aS GIANNI FLIPPED THROUGH FASHION MAGAZINES IN HIS mother’s workshop and began to dream of a future far from Reggio, he learned that there was just one place in the world where style was determined: Paris. In the 1950s, the entire world of couture was governed by a small group of French designers. Tradition dictated that hopeful young couturiers leave their homeland behind and come to the French capital. But the Parisians were hardly going to admit a brash and untutored young man from the provinces of Italy. The world would have to change before that happened—and it did.
Though he could not have realized it as a teenager sketching in his mother’s dress shop, Gianni would, throughout his life, contend with a fashion establishment casually intent on keeping out upstarts such as himself. Ultimately, he would be a leader of a movement that would upend the ruling class—and challenge the primacy of Paris itself.
From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it is hard to imagine how thoroughly the fashion burghers of Paris dictated what the civilized world wore. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Paris had been the world’s undisputed fashion capital, home to Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet, and Jean Patou. World War II temporarily shut down the industry, but when the Nazi occupation of France ended in 1944, Paris reasserted itself as the ultimate arbiter of fashion, as Christian Dior, Givenchy, and Balenciaga dictated trends that rippled throughout Europe and the United States. For a well-dressed American or European woman, French high fashion was the only choice. But Parisian haute couture was an expensive, time-consuming process that only idle, rich women could afford—about as far from the vibrant, homey workshop of Franca Versace as a lady could get.
In practice as well as in principle—from the cutting of the first pattern to the sewing of the final button—French haute couture was the most elite enterprise that existed in twentieth-century business. To gain admittance to a designer’s salon, a woman had to secure an introduction to the house’s vendeuse, or saleswoman, through a friend or relative. In wealthy families, mothers would present their daughters to their vendeuses when the girls came of age. Once a woman became a client, she had to submit to at least three fittings for each outfit. In the workrooms, seamstresses known as petites mains, or little hands, assembled the finished garment, every buttonhole, seam, and pleat finished by hand. If the garment was an evening gown or a particularly elaborate jacket or cocktail dress, it might then be sent out for hand embroidering with precious stones, sequins, feathers, or crystals. A day dress could take a few weeks to make, while an embroidered gown could require months. When the dress was finally ready, men in livery delivered the clothes, packed in enormous cardboard boxes and buried in layers and layers of crinkly tissue paper. Even the most jaded ladies felt a shudder of excitement when a new couture outfit arrived.
Couture clothes suited that exclusive and exclusionary class of women who closely followed the strict rules for dressing of the 1950s, when a proper lady had different outfits for morning, lunch, and evening. Unsurprisingly, the styles of that decade excelled in their extravagance and, very often, discomfort—as was the case with apparel from Christian Dior. His New Look was the dominant style of the decade, and it featured a fierce, doll-like shape, lavish ballerina skirts, tightly fitted bodices, and molded jackets that required an armature of tight corsets and padding to smooth a woman’s figure into a perfect, wasplike shape. But while undeniably elegant, French couture was anything but youthful—or sexy. In the 1950s, “women didn’t care about looking young,” said Karl Lagerfeld. “An eighteen-year-old wanted to look like a woman with jewellery and a mink coat because this was the fashion.”1 Two decades later, Gianni Versace would be part of a vanguard that would challenge these ingrained notions of the presentation of the body—replacing them with a glorification of youth and sexuality that would transform fashion and force Paris itself into its embrace.
Even though French fashion reigned supreme during Gianni’s youth, Italian style was beginning to blossom at the time. Italy’s clothing design sprang from the country’s tradition of producing beautiful, high-quality fabrics. Centuries ago, Venetian merchants traded silk in Byzantium and Persia. Como’s first silk looms were established in the 1500s, while weavers in Biella were spinning whisper-soft wool by the 1800s. Parisian couture houses had always bought some of their textiles from Italy, but after the war, Italian fabrics became even more popular because they were relatively cheap but of fine quality. Moreover, the Parisian couturiers employed Italian artisans to do skilled handwork, such as embroidery, and bought accessories such as shoes and lingerie from them.
In the years preceding World War II, Mussolini’s autarky policy crippled the Italian fashion industry, as designers struggled to buy raw materials and cut off exports, particularly to the lucrative American market. But when the conflict ended, Rome-based couture houses flourished. Italy’s upper class had become more accustomed to patronizing the Roman couturiers during the war. When Paris was liberated, the Romans resumed buying French couture patterns, but they increasingly balked at paying the high fees the Parisians charged. By 1955, Paris couture prices had risen about 3,000 percent over prewar levels.2 With their rich fabrics, lower labor costs, and skilled craftsmen, the Roman couturiers quickly discovered they could compete with the French houses, and regional dressmakers like Franca Versace began buying couture patterns there. Italian couturiers soon settled on a style that was much less fussy than the Parisian look, with its abundant flounces, flourishes, and bows. Italian clothes were simpler in line, and used good-quality, soft materials, elegant draping, and vibrant colors to create a fresh, more easygoing look. And the prices—as little as $100 for a day dress—were half those of French frocks, a price that was affordable for Franca’s local clientele.
The world started taking notice. American fashion magazines began to promote Italy as charming, sunny, and unstuffy. “The Italian woman of breeding has a certain quality of relaxation which endows her clothes with an easy grace, a free, uninhibited movement,” wrote Vogue in January 1947. “Her thonged sandals help too, for her legs and feet are possibly the best in Europe.”3 The young Gianni Versace soaked up this praise for the less-restrained Italian style. In his mother’s studio, he pored over the movie magazines featuring the Italian and American films that celebrated the sensual pleasures of Italian life.
About four hundred miles up the coast from Reggio, Rome’s film industry was burgeoning. So many international stars were flocking to Cinecittà, Rome’s fabled studios, that it was dubbed “Hollywood on the Tiber.” The couturiers began to make costumes for the films and got to know the stars, who loved the easy elegance of Roman designs. For a time, Ava Gardner’s contract with her studio required that she wear only clothes made by Sorelle Fontana, an atelier owned by three sisters in Piazza di Spagna. Where the stars went, the press followed. In 1955, Life magazine ran a cover feature entitled “Gina Lollobrigida: A Star’s Wardrobe,” featuring 250 sketches of her clothes, mostly made by Roman couturier Emilio Schuberth. One was a strapless evening gown in delicately pleated silk chiffon that morphed from a soft cream at the bust to a rich moss green at the waist. The play on colors as well as the snug, simple cut emphasized the star’s renowned twenty-two-inch waist. The young Gianni surely saw these designs and was influenced by them—and by the overall glamour of the Italian look that emerged during the 1950s, just in time to shape his nascent fashion sensibility.
In 1951, the Roman couturiers gained an important new ally in Giovanni Battista Giorgini, a Florentine with a noble hawklike face and an aristocratic pedigree. For nearly thirty years Giorgini had been the leading buyer of Italian craft goods such as linens and fine ceramics for American department stores. Spying an opportunity, he convinced ten Roman designers to hold a runway show in his magnificent home, Villa Torrigiani, in Florence, where they displayed 180 outfits before eight American department store buyers and a host of Florentine aristocrats, who were ordered to wear only Italian designs to the event. The show was a success: Women’s Wear Daily published a front-page article headlined “Italian Style Gains Approval of U.S. Buyers.”
Within a couple of years, Giorgini moved the shows to a larger space, the Sala Bianca in Palazzo Pitti, a vast, Renaissance-era palace on the south side of the River Arno that was once the seat of the Medici dynasty. After the shows, Giorgini threw sumptuous parties in Renaissance palazzi guaranteed to dazzle, with their coffered ceilings and sumptuous frescoes. The Americans, suitably impressed, soon became the biggest fans of the new Italian look, drawn to the lower prices and cleaner, simpler looks that better suited U.S. tastes than their French counterparts. The Italian couturiers, many of aristocratic birth, also seemed to embody the carefree lifestyle of Italy’s blossoming dolce vita.
“One season we would all be in Capri or Sardinia, and the next Saint Moritz—with trips to New York wedged in between,” recalled Irene Galitzine, a Russian émigré who set up her own fashion house, threw grand parties in her apartment in Rome,4 and created the famous palazzo pajamas, a wide-legged jumpsuit made of soft silk.
More important, the regular shows prodded the couture houses into producing more clothes in the factory that were ready-to-wear, rather than painstakingly made by hand. (In 1954, one Italian clothing manufacturer took the measurements of twenty-five thousand women to produce an accurate sizing system for ready-to-wear clothes.5) Giorgini had invited to Palazzo Pitti a small number of so-called boutique labels, or designers who made very high-quality ready-to-wear clothes. The best known of these couturiers was Emilio Pucci.
Pucci, a Florentine nobleman, had created chic ski and resort wear that was soft and unstructured. His brightly colored prints and tight stretchy trousers were an instant hit, done in exuberant blues and pinks and swirly patterns that looked great with the sandals and tanned bare legs beloved by Vogue. Made with a new synthetic silk-and-nylon material, his superlight jersey dresses were slinky, comfortable, and—perfect for the jet set—didn’t wrinkle. At $39.95 for ski pants and $190 for a dress, Pucci’s designs were very expensive ready-to-wear that was chic enough to compete with couture.6
By the 1960s, when Versace was a teenager traveling with his mother on her buying trips to Rome and Florence, the first ripples of a youthquake began to wash over fashion. Women worldwide yearned for a new wardrobe to match their growing social freedom. They were no longer willing to spend hours in fittings, and their social calendars didn’t require such formal wardrobes. Initially, the revolution came from London, which spawned a flock of designers catering not to society ladies but girls on the street. These designers launched some of the first collections of ready-to-wear clothes that were fashionable and offered the instant gratification that made-to-measure clothes didn’t—a lesson the young Versace would quickly absorb. He certainly followed the work of the first and most successful of these London designers, Mary Quant, renowned as the “inventor” of the miniskirt, whose pleated dresses and hot pants in wild, pyrotechnic colors defined the Swinging London look. The clothes were photographed on Lolita-like models such as Twiggy, with their long legs and über-slim figures, and were a huge break from the corseted, glove-and-hat style of the 1950s. Better yet, the prices were low enough that a broad swath of young women could now aspire to dress fashionably. The London look was an inspiration to Gianni, who would soon try out the modern new designs on his kid sister.
The older French couture designers haughtily resisted the new ready-to-wear tsunami. Since France had very few department stores—women bought their clothes in small boutiques—they had never felt the pressure to make clothes for the mass market.
“Coco Chanel vowed she’d never do ready-to-wear because she didn’t want to dress everybody,” said Gerry Dryansky, a Women’s Wear Daily reporter in the 1960s. “The couturiers’ ambitions weren’t so high. They were rich and lived well, but they never intended to build colossal businesses. Their snobbism was greater than their greed.”7
Christian Dior famously refused to provide a wedding dress for Brigitte Bardot, considering her too vulgar for his confections. “Couture is for grannies,” retorted Bardot. And many agreed. In 1964, a UK magazine announced the death of couture with fictional obituaries for Balenciaga and Givenchy.
At the same time, a sharp increase in the cost of skilled seamstresses forced couture prices ever higher. By the 1970s, legend had it that only one hundred women in the world still regularly commissioned haute couture clothes. As Gianni Versace would soon see firsthand, his fellow Italians were quickly stepping into the breach. The change in the fashion business would open the door for his radical talents.
Franca Versace understood, in a way that her husband did not, that Gianni could succeed on his own terms. So when her son flunked out of high school in 1965, Franca, anxious to see him settled into a profession, decided to open a freestanding boutique next to her atelier. Taking the name from the French fashion magazine, Gianni called it Elle di Francesca Versace.
The shop was Gianni’s diploma—and his ticket to freedom. Twice a year, he went with Franca to Palazzo Pitti to watch the shows and place orders for the shop. He bought soft knits from Missoni and pleated dresses from Krizia. As the shop grew, he began going to Paris as well, where he fell in love with Chloé, a line that made gauzy blouses, long skirts, and evening dresses that were light as a cloud. He found a kindred spirit in the brand’s young German designer, Karl Lagerfeld, starting what would become a lifelong friendship. Lagerfeld had made a name for himself at storied couture houses such as Balmain and Jean Patou, but by the early 1960s, finding couture out of touch, he began hiring himself out to the new ready-to-wear houses in France and Italy.
Franca—who had let Gianni tend her clients and had taught him how to make clothes to flatter a woman who didn’t have a perfect figure, cutting a skirt or a dress in such a way as to hide saddlebags or slim a waist—despaired when she saw some of the trendy clothes that Gianni brought back. She preferred the more traditional designers who served up the sort of mother-of-the-bride outfits—ruffled blouses and staid tailleurs, or tailored suits and dresses—that would appeal to a provincial lady. When Gianni came home with more daring designs, Franca scolded him testily for buying clothes that she thought would be hard to sell.8
Gradually, however, the new designs attracted Reggio’s younger women. “They were beautiful women, maybe thirty-two or thirty-five years old, already married and with kids, but they had wonderful figures,” said a former shop girl at the Versace boutique in Reggio. “The boutique sold the sort of clothes that Reggio didn’t have until then, because in the past, ladies like them would have worn couture.”
The boutique catered to Reggio’s alta borghesia (upper crust), including the wives of bankers in search of new cocktail dresses or mothers looking to buy their daughters special dresses for university graduation. Its ground floor had white tables with glass tops and an antique glass and wood case that held small evening purses. Long steel-blue curtains set off creamy white wallpaper. Unlike in the United States, where impersonal department stores dominated and one-on-one service was rare, shopping in Italy was a leisurely affair. Ladies lingered in the Versace shop, browsing through the racks in the air-conditioned coolness, then a rarity in Reggio. Shopgirls fetched drinks, while Franca or her son conferred with the signora to understand what she needed. As a modern touch, Gianni had a stereo system installed, which played the latest songs by Frank Sinatra or Mina, a soulful Italian singer popular in the 1960s.
Gianni proved to be a skilled salesman with a sharp eye for what best suited a woman, suggesting the accessory or finishing touch that would make her stand out, such as tying a scarf around her waist or fastening a shawl of fluttering voile at her neck with a jeweled brooch. He learned how women saw themselves and how to make them feel attractive.
“When he dressed you, people would tell you how great you looked and ask you where you shopped,” said Santo Versace.9 The word spread and the boutique grew.
Encouraged by the success of the shop, Gianni decided to try his hand at designing clothes himself. At first, he commissioned a small clothing manufacturer to make up some relatively staid suits and dresses. He also started making suggestions when he met with clothing manufacturers on his buying trips.
“Gianni used to come with his mother to buy clothes for his shop,” recalled Laura Biagiotti, a Rome-based clothing manufacturer who later became a prominent designer. “I remember him as a sweet, shy young man. He used to sit at my drawing table and make sketches of what he wanted us to make for him.”10
Already fiercely determined, he started bringing a folder full of his sketches to the shows at Pitti, hoping to attract the interest of one of the clothing manufacturers that showed there. “I remember this young man, very thin and wide-eyed, armed with a huge desire to succeed and with this big folder full of sketches, trying to sell them,” recalled Beppe Modenese, head of Italy’s fashion trade group. “I’ve rarely seen someone so determined.”11
At one trip to Pitti in early 1972, Gianni’s sketches attracted the attention of Ezio Nicosia and Salvatore Chiodini, owners of Florentine Flowers, a knitwear company based in Lucca, a small medieval town near the coast in Tuscany. Nicosia’s wife was the line’s designer, but the company had faltered when her clothes failed to appeal to contemporary shoppers. Gianni gave Nicosia and Chiodini some advice as to what might appeal to young people. The two Tuscan businessmen liked his ideas and, desperate for some fresh blood to revive Florentine Flowers, asked Gianni to join the company.
The offer had to have been a shock to the budding designer. It was the opportunity Gianni had always hoped for, but it meant leaving his home behind, forsaking the familiar and the possibility of modest prosperity for a far more uncertain future. His dream would separate him from Franca and from the local legacy of the Versaces, and give him a foothold in a world he had only dreamed of until then.
In a move that would determine his professional relationships for the rest of his life, Gianni turned for advice to the man he trusted most: Santo Versace. His brother had just returned from two years of military service and was about to open an accountancy practice on the block next to the family’s home. In what would be the first of innumerable negotiations on Gianni’s behalf, Santo helped broker his brother’s first contract. Gianni, displaying a confidence he didn’t entirely possess, told Santo to ask for the same amount received by the hot new designer Walter Albini. Nicosia agreed.12
Gianni flew to Tuscany on February 5, 1972. He was twenty-five years old and happy to finally break free from Reggio. He went straight to Florentine Flowers’s yarn supplier to choose the materials for a “flash” spring-summer collection that could prop up sales of the items that were currently in the stores. Gianni was already getting in deeper than he realized, taking a risk that showed his reflexive ingenuity. He knew little about how to work with knitwear; he designed as if he were working with fabric. He asked the factory to weave knits with intricate woven and braided patterns, something they had never done before, and then he cut the knits as if he were working with wool or silk, by, for instance, slicing it on the bias. The minicollection was a hit. Nicosia was so pleased that he bought Gianni a black Volkswagen convertible with a white top.
“I felt this pressure to show them I could do it immediately,” Gianni would say later. “I wanted a new type of knit, one that was like fabric. It was very difficult, but, when I was discouraged, I thought of my mother, and how she used to stay up all night just to finish a dress.”13
After just a few months in Tuscany, Gianni left Florentine Flowers to move to Milan, drawn by the rising buzz of the fashion scene there as well as the possibility of winning bigger jobs. That very year, several hot design houses—Krizia, Missoni, and Walter Albini—had abandoned Florence to stage their shows in Milan. The new ready-to-wear designers had grown increasingly unhappy with the Pitti shows. The explosion of new brands meant they had to share a runway and show only sixteen garments in a production so drab that it drained the zest from the designs. Department store buyers and journalists lobbied the designers to show in Milan, which had many more direct flights from the United States and other European capitals. Milan, the birthplace of the Futurist movement in 1909, had become the publishing capital of Italy by then, and was home to the biggest magazines and newspapers. Condé Nast established its Italian headquarters in Milan in the mid-1960s, when it launched Italian Vogue. International ad agencies set up their Italian headquarters in the city. Furthermore, Milan’s proximity to Italy’s textile producers in the north was a huge advantage, not just to manufacturing but to the design process itself.
By the early 1970s, Italian designers had gained an invaluable edge over their American and French rivals by working directly with the textile producers to create entirely new fabrics that draped differently than simple silk, cotton, or wool, and even had a different touch and sheen. A clutch of designers were staging their first shows in Milan, often using the ballrooms of big hotels. The early shows were little more than amateur hours, where designers drafted family and friends to build the backdrops, dress the models, and help with the lighting. Local hairdressers agreed to do the models’ hair for free in exchange for a mention in a show’s program. At the time, models were so cheap that dozens were hired per show. Gianni attended these shows and watched how they were put together; they would become the model for his own extravaganzas in the years ahead.
In Milan, the young designer moved into the Principessa Clotilde residence on the east side of the city, in Porta Nuova. His neighbors were penniless aspiring male and female models sent by their agencies, which had secured discounts on the spartan apartments. The residence was soon dubbed Principessa Clitoris, because of the high concentration of beautiful young flesh staying there and the horde of Italian playboys they attracted.
“Girls, guys—that residence was a place of perdition,” Santo recalled.14 Gianni loved the energy and sexuality of it, which would infuse his own life and influence his designs.
Gianni was becoming a player in a nascent Milanese fashion scene that was something of a Wild West, drawing neophyte models who hadn’t yet managed to break through in New York or Paris, home of the major agencies. New modeling firms were mushrooming in Milan, sometimes established by men looking only to meet pretty girls, encouraging them to attend parties and dinners to generate buzz for their new businesses. These model hounds picked them up at the airport, sent them roses, and brought them to new nightclubs where they were feted with champagne—and, more and more often, cocaine. The young women were often paid little—sometimes just fifty dollars for a fitting and a show.
“The flower children, the new culture, were coming forward,” said Polly Mellen, a major magazine editor in the 1960s. “It was all parties, drugs and madness, and the girls who chose to be part of it were the girls who were booked.”15
Gianni was participating in a social revolution in Italy amid violent political unrest, as the nation’s postwar dolce vita mentality burned away in a blaze of bombings, kidnappings, and violent demonstrations. In the first half of the 1970s, more than four thousand acts of political violence occurred in Italy, most of them in Rome, Turin, and Milan, including sixty-three murders, culminating in the killing of Aldo Moro, former prime minister, by the Red Brigades, a Marxist guerrilla group. Along with this upheaval came social changes at warp speed, which transformed how women dressed. Couture became a symbol of the hated bourgeoisie.
Around the world, the 1970s were a contrarian decade in fashion, as rules of taste were deliberately broken, and outrageous looks—hot pants, platform shoes, maxicoats, and polyester shirts open to the waist—reigned supreme. In Italy, however, such tastelessness was less popular. Certainly, young women shed their twinsets, black leather pumps, and pleated skirts in favor of jeans, Eskimo coats, and tie-dyed shirts. Young people who wore the old styles were suspected of harboring Fascist sympathies and could find themselves the target of bullying. But the zany aspects of 1970s style never really took root in Italy. As the decade wore on, shoppers everywhere looked for more toned-down clothes, particularly for the office, and the Italians were quick to meld the urge for casual dressing with the polish and elegance that had gone missing in the early part of the decade.
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?”