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

by Deborah Ball

  In all, the Versaces spent 14 billion lire ($8 million) to buy the building. Gianni sank another 6.3 billion lire ($3.7 million) to restore it to its original high-classical style. In his private apartment, which occupied one entire floor, Gianni tried to re-create the look of a Renaissance piazza, complete with antique pillars, trompe l’oeil columns, Greek vases in terra-cotta, and Roman busts. In his bedroom was a canopy bed dating from Renaissance Florence, and his bathroom featured an enormous beige marble sunken tub and murals of neoclassic figures. He turned the Rizzolis’ old theater in the basement into a pool and gym. In 1987, after restoring the rest of the building, he moved his team to one wing, making Via Gesù his official new headquarters.

  The purchase of the Rizzoli mansion sparked the first questions about the finances of the fledgling business—questions that would dog the Versaces for years. How could the company have found the money for such an extravagant acquisition? And how was it possible that Santo had paid for the palazzo in cash? As the Versaces and their company extended their reach, opening new shops and new factory space and buying lots of advertising, the speculation only rose.

  The acquisition of the Via Gesù mansion, as well as the sharp growth in Versace’s business, fueled rumors of mafia involvement in the company. By the 1980s, it was practically a given that organized crime would seek to insinuate itself into any decent-sized business in southern Italy. In Calabria, it was virtually impossible for companies to operate without encountering pressure from the ’Ndrangheta, the local mafia. While the ’Ndrangheta is less famous abroad than the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra, by the 1980s it was becoming one of the most powerful crime syndicates in Italy. Born shortly after the unification of Italy in 1861, it sprang from gangs of bandits who robbed the rich, and it flourished in the face of government corruption and indifference in the south. Until the mid-1970s, it operated mainly in Calabria and was involved in petty extortion and kidnapping.

  But with the arrival of the international drug trade, the ’Ndrangheta exploded, spreading its influence first to northern Italy and then abroad. It became one of the largest importers of cocaine to Europe, channeling much of it through the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro. The group also skimmed money off public works projects and ran money-laundering operations. In Calabria, by the 1980s, the threat of extortion by ’Ndranghetisti became a constant fear for local businessmen, who were increasingly frightened by the group’s reputation for ruthlessness and violence. Since the 1970s, Italian authorities have succeeded in infiltrating parts of Cosa Nostra and the Camorra by recruiting pentiti, or turncoats, but the strength of the bonds among Calabrian family members has made the ’Ndrangheta among the most difficult of Italy’s criminal organizations to crack. The group recruits members on the basis of blood relations; sons of ’Ndranghetisti are expected to follow in their fathers’ footsteps.

  With recurring wars among ’Ndrangheta families making the front pages of Italian newspapers, some observers suspected the Versaces’ sudden good fortune to be a front for mafia activity. In addition to their rich investments in prime Milan real estate, they were opening stores all over the country and buying ads in Italy’s leading magazines—giving the impression that they were spending more than they could possibly be taking in. Such whispers enraged Santo, who felt they sprang from the heavy antisouthern prejudice in Milan and jealousy at the clan’s purchase of Via Gesù, a symbol of the city’s blue-blooded class. He and his siblings worked hard to establish the house, and insinuations that it was the fruit of dirty money infuriated him. He vehemently denied any connection between Versace and organized crime.

  Santo’s indignation was justified. In fact, the company began making a profit shortly after its inception. A close examination of Versace’s first balance sheets shows that sales of Gianni’s early collections took off quickly, providing enough profits to fund the capital increases. (The Versaces also bought the Via Gesù mansion at a relatively cheap price, acquiring part of it at a foreclosure auction.) For the first decade of its existence, sales of Gianni’s collections grew by double digits each year. Retailers who had easily sold Genny, Callaghan, and Complice, another popular outside collection that Gianni designed, were quick to place orders for the new Versace line. Moreover, Gianni was earning millions of dollars from his outside contract work, which Santo invested in factories, advertising, and a sales force. The new house was riding a wave of demand by baby boomers for fashionable clothing. As young women shunned their mothers’ seamstresses, new ready-to-wear designers such as Gianni found themselves in the midst of a sea change in tastes and habits. Moreover, in a market that was far less crowded with designer brands, it was relatively easy to open new shops, while licenses also offered a quick way for a new brand to grow. At the same time, Gianni’s designs had struck a chord. So by the end of the 1980s, Versace’s sales would double.

  The rumors have persisted over the years, despite a dearth of evidence of corruption at Versace. From the house’s inception, Italy’s tax police, who also investigate financial fraud and money laundering, audited Versace’s accounts year after year, spending weeks at a time with Santo’s team sifting through the house’s books, but they never found any evidence of foul play. In thirty years of antimafia investigations, magistrates in both Milan and Reggio have never discovered a connection between organized crime and the Versace family. White-shoe banks in Milan such as Banca Commerciale Italiana, who would have shied away from working with suspect companies, financed the house’s growth from the start. Starting in 1986, Santo hired outside auditors from KPMG to certify the accounts each year. But a decade later, Gianni’s death would reignite the spurious talk of mafia involvement, undoing years of effort by Santo to prove the house was clean.

  Even as Milan’s old-line families turned up their noses at the Versace trio, their city was speeding into a period of wholesale change. An industrial metropolis long before it became a fashion capital, Milan, with its flat light and paucity of world-class monuments, has never been a typical Italian city. Unlike Rome and its palette of burnt orange, warm pink, and deep yellow, or Naples, with its bracing blue sky, Milan is a city of grays and browns, the monochrome skyline relieved only by the rose marble of the Duomo. Even its most beautiful buildings are smudged with smog from nearby factories, and heavy bombing during the war left it pockmarked. During the frenzy of building to accommodate the influx of southerners in the postwar boom, the city replaced its wartime rubble with ugly concrete apartment blocks that grew grimmer with age, as graffiti and car fumes took their toll.

  In the midst of all this grimness, Milan’s fashion quarter is an oasis. Largely spared the pounding of wartime bombs, its eighteenth-century architecture remained intact. The main byway is Via Montenapoleone. The street was once the home of the food shops, stationery stores, and leather craftsmen that served Milan’s wealthiest families, as well as the city’s best seamstresses, such as Biki, the granddaughter of Puccini, who, in the 1950s, turned the great soprano Maria Callas from an ugly duckling into a poised swan. Via Montenapoleone was so elegant that delivery boys coming from other neighborhoods changed into their best clothes to drop their goods there. At the edge of the area sat La Scala, the eighteenth-century opera house that hosted the debut of a young Giuseppe Verdi and for decades served as the artistic home to Callas. From its birth, the opera house was a favorite for Italian aristocracy, who owned the private boxes and paid for them to be elaborately decorated, passing them down from generation to generation. Largely destroyed during the war, its reconstruction symbolized the rebirth of Italy, culminating in a 1946 concert under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. In modern times, it became famous for its pre—Christmas season opening, when international celebrities mix with well-heeled Milanese ladies, draped in their finest furs, diamond jewelry, and couture outfits ordered specially for the evening.

  The Milanese—the country’s bankers, industrialists, and entrepreneurs—have long prided themselves on their role as the Calvinists
of Italy, with a pinched restraint that has far more in common with their Swiss neighbors just to the north than their sunny compatriots in Naples or Rome. Yet in the 1980s, Milan changed radically. More than any other part of Italy, the city, home to Italy’s stock market, embraced the new greed-is-good ethos that was sweeping other Western countries and made a rapid and wholehearted transition from an industrial metropolis to one based on services. It became the capital of Italy’s second economic miracle. For the new yuppie class in Milan, inspiration came not from old-line families but from Silvio Berlusconi, a Milan native, who became Italy’s richest man during the decade by introducing commercial television to the country. With his soap operas, quiz shows, and imports of American fare such as Dynasty—all with copious amounts of commercial advertising—he wrought a cultural revolution. The Italians, sick of the ideological conflict of the 1970s, were happy to plunge into a new prosperity, snapping up the refrigerators, cars, and televisions they saw advertised on Berlusconi’s networks. The change was felt nowhere more than in Milan, as the city’s publishing, newspaper, and advertising industries thrived. A triumphant ad slogan became shorthand for the decadence and exuberance of the city in the 1980s: Milano da Bere, which roughly translates to “Milan is good enough to drink.”

  In this heady new commercial era, Versace and the other new fashion designers, having paid their dues in the 1970s, now took off. Boutiques pushed out the old-line shops on Via Montenapoleone, and the street became known as the Quadrilatero d’Oro, or Block of Gold. The sidewalks were immaculately kept, with carpets and plants, and the buildings were free of the graffiti that marred so many structures in Milan. The designers became local stars. Restaurants frequented by the fashion pack, such as El Toulà, a Veneto restaurant near La Scala; Bagutta, a Tuscan restaurant off Via Montenapoleone; and La Torre di Pisa, all buzzed.

  When they first arrived in Milan, Gianni and Donatella loved to make fun of the Milanese, with their nasal, clipped accents and heavy fur coats, ladylike gloves, and patent-leather purses. But by the 1980s, Versace had helped to create an entire nouveau riche social milieu that had redefined Milan itself. His clothes—with their bright colors, bold patterns, close fit, and unconventional new fabrics—were right for a growing class of women who wanted to show off more.

  “When I came to Milan, I found the sense of style here extremely boring,” Donatella said in 2008. “Everyone was dressed the same, in this very bourgeoisie style, without any sense of fashion.”10 Now that the Versaces had remade the style of Milan, they would settle into relationships that would bring tumult into the family—even as they were growing a business that could dominate the world.

  six

  Rivals and Lovers

  bY THE EARLY 1980S, GIANNI’S NEW BRAND WAS A SUCCESS IN Italy, with dozens of shops dotting the peninsula, and was breaking through in a handful of other European countries as well. But while Gianni was an emerging force at home, he was failing to romance the critical U.S. market. The editors of the European editions of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar liked the theatricality and variety of his collections, but the powerful women who ran the fashion magazines in the United States found his clothes flashy and trashy. Twice a year when buyers from Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bergdorf Goodman came to the Milan shows, Gianni and Santo courted them assiduously. Santo tirelessly chatted them up in the showroom, taking them through the collection piece by piece. Meanwhile, Gianni invited them to sumptuous dinners in his apartment and sent bouquets of flowers to their hotels. But the Americans were unmoved. They felt that American women, just entering the workplace in force, wanted to be taken seriously; they wouldn’t want to sport black leather biker jackets, peekaboo black lace gowns with beading applied like clusters of caviar, and skirts so short they were little more than belts. Some of Gianni’s publicity stunts didn’t help his cause. For a fashion show in New York, he once chose a song featuring a woman faking an orgasm. “I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming,” she sang breathily. The runway show was supposed to have traveled to Chicago, but the organizers there heard about the music and canceled it.1

  “It was very, very difficult for us in the U.S.,” a former Versace executive recalled. “We had boutiques in important cities, but in the U.S., if you weren’t in the department stores, you were no one. They saw Versace as something extravagant that would appeal to a limited number of shoppers.” And if the fashion professionals didn’t embrace the clothes, then American customers would spurn them. Years later, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art assembled a collection of Gianni’s work, the curators struggled to find New York society ladies who had early Versace pieces to lend.

  While Gianni attempted to woo America, Giorgio Armani’s courtship of the U.S. market was heating up, his clothes appealing to a generation of professional women. From the start, Gianni had sensed that Armani would be his main rival. Anna Zegna, the scion of a prominent textiles family, had worked in Gianni’s press office between 1979 and 1982. “Gianni used to have me count the number of [magazine] covers Armani had and how many he had,” she remembered. “It was a nightmare. There was this constant race to see who had more.”2

  Armani and Versace could hardly have been more different. Armani, twelve years older than Gianni, had a rigid, chilly character forged in a deprived childhood in Piacenza, a northern industrial city heavily bombed during the war. Like Gianni, Armani had a sister who had died in childhood, and he had a cool relationship with a distant father. And while Gianni, born right after the war, enjoyed a largely carefree childhood, Armani’s early years were marked by wartime hardship and fear. His father, a petty bureaucrat in the local Fascist Party, was imprisoned after the war; when Armani was badly burned in an accident with gunpowder, other children stole his crutches, as punishment for his father’s Fascist past.

  “I dragged myself home by clinging to the walls and crying because of the pain,” Armani recalled later.3 After Armani’s father was released, the family moved to a working-class neighborhood in Milan. For the young Armani, the blue bloods who strolled leisurely down Via Montenapoleone on Sunday afternoons were as distant as a dream. Gianni found his calling early in his mother’s atelier, but Armani’s aesthetic sense bubbled up in fits and spurts. An avid photographer, he developed a fascination with the human body that led him to study medicine after high school but he ended up dropping out. Working in La Rinascente, a middle-class Milan department store, he grew frustrated by the men’s suits on offer, their stiff structure dictated by London’s Savile Row tailors. Starting in 1962, he worked with Nino Cerruti, a prominent textile manufacturer in Biella, a region renowned for its fine wool, and he soon came up with a new vision of men’s clothing.

  Armani would ride a wave of social change in fashion. By the 1970s, men were looking for a new, more relaxed style, while women needed temperate, elegant clothes. Searching for a tailored yet sensual look, Armani experimented with lighter fabrics from the Cerruti mills and took the padding out of jackets. Sergio Galeotti, Armani’s exuberant, much-younger lover, nagged him for two years to start his own company. Legend has it they hocked their Volkswagen to help raise the money needed to rent a two-room office on Corso Venezia for a year. When Armani presented his first collection at a Milan hotel in 1974, his new concept of the jacket instantly revolutionized fashion by blurring the distinction between sportswear and business wear for both men and women. He tore out the lining, shoulder pads, and body-sculpting darts from jackets and erased the creases from trousers; he changed the proportions of the collar, lapels, and shoulders and moved the buttons. Fine wools, linens, and cashmeres allowed the slouchy jackets to skim the body. The cut was slightly oversized, which flattered the heavy-set and made thin people look charmingly waifish. The clothes came in painterly shades of grays, sandy beiges, and eggshell.

  Thus was born the Armani power suit, destined to become an iconic uniform of the 1980s, with its air of nonchalance, entitlement, and sexy cool. It gave women office wear that didn’t drain them of their f
emininity; men felt graceful and sexy in suits that also conveyed a sense of bodily mass and power. The success of Armani suits would transfer the locus of tailored fashion southward from London to Milan.

  “Before Armani, people thought of England as the epitome of tailoring, and then Armani stole the spotlight,” said Richard James, a prominent Savile Row tailor. “Suddenly, Italian was glamorous and English was fuddy-duddy.”4

  Americans immediately fell for Armani, charmed by his unstuffy designs that had more vitality than those of U.S. designers. By the time Gianni launched his own line in 1978, Armani’s clothes were already selling in Barneys, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdale’s.5

  “Armani was always going to be a bigger business,” said Ellin Saltzman, who was head of fashion buying for Saks Fifth Avenue in the 1980s. “In those days, Armani was perfect, tailored classic day wear.”6

  Then came a piece of good fortune that would prove the power of mass media to transform fashion—and launch Armani irrevocably. It was the kind of pioneering product placement that Gianni later copied with enormous success. In 1980, Armani’s clothes played a starring role in director Paul Schrader’s film American Gigolo. John Travolta, who was originally cast as the lead, had chosen forty Armani outfits to wear in the film. After Travolta was replaced by Richard Gere, the producers stuck with Armani (and Travolta remained an Armani client as well). When Gere, naked to the waist and swaying to rock music, lovingly packed his luggage with Armani shirts and ties, millions of fashion fans were born. Thus did Armani hitch his young brand to Hollywood’s star power. His company sales grew from $90,000 in 1976 to $135 million five years later.