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

by Deborah Ball

  In 1982, Gianni’s experimentation brought him a breakthrough that would be one of the most important innovations in postwar fashion—and a burst of originality that helped forge the quintessential Versace look. Inspired by the material used to make metal gloves that butchers wore, he created an entirely new fabric. Working with a German craftsman, he invented a mesh composed of tiny rings of metal that were interlinked to form swaths of slinky fabric.

  Initially, he used the mesh to add some Excalibur-like detail to the padded shoulders of men’s black leather jackets. He wanted to use it for women’s clothes as well, but the fabric was far too heavy. The German supplier tried using different alloys until he came up with a fabric light enough for Gianni to make a slip dress. The garment was still heavy—about fifteen pounds—so the seamstresses had to line its skinny spaghetti straps with leather strips to bear the weight. Backstage before a show, it took two dressers to help the model into it.

  But Gianni hounded the supplier until he found a way to make metal mesh fine enough to drape. The fabric gathered in gentle folds and cowls without being bulky, yet was weighty enough to slide over the body, molding to a woman’s curves and glinting against bare skin. The metal mesh was a master study in the sort of contrasts that were becoming Gianni’s signature, combining the alloy’s cool toughness with the suppleness of traditional cloth. To make a dress, Gianni’s seamstresses had to unhook the hundreds of tiny links, using tiny crochet-type hooks, and reattach them according to Gianni’s pattern. The dress was also tough on the wearer: It was cold when a woman first put it on, and the links tended to scratch.

  Gianni adored the new fabric, which was like putty in his hands. He used blocks of yellow, green, and silver mesh to create Picasso-inspired patterns and floating Klimt-like gold leaves. For men, he made sleeveless muscle shirts that were an instant hit at gay clubs. The mesh gowns were catnip for Italian celebrities needing red-carpet clothes that photographed well. Metal mesh dresses would feature in every collection Versace presented from 1982 until his death.

  Carolyn Mahboubi, who opened a Versace franchise in Los Angeles in 1983, instantly realized how striking the dresses were: “We opened with the leather jackets and the metal mesh dresses. At the time, it was revolutionary. No one had ever done anything like that. I remember there was a Nina Ricci shop near us, and [the French designer] just looked so old compared to Versace.”14

  Gianni went on to prod his silk, cotton, and wool suppliers to make their own breakthroughs. Normally, while assembling a new collection, a designer would choose fabrics from samples already available through textile suppliers. Instead, Gianni pushed the mills to devise fabrics that were wholly original. He told silk manufacturers to finish the cloth with heat in order to create rougher textures. One year, he had the silk made in a black-and-white pattern resembling a rhinoceros hide, and then applied opaque gold patches by hand to suggest splashes of mud. Another year, the surface of a black-and-white-striped silk was corroded to create a concertina effect; on the runway, the striped pattern looked like rippling animal skin.

  Years of watching his mother cut patterns for clothes gave Gianni the confidence to experiment with new shapes and cuts that would have been clumsy in less skilled hands. In 1987, he showed a bright red strapless cocktail dress, its wide, overlapping bands of silk creating tiers that resembled opulent, slightly uneven wrapped bandages. Some of the bands had an irregularly placed pleat folded into them, throwing a twist into a dress that would otherwise have been unremarkable. The next year, he showed a red wool crepe coat with its right side cut off the shoulder—as if the wearer had shrugged it halfway off. The asymmetry worked because of the immaculate cut and construction of the coat.

  As he traveled more and more frequently, he trolled the world’s great museums for images to appropriate for his fashions. Once, he fell in love with Art Deco design and began transposing its sharp geometric shapes to his clothes. One silk sarong had the geometric patterns of an Art Deco design lifted straight from an art book, while a little black dress had brightly colored, Kandinsky-like embroidery. Whatever his inspiration, the innovations he made were revolutionary. The kaleidoscope of new designs, colors, cuts, and fabrics he came up with were like candy for fashionable women who were looking for something new and fun, yet sophisticated.

  By the mid-1980s, Gianni was working constantly, maintaining his outside contracts with Genny and Callaghan in order to subsidize the growth of his own brand. To channel all of the new ideas that came to him, he sketched in the evenings, on weekends, and during vacations, rising before dawn to visit the factories to check on samples or to meet with textile suppliers to go over new fabrics. His fashion show schedule was relentless: four shows a year for his own line plus another half a dozen for his contract brands. Despite the heavy workload, he maintained the perfectionism that is indispensable to those who have extraordinary success.

  “You could never, ever say, ‘It’s not possible,’” recalled Cucco, his assistant. “That just made him more determined to do it.”15

  Passionate by nature, Gianni performed his work with the spirit of someone who was doing what he was born to do—and was proving hugely successful at it. When he had a new idea, he felt as impatient as a child, pestering his team to translate a sketch into a sample. Punctual to a fault, he hounded his suppliers to deliver his fabrics faster. In meetings, his words came so fast and furious that an assistant trailed behind him, taking notes on what he said so that she could explain him afterward to his guests.

  He felt an almost compulsive need to check everything that went on at his new company. He stopped unannounced at the shops to check that the clothes were perfectly folded and that the windows looked right. When he arrived, he went straight to the stockroom to see that his bestselling items, such as print shirts and black cashmere sweaters, were available in every size, growing angry at the manager if anything was out of stock.16

  Acutely conscious of his image, he sat down with his public relations person to help write press releases. He had his designers make full-color illustrations of his clothes on models complete with faces and sylphlike bodies, using them as elaborate backdrops in his office when television crews arrived for interviews. He assiduously courted fashion editors, sending them free dresses and frequently inviting them to those family-style lunches with his team. Journalists who wrote favorably about his clothes received a large bouquet of flowers the same day, along with a handwritten note of thanks. But negative press reviews stung him badly. Once, a top Italian fashion critic who typically favored Armani in her reviews came for a private look at his collection. As Gianni, keen to impress the woman, took her through the works, the journalist was full of praise. When, a few days later, Gianni opened the newspaper to find her fiercely negative article, he felt bitterly disappointed. “What a bitch!” he said, bursting into tears. “She comes in here and gives me all these compliments and then turns around to write a nasty review.”17

  Wanting desperately to break through abroad, Gianni was determined to learn English in order to communicate directly with journalists and department store buyers. He never studied formally but instead picked up phrases from American songs, films, and reviews of his designs in the English-speaking press. As a result, his English was rather picturesque and heavy on fashion-speak. “Darling” was his favorite endearment, while “Ees so booring” was the ultimate put-down for people and things that were, to him, unforgivably passé. He spoke with a thick accent, peppering his sentences with charming mistakes, but he didn’t mind. Once, in 1981, an interviewer asked what had inspired a particular collection. “I tink of the life,” he replied, his brow furrowed, intent on making himself understood. “Dee life today is so speedy. I tink of the woman today. Is so deeferent.”

  “His broken English was part of his charm,” said Dawn Mello, who was buying for B. Altman, one of the first U.S. department stores to buy Versace in the 1970s. “He came up with some stock phrases for the store appearances and did this mix of Italia
n and English.”18 Within a few years, through pure determination, he was able to speak fluently, while still charming interlocutors with the occasional Italian phrase, most often “Basta!” (“Enough!”)

  Gianni’s vision of Versace’s future was so grandiose that at times it strained the people he worked with. For instance, franchisees were required to decorate the shops using designs drawn up by Versace-hired architects (who, in turn, paid a fee to the house for each shop they outfitted). Invariably, Gianni pushed for opulent designs that cost the franchisees a fortune.

  “If you left it to Gianni, you would have St. Paul’s Cathedral,” said Roberto Devorik, who owned a London Versace franchise in the 1980s. “He wanted everything. Then Santo would be more real.”19

  Gianni could be autocratic sometimes, believing that his vision was the right one. He pushed the franchisees to buy items even if they didn’t find them salable. Once Devorik refused to buy some Versace moccasins that sported garish gold medusas, reckoning they would never sell in the understated UK market. “But these shoes are a masterpiece!” Gianni protested, his high-pitched voice rising.

  “Gianni, a shoe can never be a masterpiece,” Devorik shot back. “I don’t like them. I find them very nouveau riche. If you want the shoes in the store, you can pay for them yourself.” Gianni, offended and angry, abruptly slammed down the phone.20

  In the atelier, Gianni was an implacable perfectionist who drove his staff to their limit. Once, the night before a show, he decided to replace his suits’ fitted skirts with light, diaphanous ones featuring a double layer of organza that had been printed with flower patterns. His seamstresses spent the entire night making twenty skirts—the flower patterns layered precisely to create the right look—for the show the next day.

  Gianni had “an almost paranoid need for perfection,” one top assistant said. “He threw his heart and soul into his work and he demanded the most from those of us who worked for him.” Donatella often melted the tension caused by one of Gianni’s outbursts, soothing the hurt feelings he left in his wake. Once, after Gianni brusquely criticized the work of an assistant, Donatella made up for it by buying the upset young man a plane ticket to New York to visit his boyfriend.21

  But Gianni knew how much he needed his staff and often tried to make up for the pressure he put on them, too. During the frantic days before a show, he brought his seamstresses tea and biscuits and gave each one a small, colorful bouquet of flowers, along with a personal message of thanks. When he was on vacation, he brought back small, thoughtful gifts for his closest associates.

  “He once gave me a silver tray that he found in Egypt and another time it was a caftan from India,” Cucco said. “It was wonderful. It made you feel special, that he had thought of you.”22

  At the end of 1985, when the family gathered for Christmas, they had something special to celebrate. By then, the clan had established a tradition of spending the holiday together at Villa Fontanelle, the sumptuous home that Gianni had recently finished restoring. In 1977, Gianni had discovered the villa during one of his frequent trips to Lake Como, the finger-shaped lake thirty miles north of Milan, where many of Versace’s silk manufacturers were located. He’d fallen in love with the lake, with its limpid light and winding one-lane roads. Since the eighteenth century, Lake Como had lured aristocratic and bourgeoisie families looking for summer homes, first from Milan, and later from England, Switzerland, and Germany. Today the cemeteries around the lake contain tombs of the many expatriates who retired to Como.

  One day, on a visit to Moltrasio, a tiny town on Lake Como’s western shore, Gianni discovered Villa Fontanelle. He was bewitched by the house’s history. In 1865, an eccentric English nobleman, Charles Currie, built the mansion, where, legend has it, he spent entire days wandering nude in the villa’s sheltered garden. Villa Fontanelle consisted of three structures: a custodian’s house, a dependance (outbuilding), and the main villa, a three-story rectangular structure with a large terrace overlooking the lake and a small dock. Currie dubbed his twenty-seven-room home Villa Fontanelle—or “little fountains”—because of the natural springs bubbling in a grotto on the grounds.

  But by the time Gianni saw Villa Fontanelle, the mansion had been largely abandoned, its walls swollen with damp and mold, their elaborate frescoes nearly destroyed, the mosaic floors in total disrepair. The newly rich found Lake Como drab and unexciting, preferring trendier vacation spots in Sardinia and Portofino. Many of the grand villas around the lake were empty husks left to deteriorate by owners who could no longer afford to keep them up.

  Gianni didn’t have enough money at the time to acquire Currie’s entire estate, so he started out by buying one piece of it, paying eight hundred million lire ($485,000) for the first small sections. A close friend bought most of the rest. (Years later, Gianni would buy out the friend to own the entire estate.) By the time the family gathered there for Christmas in 1985, Gianni had brought the villa back to life in grand neoclassical style. He hired Queen Elizabeth’s landscaper to claw the gardens back from decades of neglect. He planted yellow and red roses, citrus groves, pink begonias, and boxwoods, and built fountains with water running from the mouth of medusa heads. A swing hung from a large tree that also served as shelter for outdoor lunches. He installed marble bathrooms, restored the frescoed ceilings, and designed an all-pink bedroom for Donatella. Gianni’s renovation of Villa Fontanelle opened the doors to the renaissance of Lake Como, which would once again become a favorite playground of the elite, from Russian oligarchs to Hollywood stars such as George Clooney.

  By the mid-1980s, Villa Fontanelle was Gianni’s escape. He and Antonio would drive out to Lake Como, often with prospective sound tracks for his next runway show playing on the car’s stereo system. Gianni adored the mansion and, in turn, it was to be the site of some of the Versace family’s happiest times together. Over the previous few years, on December 8, the Catholic Church’s Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the traditional start of the Italian Christmas season, Gianni began having his favorite gardener erect a twelve-foot Scandinavian fir tree and decorate it with glass Christmas bulbs, ribbons, and lights. He had an eighteenth-century Neapolitan nativity scene set up in the main living room. Just before Christmas, Gianni personally helped arrange the pile of gifts under the tree. Nora and Nino flew up to join the rest of the family, where they played cards together for hours in the library.

  Nino, however, never felt comfortable with his son’s opulent lifestyle. Soon after the family began gathering in Como, he approached Gianni one morning. “Gianni, I didn’t sleep well at all last night,” he told him. Gianni, who had given his father his grand two-room bedroom suite, asked him what was wrong. “I just can’t get used to that big room,” his father said. “Don’t you have a smaller one you can give me?” Nino came to visit only reluctantly, always accompanied by Nora. Once, he felt so ill at ease that he slipped off to the airport to fly back to Reggio without telling his children.23

  But that Christmas would be a special one. Donatella had recently announced that she was pregnant. Gianni was thrilled at the news, although during the pregnancy, he was privately horrified at his sister’s huge weight gain, her arms and neck ballooning in size. Her condition hardly slowed Donatella down. She gave up neither her Marlboros nor her stilettos, even late in the pregnancy. On June 30, 1986, at a private clinic in Milan, Donatella gave birth to a girl by Cesarean section. Gianni proudly helped choose the name of his new niece: Allegra Donata Beck.

  eight

  Rock and Royalty

  oNE DAY IN 1986, ELTON JOHN MADE A TRIP TO MILAN ON business regarding a soccer team he owned. But while he was there, he had an important stop to make: the Versace men’s shop.

  For Elton John, visiting Versace’s store in Milan was like going to Mecca. A compulsive shopper, he was an enormous fan of Gianni’s showy clothes. In a single afternoon at the shop in London, he had bought as many as a hundred of Gianni’s elaborate silk print shirts. He had been known to order Gia
nni’s entire men’s collection, sight unseen. So when Elton walked into the Versace store in Milan, the shop manager immediately called up to Gianni’s office. Gianni hustled down to the store, ordering it shut for the afternoon so that he could help Elton shop undisturbed.

  That evening, over dinner, Elton found himself opening up to Gianni. It was a difficult time in Elton’s life. He was battling a years-long drug problem. He was also struggling with bulimia, and the London newspapers were constantly speculating about his sexuality. In Gianni, he found a new friend—one of the closest the pop star would ever have.

  “Elton totally opened up to Gianni,” recalled Antonio D’Amico. “Something clicked instantly between them.”1

  Over the next few years, once Elton stopped drinking and drugging and acknowledged that he was gay, the friendship between the two men deepened. Elton found Gianni’s natural exuberance a salve. For his part, Gianni loved to quiz Elton on music and pop culture, soaking up his friend’s expertise in a world he knew little about. They spoke every day, playing phone pranks on each other; Elton, who normally disliked being a guest in people’s homes, stayed frequently at Villa Fontanelle. They shared similar, outré sensibilities, both reveling in their status as leading lights in the gay world.

  “When I’m reincarnated, I want to come back as super gay,” Gianni once told Elton.

  “Gianni, what do you think you are now?” Elton shot back.

  Elton became a walking billboard for Versace, spending up to 250,000 pounds (about $400,000) at a time on Gianni’s shirts and suits.2 Gianni had his best illustrator make colorful sketches of a slim Elton dressed in Versace clothes, much to his friend’s delight. Because of Elton’s ungainly shape—narrow around the shoulders but wide at the middle—Versace seamstresses had to adapt the outfits. Elton wrote some songs for Gianni’s shows (“Deep in the jungle, a story’s unfolding—exotic, sexy, classic, Gee-AH-nee!”). Gianni, in turn, made the costumes for several of Elton’s tours for free—embroidered, fezlike hats, vests with bold Picasso-inspired designs, and leather tuxedos.