dollars annually.
“It wasn’t that they were writing blank checks for him, but it wasn’t far off,” Santo recalled. “The companies that Gianni was working for had to make money, but when things went well, we made money as well. Gianni started to earn the sort of money that had been unheard of until then.”6
Santo used part of the cash to assemble a small sales force dedicated to Gianni’s own line, opening an 8,500-square-foot showroom on Via San Primo, a cozy side street off Via Montenapoleone, where buyers from department stores and independent boutiques could look at Versace clothes. He invested in a joint venture for production so that Versace could keep a close eye on the factories.
Most important, however, he set up a network of boutiques that sold only Gianni’s clothes. At the time, there were virtually no singlebrand boutiques; most shops sold an array of French and Italian brands. But that left a designer at the mercy of the boutique owner, who decided how much to buy and how to display the clothes. Santo understood that Versace-exclusive boutiques on the best streets in Italy would offer Gianni priceless publicity and control over how to show and sell the clothes. He imported the model of franchise stores, which then existed largely in the United States. (There wasn’t even a word in Italian for franchising.) Under this system, owners of boutiques agreed to open a Versace shop and pay the company a slice of the sales of the clothes. The boutiques shouldered the risk of outfitting a store; Santo required them to use Versace-approved architects, who dictated a specific look for the shops. In order to create more buzz, the boutique owners pledged to run Versace advertising in local newspapers and magazines and stage mini runway shows in their city. Santo traveled tirelessly up and down Italy, looking for entrepreneurs willing to open shops on the best corners. To help potential franchisees, he extended them credit so that they could buy the first collections or gave them more time to pay for the clothes.
He aimed high. “We have to be next to Chanel,” he told his team over and over. He pushed them to ferret out a space on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris’s classiest shopping street, convincing skeptical French boutique owners of the potential of this tiny Italian brand. Soon they had shops on Via Condotti in Rome and in Porto Cervo in Sardinia, the latest playground in Italy for Europe’s aristocrats and trust-fund babies. The strategy was extremely risky for an unproven brand. If Gianni’s collections flopped repeatedly, the boutiques would quickly sink.
As he hustled to build up his brother’s brand, Santo grew into a natural, even evangelical, leader, hiring a clutch of young managers who venerated their boss. Santo, who slept less than six hours a night, had a hyperactive energy that galvanized his team. During meetings, he rarely sat still, jumping up and pacing the room excitedly as he spoke. “Versace is a religion,” he repeatedly told his team. He walked up and down the main shopping thoroughfares in Europe and the United States until he knew each corner by heart. With his high energy and willingness to take big gambles, Santo managed to channel his brother’s ideas and create a dynamic young business.
As Gianni’s popularity grew, Santo was juggling more and more—lunching with buyers who visited the showroom quarterly during the selling season, discussing sales targets with new franchisees, and courting bankers who would loan Versace the money to grow. In 1982, he made an around-the-world trip to open shops in Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. While Gianni worked frantically backstage before a show, Santo coolly greeted the buyers and magazine editors seated in the front of the house, talking up his brother’s latest collection. He was an ideal ambassador for Gianni, with his distinguished looks and slim, athletic frame and wearing his uniform of a perfectly cut black jacket over a collarless shirt.
This didn’t mean he always approved of his brother’s designs. When Gianni began creating clothes for men—silk shirts, loose trousers with exaggerated folds and pleats, and elaborate knit sweaters—the straitlaced Santo blanched. “Look, Gianni, you should be designing for someone like me!” he admonished his brother. “Look at what I wear—a basic jacket, a polo shirt.” Gianni scoffed at him. The clothes turned out to be a hit, offering men the sort of fashionable wardrobes that women had always enjoyed. Santo thereafter steered clear of the creative side of the business.
But Santo’s charisma and evident passion for Gianni’s work won over many who might otherwise have been wary of supporting such a young brand. In his big brother, Gianni found the figure that was often filled by a designer’s lover at other design houses; Pierre Bergé provided the protection and succor that a neurotic Yves Saint Laurent needed to thrive, while Sergio Galeotti was supporting Giorgio Armani in his new venture across town.
“Gianni’s great fortune was to have Santo as his partner,” said one executive who worked for the Versaces early in their careers.7
By the mid-1980s, Santo’s business model had clicked. As Gianni’s clothing sales took off, Santo signed a few licenses, or contracts with outside companies, to make other Versace products such as shoes, purses, and ties. Licenses were a quick way to boost a brand’s image, allowing shoppers who couldn’t afford a one-thousand-dollar dress to buy a little slice of high fashion in the form of a scarf or perfume. The licensees made the items and sold them to boutiques, paying a percentage of sales—usually about 8 percent—to Versace. (A license can backfire for a brand, however, if the owner of the brand doesn’t closely monitor the quality of the product, as would eventually be true for Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, and later, Gucci.)
But with profit came profligacy. One of Santo’s early tasks was to rein in Gianni’s spendthrift habits. When they were kids, Santo scolded Gianni for wasting his entire allowance on candy or magazines. But now, Gianni, no longer the black sheep of the family, had the upper hand. Gianni wanted to use the fabrics he liked, stage the extravagant shows he wanted, and use the priciest photographers for his ad campaigns. By 1986, Gianni would be spending more than 7 billion lire—or $4 million at the time—in advertising. He scoffed at his big brother’s pleas for restraint, and in part, Gianni was right. The company was growing fast. The house’s overall sales rose from 250 billion lire (about $150 million) in 1983 to 380 million lire (about $220 million) in 1986.8 But Santo, thrifty by nature, thought the money was wasted.
“Gianni didn’t want to hear it when Santo told him how much something cost,” said Anna Cernuschi, one of Gianni’s top seamstresses in the 1980s. “He hated being told how much he was spending. He wanted to be totally free.”9
During the 1980s, the Versaces plowed some of their profits into real estate, buying properties for investments or indulgence. Santo, predicting that Milan’s housing and office market was about to explode, bought a clutch of apartments around the city—but the biggest deal was also the one that raised the most eyebrows in the Versaces’ adopted city. In 1981, they bought a 19,000-square-foot apartment on Via Gesù, a small street running between Via Montenapoleone and Via della Spiga. The palazzo was three stories high,
covered about 45,000 square feet, and boasted one of the most beautiful courtyards in Milan, featuring a large compass composed of tiny black and white pebbles, with a second courtyard complete with a bubbling fountain flanked by flower beds. In the rear was a large garden with rose trellises, weeping willows, magnolias, and cedars. One wing of the mansion housed a winter garden and a greenhouse.
The palazzo had been the home of some of Milan’s most important families, including the Bonomi clan, who were prominent real estate tycoons. Much of the southwest corner of the building had been damaged by Allied bombs during the war. In 1946, the Rizzoli family, a wealthy publishing clan, bought the building and began to restore it. The family members were leading lights of the city’s postwar leftist intellectual movement. In the basement of one wing, they installed a projection room, where they held one of the first showings of Federico Fellini’s neorealist masterpiece La Dolce Vita.
When the Rizzolis were split by internal feuds and the downturn in the Italian economy, they began selling parts of the family home to the Versaces. Many Milanese were horrified to see such arrivistes supplant one of the most prestigious names of the city. Gianni would justify their dismay, bringing notoriety to the palazzo with his parade of rock stars, Hollywood actors, and royalty, all dazzled by the nouveau riche opulence. The home would become literally emblematic of his burgeoning brand. On the knocker of its main double door, Gianni noticed an odd, if ominous, mythological figure: the head of a medusa, the legendary demon that turns any human being she lays eyes on to stone. He had been looking for a logo for his growing brand and found the medusa fitting, a reference to a childhood spent playing among the Greek relics in Calabria. The medusa was an apt symbol of the Versace brand’s sensibility, at once classical, alluring, theatrical, garish, and dangerous.