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 Gianni’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.
Gianni’s relationship with Elton, while driven by genuine friendship, was an early instance of the burgeoning love affair between fashion designers and celebrities that would, by the early 1990s, prove a gold mine for all involved. Gianni would lead the parade, as his clothes became must-haves for movie stars, supermodels, certain members of royalty, and even some grandees of the corporate world. This pairing came just as press coverage of the rich and famous was exploding. Finding themselves in the media’s unblinking eye, celebrities quickly grasped the chance to work with designers to burnish their images. At the same time, the blanket coverage of the stars—and what they were wearing—influenced shoppers’ tastes more and more. It would be a match made in heaven.
Gianni’s relationship with VIPs had gotten off to a slow start, with his clothes’ popularity confined largely to Italian television celebrities and pop singers. Early in his career, he had a few hits with international luminaries, virtually all men. In 1983, Versace dressed Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson for their “Say Say Say” music video. But Gianni, enormously busy with his many collections, had little time or patience to butter up stars. Indeed, with the exception of Elton (and, later, Sting), he found much of the celebrity world to be tedious. He was a happy workaholic who was content to go to bed early rather than stay out all night clubbing with the stars. Instead, Donatella was becoming a bigger part of the celebrity scene, and she quickly saw that celebrities could be a boon for her brother. While Gianni frequented the theater and ballet in his little free time, Donatella, a passionate pop music fan, was hanging out backstage with rock stars after their concerts. In the early 1980s, she approached Sting following a concert during his European tour and later charmed Bruce Springsteen, lending him the villa in Como for his 1985 honeymoon. After wearing Versace for his Born in the USA tour, he began talking up the Versace brand to his fellow musicians.
But winning fans among female stars was the real ticket to press coverage—and at this Gianni struggled, as Armani established himself as the designer to Hollywood. Armani had stepped neatly into a fashion gap in the entertainment business that had been growing for years. Until the 1970s, Hollywood studios had their costume designers make actresses’ gowns for red-carpet events such as the Oscars. (MGM’s chief costumer even made Grace Kelly’s wedding dress.) But when the studios disbanded their costume departments, actresses were left to buy dresses on their own. The result was a series of frontpage fashion flops throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with stars dressing in “oversize this, thrift-shop that,” as Graydon Carter wrote in Vogue. 3
After American Gigolo, Armani saw gold in Hollywood’s hills. In 1988, he opened a thirteen-thousand-square-foot boutique in Beverly Hills to cater to celebrities and hired as its publicist a former society columnist with a Rolodex full of the private numbers of major Hollywood celebrities. His sleek outfits were a safe option for nervous stars on an evening when millions were watching.
“When you dress in Armani, you can be sure you’ll never look like a Christmas tree,” said Sophia Loren. The 1990 Oscars were an Armani fashion show. He dressed Michelle Pfeiffer, Jodie Foster, Julia Roberts, and Jessica Lange, as well as six leading men, including Denzel Washington.4 Gianni knew it would take more than friendship with Elton John to win the kind of celebrity following that could turbo-charge his business. And he thought the way to popular success might be to give the stars the sort of showstopping clothes they couldn’t resist.
So, even as Armani was orchestrating his triumphant 1990 Oscar showing, Versace was more than five thousand miles away, at the Ritz in Paris, preparing for his first-ever runway show of Versace haute couture. It was a chilly January day and Gianni and Donatella had barely slept since arriving a few days before. They had worked until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. each night, snatching a few hours of sleep before starting again at 9 a.m. (On Gianni’s arrival, Karl Lagerfeld, a prolific designer and talented artist, sent over a sketch he had made of Gianni, with a note offering warm wishes for his debut.)5 The week before, a caravan of about a dozen seamstresses and other assistants had made the trip from Milan, lugging sewing machines, irons, and large coffinlike cases full of hundreds of garments, shoes, bags, belts, and jewelry. Counting the press people, marketing executives, and Gianni’s team, at least a hundred Versace employees made the trip to the Ritz.
Gianni was taking a big leap, and he knew it. It was rare for a ready-to-wear designer to launch a couture line, and only the most confident would take on the burden and expense of showing dozens of painstakingly handmade dresses twice a year. (Indeed, Santo’s main lieutenant in the business quit the company in part because he felt such a young enterprise was risking too much in adding a couture line.) But with couture, everything clicked for Gianni. During the 1980s, his atelier had grown to two dozen seamstresses who started out adding hand-finishing to dresses made at the factory but were soon making one-of-a-kind outfits. Gianni had also been experimenting with his theater costumes and was eager to apply new cuts, shapes, and embellishments to his own lines. He long harbored a dream of re-creating his mother’s workshop in grand style, so his new couture line was enormously gratifying to him. Moreover, his decision to launch couture would unlock the treasure chest of celebrities for him, and with them, fix a strong, bracing image of the Versace brand in the minds of millions of consumers around the world.
Gianni staged his show in the pool area of the storied Ritz Hotel, which had double spiral staircases on either end, frescoed ceilings, and a plush bar area. Days before, Ritz workers had donned scuba gear to slip poles into holes at the bottom of the pool to support a runway that would cover the turquoise water. In a kitchen area behind the pool, on the day of the show, the top makeup artist first made up Donatella, then went to work on the models, poking, combing, and painting them for as long as five hours to transform them into Versace glamour girls. The “backstage” was a tiny space just behind the staircase that the models descended to reach the runway. The space crackled with stress. Gianni’s team, who normally cleared a path for their boss as he snapped orders during the intense hours before a show, struggled to get out of his way. Gianni felt enormous pressure, worried that his debut before the notoriously critical Parisians would be a bust. “Look at the creases in these dresses!” Gianni exploded. Last-minute manhandling had wrinkled the dresses, but the backstage area was too small for ironing boards.
Outside, three hundred guests descended white marble steps to the pool area. At the far end of the pool hung a large medusa logo on the landing of the double staircase that led to the backstage. When the house lights went down, a spotlight flashed onto the first model, lighting up her elaborately embroidered bodice like a blaze as she walked down the pristine white runway. A stream of models followed, dressed in pinstriped miniskirts topped with glittering bodices covered in beads, rhinestones, and pearls. Many of the girls were black or Latino, and their dark, oiled skin glowed under the spotlights. As the music morphed from Prince to Puccini’s aria “Vincerò,” the clothes built from miniskirted day suits to embroidered cocktail dresses, shown with voluminous silk Little Red Riding Hood capes lined in lemon yellow or neon pink.
At the end of the forty-five-minute show, Gianni emerged, visibly drained but smiling. When he heard the cascade of applause that greeted him, he knew that his collection had been a success. As he took his bow and felt the adrenaline of the previous days ebb, he reveled in the moment, knowing that he and his brand had entered a new realm—one that even his mother could never have dreamed of for him while she was alive. Indeed, with the advent of his couture collection, Gianni’s great technical ability to make well-crafted dresses melded with his natural showmanship to produce clothes that were stunning in their imagery. During the early 1990s, images from his semiannual shows at the Ritz became instantly recognizable as Versace, disseminating a look that, while polarizing, was hardly boring.
Gianni’s decision to launch a couture line gave a jolt to a stodgy business. The traditional Parisian couture houses were dying as women increasingly took their cues from trends bubbling up from pop music, urban teenagers, and the counterculture. Gianni’s genius was to co-opt these forces and project them onto his clothes, something that earned him the envy of the French couturiers, who would struggle to compete with such bracing, exciting designs. In doing so, he pulled the curtain on fashion as an elite, rarefied enterprise and recast it as a topic of bottomless interest to the masses.
“Versace moved fashion into the public domain in the most strident way,” said Hamish Bowles, former European editor-at-large for Vogue. 6
He carved out a clutch of themes that he used over and over to great effect, from his “Wild Baroque” pieces with their raucous mix of leopard print and gold-leaf whorls, to second-skin bodysuits—inspired by Donatella’s love of stretchy leggings—featuring clashing, gaudy colors and gold-colored chains. He created outfits that were like jewels, cramming beads, sequins, large stones, and silk embroidery into wild patterns, often using a technique applied by nineteenth-century Parisian ateliers in which craftswomen used wire supports to create layer after layer of beaded appliqués, giving bodices a rich, three-dimensional look.
In kaleidoscopic fashion, Gianni dipped into and mixed popular culture, fine arts, and couture history, making the most dissonant images look right together. Billowing eighteenth-century skirts in riotous pastel patterns were combined with cowgirl’s denim shirts top-stitched in gold. He translated one of Roy Lichtenstein’s most famous paintings by putting giant letters spelling “WHAAM!” on a yellow devoré evening gown. He adorned a silk halter-neck gown with Andy Warhol’s celebrated images of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.
Gianni spilled the full force of his creativity onto his prints and surpassed the work done by Emilio Pucci, considered the great postwar innovator of prints. Gianni transposed all manner of images to foulards, silk shirts, and dresses—a portrait of Elton John, postcardlike images of Miami’s South Beach neighborhood, rich Byzantine Madonnas. It took great skill to know how to design and place a print so that it looked right on the cut of a shirt or the drape of a dress. His wild designs were painstaking to execute. Before computer-assisted design, prints were made by using engraved rollers or screens, one for each color. Gianni’s most elaborate prints had twenty-three colors, rivaling only Hermès’s legendary foulards.
“I used to go to him with five designs and I left with orders to make a dozen,” recalled one Versace printmaker. “I did three hundred or four hundred designs a year for him—a tremendous amount.”7
Gianni’s evening gowns were showstoppers. He cut filmy materials such as chiffon and georgette into fine column dresses that slid easily over the body, and he used punk-inspired pins to gather up masses of light organza into ball gowns, holding up the whole confections with overalls-like suspenders. The dresses fit wonderfully.
“One had only to try on a Versace dress to find that one’s tits went up, and one’s ass went out, and one’s waist went in,” declared longtime Vogue writer and editor Joan Juliet Buck. “Gianni Versace’s evening dresses had these zips, and so the body changed. It worked because of that kind of inner architecture.”8
Some commentators blasted his couture collections for their cartoon glamour and happy-hooker imagery. They found his plundering of Klimt, Picasso, and Warhol facile, and branded him “Copyace.” His horror vacui decorations were, for some, an assault on the eyes. They found his clothes gimmicky and out of touch with real women—but Gianni himself had a different audience in mind with some of his most extravagant creations; they were intended more for the media than for sale. For instance, a series of catsuits and dresses adorned with images of Vogue covers were meant to be catnip for the fashion press. At times, Gianni seemed to provoke his harshest critics deliberately. In 1992, he presented a collection inspired by sadomasochism and gay leather bars, complete with black leather straps, harness bodices, and studded leather skirts. At the show, he sent as many as eight girls, hoisted in dominatrix-style leather dresses, big hair, and bold makeup, on the runway at once, a visual punch in the eye. Critics were split on whether Versace was a creative genius or a moral scandal.
“There were people who loved it, who thought it was brilliant, the greatest thing he had ever done,” Holly Brubach, the fashion critic at the New Yorker at the time, said afterward. “And others of us, mostly women, could barely evaluate the design aspect of it because we were so offended. I have to say that I hated it.”9
Gianni’s salespeople struggled to sell the clothes, even in watered-down versions with many of the harnesses and buckles removed. But it hardly mattered. The dustup earned him reams of press coverage. The Versaces were not just dressing celebrities; they had become a media phenomenon—celebrities themselves. Vogue editor Anna Wintour recalled the one hundredth anniversary party for the magazine at the New York Public Library in 1992, a black-tie event with a guest list including Hollywood stars, media moguls, and the world’s top designers. “I was standing at the top of the stairs and there were a lot of paparazzi and photographers,” she said. “Then there was this roar that you could have heard in Washington. It was Donatella and Gianni arriving. Donatella was in one of those bondage dresses. She was absolutely it.”10
Gianni’s hyperbolic style appealed initially to the parvenus in cities such as Miami, Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong, who lacked a strong sense of inner style but wanted to revel in the cutting-edge cachet their new money could buy. (Rich Arab women, happy to spend as much as forty thousand dollars for an opulent Versace wedding gown, were big clients.) In the 1980s, Gianni had suffered because of his disinterest in dressing the Establishment, but during the 1990s, his exuberant, guilt-free clothes mirrored the post—Cold War economic boom spreading around the world. His clothes embraced the rampant consumerism of the decade. Meanwhile, women who had flocked to safe designers such as Armani when they first entered the workforce now wanted to cut loose. As a result, Gianni managed to channel the new yen for fun, exuberant clothes and then gave it shape with collection after collection of clothes that caught women’s imaginations.
“Armani really represented the rise of the woman in the workforce,” Wintour noted. “But then I think that people started saying, sure, she’s in the workforce. But she can also have some fun.”11
The 1988 ascent of Anna Wintour to the helm of Vogue gave Gianni an enormous boost. Until then, the American magazines virtually ignored him, even declining to attend some of his dinners and parties in Milan. Wintour set out to loosen up the venerable magazine, putting celebrities on the cover and running features on new styles and more accessible fashions. The UK-born editor found Gianni a breath of fresh air.
“My predecessor was a Geoffrey Beene and Giorgio Armani fan,” she said. “I think to her eye, Gianni was a bit brash and vulgar, where as to me, it was fun.”12 When Wintour organized a benefit runway show in the early 1990s, she featured Versace, along with Chanel and Lacroix, instead of old-liners such as Valentino and Givenchy. Gianni soon became a mainstay of Vogue’s coverage.
“That show made him famous,” Donatella recalled, the pride evident in her voice years later. “The Americans had considered him vulgar. He suffered this a lot. Then Anna arrived and realized he wasn’t vulgar—he was ‘glamour.’”13
Over time, Versace images that had originally seemed jarring became an accepted part of fashion vocabulary. Ideas that may have looked over-the-top or brash on the couture catwalk soon trickled down to more-wearable versions in his ready-to-wear collection or even licensed products that were affordable to many women. As a result, the shocking images from the runway came to influence how women dressed every day. “Try to imagine your wardrobe without the jolt of a print, the vitality of a stiletto, the glamorous bric-a-brac of chains and doodads,” wrote Cathy Horyn, influential fashion critic for the New York Times, in 1997. “This was Versace’s doing. His influence melted and spread far beyond the sexual heat of his runway.”14
Little more than a year after his debut at the Ritz, Gianni’s foray into couture paid its first huge dividend. After the couture runway in July 1991, Donatella stayed in Paris after the couture show to shoot the clothes for an ad campaign. She and the photographer were scanning the Polaroid test shots when Sam McKnight, the London-based celebrity hairdresser she’d hired to do the models’ hair, pulled her aside. “Listen, Anna Harvey would like you to send her some of the Polaroids,” he said. “She wants to show them to someone important. She can’t tell you who it is, but, trust me, she’s a very important person.”
Donatella knew Harvey, a former senior editor at British Vogue, quite well. Perplexed, she gathered up a number of photos, including one of an eggshell blue column dress made of heavy silk and decorated with a swirly pattern of gold-tone studs and colored strass and slipped them in a FedEx package. Once Harvey received them, Donatella’s assistant wheedled the name of the mysterious lady out of her: It was Diana, Princess of Wales.
Donatella instantly picked up the phone to tell Gianni. Gianni was thrilled. “What are you talking about?” he said, his voice rising in excitement. “You must be kidding!”15
Not long afterward, Diana appeared in British Harper’s Bazaar in the blue-silk couture dress, in a picture by French photographer Patrick Demarchelier. The pictures showing a relaxed, sexy Diana, shorn of jewelry and wearing the sleek gown, were an instant hit—for her and for the gown’s designer.
By the time she slipped on that blue dress, Diana was far from the frumpy English girl who burst onto the world’s stage in 1981 with her engagement to Prince Charles. Back then, Shy Di had little sense of style beyond an English-countryside wardrobe of corduroys, flouncy dresses, and Barbour jackets. For the announcement of her engagement, she wore an off-the-rack outfit she had chosen with her mother—an unbecoming blue suit with a scalloped edge and a print blouse with a large pussy-cat bow. Her bunchy wedding gown, with its ten thousand sequins and seed pearls and twenty-five-foot train, hardly heralded the birth of a fashion star. Moreover, rigid royal protocol—hats at public events, tiaras for grand evenings, and dresses cut carefully to prevent a flash of décolleté—made her look like a schoolgirl dressed in her mother’s clothes.
For the first half of the 1980s, the UK tabloids pilloried her often for her fashion faux pas: a white, majorette-style suit with gold frogging down the front, chunky velvet Laura Ashley—style dresses, buckled shoes, and too many ruffled shirts. The obligation of the future queen to dress largely in British designs kept her on a short leash. Gradually, she found her style by scrutinizing her press clippings and learning that what looked good in the mirror might not translate well to photos. She turned more and more to Anna Harvey for advice and contacts with designers. Harvey helped her find clothes that suited both her youth and stature. She pared things down, choosing sleeker, simpler outfits that were cut closer to her body, in strong colors that were visible to the crowds. (She never wore Giorgio Armani’s designs publicly because she felt his muted colors didn’t stand out enough.) By her late twenties, she’d made the awkward, painful transformation from a passive young girl to a dynamic and worldly, if troubled, woman.
Diana was a perfect mannequin, with her slender five-foot-ten frame, a slim neck, and broad shoulders. She wore an Italian size forty or forty-two—a size six or eight in the United States—and had the peachy skin and luminous blue eyes of a classic English rose. Designers assiduously courted her, knowing a jackpot lay in dressing the world’s most photographed woman. When Diana was photographed carrying a chic Christian Dior handbag, the company soon sold one hundred thousand units, the surge in sales sending the company’s revenues up 20 percent that year.
But Diana refused to take free or unsolicited clothes (although she did accept deep discounts of up to 90 percent). If a designer sent clothes to Kensington Palace without being asked, she had a dresser return them with a chilly thank-you note. Designers who dressed her were forbidden to publicize their association with her. To prevent leaks, she tended to choose outfits at the last minute, her selections depending on the weather, her mood, and whether she wanted to make a particular statement with her appearance. Her PR people were then careful to get a mention of the designer into the press.
The year after she donned Gianni’s powder blue dress was the year in which she separated from Charles. Her separation gave her much more freedom to modernize her image and turn to designers such as Versace. Single, restless, and largely liberated of her royal duties, she felt free to flaunt her sexy side. Shorn of her royal title, Diana could wear French and Italian designers freely now, and Harvey contacted the houses for samples that might work. Diana began to wear higher heels and sleeveless dresses that showed off her gym-trim legs and arms, and she stopped wearing hats. She got Sam McKnight to cut her hair into a shorter, sleeker bob that looked casual but chic. Her post-Charles wardrobe was so glamorous and sensual that the UK press dubbed it her “revenge couture.” On the evening in which Prince Charles admitted to his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles on national television, she stole his thunder by wearing a form-fitting black cocktail dress cut above the knee, her nails painted poppy red. “The Thrilla He Left to Woo Camilla,” read the headline in the Sun the next day.
Just around the time of Diana’s separation, Gianni inaugurated an opulent new store on Bond Street, London’s tony shopping thoroughfare. He spent more than $6 million to transform a former bank branch into a four-floor emporium. Composed of ten different types of marble shipped from Italy, each floor had a different theme—yellow stone for the ground floor, dusty pinks and apricots on the next, and deep green and turquoise for the VIP level. Brocatelle marble lined the staircase, and medusas were etched in frosted glass. At a time when spartan, Japanese-style interiors were ascendant in London fashion boutiques, the new Versace store was an extravagance.
On the opening night in May 1992, nearly a thousand guests gawked at the store, fingering pairs of mules covered with gilt seashells that cost 650 pounds ($1,000), and men’s studded leather trousers, priced at 1,800 pounds ($2,700). Elton John, Joan Collins, Kylie Minogue, and Ivana Trump mixed with artists, London socialites, and magazine editors. The party was the talk of London. Gianni had invited Diana to the party, but she declined. “It will be trashy,” a friend told her.16 Instead, she agreed to a private tour.
The manager closed the store during lunch and Diana browsed, murmuring polite praise for the embroidered cashmere cardigan sweaters and tailored day suits. But she didn’t buy anything. The next day, a delivery truck arrived at Kensington Palace, bearing boxes and boxes of Versace clothes. Gianni had sent her nearly the entire collection. Annoyed, she sent it all back to the shop. Gianni quickly wrote Diana a note of apology and sent her an all-white collection of soaps and candles scented of lily of the valley, her favorite flower. Diana accepted the token.
At the same time, Elton John was becoming closer with Diana, hoping to corral her patronage for his AIDS foundation. Diana had been friends with the singer since 1981, when he had played a private party for the twenty-first birthday of Charles’s brother, Prince Andrew. Over the years, the two spoke privately about their struggles with bulimia, and Diana respected Elton’s energetic charity work. By the 1990s, Diana was becoming more open to friendships with highprofile gay men, an association she’d avoided during her marriage. They offered her the prospect of fun and wicked conversation. Elton started inviting her to his spread in Windsor, where she got to know Gianni better.
“Diana used to keep celebrities at arm’s length, but that changed later on,” a close associate recalls. “She liked to commiserate on the terrible price that fame bought them.”
Over the next several years, Gianni gradually became one of her favorite designers, although she often made him remove the gaudy medusas and overwrought details he piled on his clothes. He gave her first pick of his couture collection and designed pieces exclusively for her that were classic but had a pinch of glamour. His bright, clear colors and impeccable fit helped her shrug off the last vestiges of British dowdiness, giving her the sleek, international look she was known for at the end of her life. (The night she died in a car crash in Paris, in 1997, she was wearing black Versace satin sling-back shoes.)
“Diana needed fresh air,” said Roberto Devorik, the owner of the London Versace franchise and a friend of Diana’s. “She needed a way to show them, I’m here. She did it with Chanel, she did it with Lacroix. But in the sexy way, she had to do it with Versace.”17 For Gianni, Diana was a wholesale vindication of charges that his designs were vulgar—that they were aimed only at arrivistes who frequented nightclubs in Miami or Arab princesses looking for ostentatious displays of their wealth.
In one outfit that emulated Diana’s idol, Jackie Kennedy, Gianni designed a formfitting bubble-gum-pink suit, with a pencil skirt, a short double-breasted jacket with a round collar, and a pillbox hat. He also made her a series of slim, knee-length pastel-colored sheaths that fit her like a glove and became a sort of uniform. His evening wear was done in simple silhouettes that let her express a sexual charge at a time when she was having affairs with various men. Gianni did as many of her fittings as he could himself, but soon charged Franca Biagini, the head of the atelier, with handling the princess. (Gianni, sensing that Diana didn’t care for Donatella, never sent his sister.) As she did with all top couture clients, Biagini had a mannequin made, with a wooden core and a fabric outer layer molded in Diana’s size. If a client gained or lost weight, she adjusted the fabric layer.
Diana and Biagini quickly developed a rapport. The first time Biagini arrived at Kensington Palace, she found Diana waiting for her at the top of the stairs, holding a bouquet of flowers. They spent hours together in Diana’s private living room, a small salon that held her old ballet shoes and photos of her sons. Diana loved going through the clothes and being fitted. Afterward, she would help the seamstress gather everything up and carry it down to the car. Every year, she sent Biagini a Christmas card with a personal note.18
With Elton playing matchmaker, Gianni and Diana developed the sort of obsequious friendship typical in the fashion world. Gianni reveled in his relationship with the princess. He was also quick to spot a golden PR opportunity. Years later, he told a journalist that he spoke with the princess every week. When she sent him a Christmas card, he had it framed and placed it conspicuously in his New York townhouse. But while Diana was genuinely fond of Elton, her relationship with Gianni was never as tight as he liked to claim.
“Diana and Gianni weren’t really friends,” said one person who was close to Diana. “They never had a one-on-one relationship. She was wary of him. With Gianni it was business. She needed a bit of glamour.”
With his couture collection leading the headlines in the fashion press every six months and Diana stepping out more frequently in his clothes, Gianni took the competition for famous names to the next level. The stars were soon bewitched by Gianni’s clothes, which stood out on the red carpet and photographed brilliantly. Everyone was happy: Versace showstoppers got actresses the attention they craved, and the press got strong, sexy images. It added up to priceless and profitable publicity for Gianni.
The care and feeding of celebrities fell to Donatella. When she wanted to recruit a star into the Versace camp, she began by sending her oodles of freebies, including couture dresses costing tens of thousands of dollars each. Assistants kept a file with measurements of all the house’s major celebrities.
“Donatella came on after Armani, but then they became really huge pushers of the clothes,” recalled Wayne Scot Lukas, a stylist who worked with many Hollywood stars. “It was, ‘Darling, take the clothes.’ The hugeness of Versace was this whole giving, giving, giving away of clothes. Versace gave them to celebrities, to their assistants. They bought the Versace business in America by throwing clothes at celebrities.”19
Once Donatella had won over a star, she lavished perks and privileges upon her that lured her into the Versace lair. She flew her over to shows in either first class or in private jets and put her up in suites at the Four Seasons. The most coveted stars were given the run of the boutique on Via Montenapoleone. (If Gianni didn’t like a star whom Donatella was courting, he would explode when he saw the bill from the shop.) She invited her to stay for a few days at the villa in Como, where even the most jaded celebrities were dazzled by the Versaces’ opulent mode of living.
The first time Madonna came to Milan for a Versace event, Donatella went to the airport to meet her and shuttled her to Villa Fontanelle. Madonna, wanting a more sophisticated look following a no-holds-bared period highlighted by her Sex book, had agreed to appear in ads for Versace. Donatella had the villa filled with Madonna’s favorite flowers—white gardenias and tuberoses—floating in large vases filled with water. When Madonna walked in, she was bowled over. “Look at this place!” she exclaimed as she gaped at the opulent house. “Even I wouldn’t have the balls to do something like this.” For the next few days, Donatella’s hunky bodyguards took Madonna’s dog Chiquita for long walks, while white-gloved servants waited on the star.
When, a few years later, Victoria Beckham was rehearsing in the south of France for the Spice Girls’ first show, she took a break and headed to Milan for a Versace fashion show. “For six weeks, we had no social life at all—so suddenly finding myself in the front row of one of the most prestigious catwalk shows in the world felt magical,” she wrote. “Donatella invited me to stay the night at Lake Como. [She] waved her wand in the direction of the Versace shop. I can still remember the thrill of being let loose and told I could choose whatever I wanted.”20
Far more than Gianni, Donatella showed a knack for dealing with the high-strung stars: He found the celebrities tedious at times and was privately relieved to leave the care of celebrities to his kid sister. Unlike Gianni, Donatella delighted in the buzz and drama they brought. In turn, her high-camp image and plain-talking candor charmed the celebrities. Over time, she perfected her glamour-puss act, sucking voluptuously on one Marlboro Red after another and tossing off gossipy witticisms in her gravelly voice.
Donatella, now emerging as a celebrity herself, soon was appearing at the hottest parties in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, where she befriended A-listers. She and Paul vacationed with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis in Turks and Caicos, together with their respective broods. Sting and Trudie Styler were frequent guests in Como, as were Sylvester Stallone, Prince, and Eric Clapton.
In the early 1990s, before the celebrity-fashion connection had morphed into a big business involving celebrity wranglers, publicists, and stylists, designers connected directly with stars. At Versace, Donatella’s personal friendships with celebrities extended to offering them clothes for red-carpet events. She and Gianni typically chose a dress they thought would suit a particular “friend of the house” for a big event, and Donatella flew her assistant out to L.A. or New York to fit it. She would later claim her attentiveness was about camaraderie, not commerce.
“I never tried to become friends with these people because I wanted to dress them,” Donatella would declare. “We were just friends. If they dressed in Versace as well, all the better. But it was different. We often had children the same age. We vacationed together.”21
Donatella and Gianni’s timing was perfect. In 1994, Time, Inc., launched InStyle, a sort of hybrid of People and Vogue. It featured celebrities at red-carpet events, in particular the Oscars, as well as out on the town or on vacation. The focus was always on what they were wearing. Meanwhile Joan Rivers had a hit new gig where she joshed with stars about their wardrobe choices at red-carpet appearances. The Italians were the quickest to seize on the change. The French couturiers had traditionally turned up their noses at dressing celebrities, preferring American socialites and European aristocrats, while the Americans were slow off the mark in courting Hollywood. So, as the surging appetite for celebrity news spilled over into curiosity about the clothes they were wearing, Armani and Versace became household names.
Indeed, Gianni’s over-the-top courting of stars added a juicy new dimension to his rivalry with Armani. Armani’s approach to celebrities was far more businesslike than Gianni’s; he virtually never invited them to vacation with him and didn’t lavish them with as much swag. His postshow parties were far more restrained.
“You were there, and you just knew that the Versace people were over there having fun,” recalled one Armani associate. “We were having this terribly sophisticated party, but they were over there getting laid.” In 1992, when Eric Clapton defected to Armani after years as a Versace client—the house had even made an embroidered strap for his guitar—Gianni, who felt stung by the defection, told journalists that the rock star now looked “like an accountant.”22 Each camp was terrified that the other would steal their prized stars. Once, when Armani had Mickey Rourke over for a show, he warned his PR team to stick close to him.
“Someone had to stay with Mickey twenty-four hours a day to make sure that none of the Versace people approached him,” recalls an associate. “We had to go clubbing with him until three a.m. to make sure no one got close.”
Over the next few years, the Versaces played the celebrity game to the hilt. Gianni began featuring the stars in his ads, creating wildly arresting images shot by prominent photographers such as Mario Testino and Richard Avedon: Prince in a metal mesh tank top with “SLAVE” scrawled on his face, a ripped Sylvester Stallone nude except for a strategically positioned Versace dinner plate. The Versace press office juiced the interest by giving the photos free to newspapers and magazines, who often used them on their covers.
Gianni’s shows became celebrity central. He not only plunked the stars in his front row but got them to help with the sound track. Prince recorded a song called “The Versace Experience.” Versace assistants left limited-edition copies of the cassettes on the seats for the audience. Guided by Donatella, Gianni embraced celebrities such as Courtney Love and Tupac Shakur at the height of controversy. He threw lavish parties for them at his house in Como and vacationed with them. Sting and his family spent weeks at the villa. Gianni’s publicists coyly spilled out titillating details of the Versaces’ friendships with the stars, and the media happily lapped them up. Yet, while the celebrity machine served up a relentless banquet of publicity, it came at a high cost: By the mid-1990s, Versace’s promotional budget—much of it the gifts and first-class treatment for VIPs—topped $70 million. Gianni and Donatella had turned the business of dressing celebrities into an immensely costly, high-stakes new game.