ON MARCH 28, 1978, ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE PALAZZO DELLA PERMANENTE, the lights went up on the first Gianni Versace collection. The Permanente, a contemporary art museum close to Milan’s Giardini Pubblici, had become the hot place among new designers because Krizia, Fendi, and Missoni were showing there. Launching a solo collection was risky and expensive, and Gianni was happy that the Permanente was cheaper than showing in one of the city’s big hotels. All the designers shared the same lights and runway at the museum, which helped keep costs to a minimum. He could also bask in the reflected glory of his bigger rivals.
Over the previous year, Gianni had grown restless. He was tired of being a hired gun and was ready to break out on his own. He had five years under his belt and had proved that he was a bona fide commercial success, dressing not just a tiny slice of fashionistas but real women as well, a skill he’d honed during his years at his mother’s boutique in Reggio. Gianni’s bosses were thrilled with his work, and they paid him accordingly. By the mid-1970s, Santo was flying to Milan every month or two, negotiating richer and richer contracts for his brother with the brand owners he was toiling for.
“In those years, he was selling so much that if he had asked for one hundred million [lire] [$60,000] more, they would have given it to him,” Santo said. “It was an incredible machine. We felt like we were minting money.”1
But working for hire was limiting for a designer who ached to do his own thing without having to answer to others. Like the other young talents who were juggling contracts and making owners rich, he was handcuffed to brands that catered to women whose tastes ran toward twinsets, pearls, and neat, pleated skirts. Frustrated, he began bickering more and more with his bosses over new ideas he wanted to realize. He watched jealously as a few designers broke free of the pack. One inspired particular envy. In 1974, Giorgio Armani, a forty-year-old newcomer from the small northern city of Piacenza, had burst onto the scene with a new look of slouchy jackets and pants that were the talk of the fashion press. By 1977, Gianni, yearning to have his own brand, turned to Santo for help. Santo started spending half of each month in Milan to work out a business plan that would make his brother’s dream come true.
In his March debut at the Permanente, Gianni showed a handful of designs created under his own name, slipping them into a show of his Genny and Callaghan collections. He staged the show on a shoestring; the models, sprawled on the floor with mirrors in hand, did their own makeup, and Donatella and some girlfriends pitched in as dressers, helping the women into their outfits. Gianni, the tension etched on his face, darted from model to model, adjusting a sash, fixing the drape of a skirt, and making frantic, last-minute adjustments before the show.
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 Donatella, 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.
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.