oNE BALMY EVENING IN FALL 1993, WITH DONATELLA AND A host of celebrity friends at his side, Gianni threw open the doors to Casa Casuarina, the extravagant home in the heart of Miami’s South Beach neighborhood that would lift him—and his brand—to new heights of fame. An invitation to his housewarming was the hot ticket of a Miami Beach social season that peaked on New Year’s Eve and rollicked on until Easter. Champagne glasses in hand, guests streamed through the mansion and its luxurious garden, marveling at the frescoed walls, the antique furniture Gianni had re-upholstered in Versace fabrics, the elaborate marble bathrooms, and most of all, the spectacular pool, tiled with thousands of tiny mosaics and illuminated with underwater lights.
By the time Gianni threw the party, the buzz around his new home was huge. “When Gianni came, it became such a media event,” said Bruce Orosz, owner of a leading photography production company. “It went well beyond someone just renovating a house. The stories started to circulate about what he was spending, and it created this mystique around him and that house.”1
Gianni had discovered the house that would become a symbol of his heady rise in the 1990s two years earlier. Just before Christmas 1991, he flew to Miami to attend the opening of a new boutique. During his last trip there five years before, he had found Miami cold and impersonal. But this time he was bewitched by the edgy frisson of the newly reinvigorated section of Miami Beach known as South Beach, with its population of drag queens, muscle boys, artists, and celebrities and its energetic embrace of sexual freedom and physical beauty. “Everything has changed so much here,” Gianni told a journalist at the party for the shop opening. “At this moment, Miami to me is heaven. I want to stay forever.”2
Over the next few years, South Beach became a slice of paradise for Gianni—as well as a pure distillation of the Versace world: decadent, guilt-free, and not a little bit vulgar. In the 1930s, developers had erected hundreds of low-rise Art Deco buildings in the area to provide cheap accommodations for northern snowbirds. Wedding cake details such as flowers and curlicues looked like sugar confections in the keystone used for the buildings’ façades. After World War II, however, South Beach began a long, slow decline. By the 1970s, the neighborhood had become a decrepit place full of retirees, criminal flotsam, and poor Cuban refugees. At the same time, Miami’s position as a byway in the decade’s booming cocaine trade sent street crime in South Beach soaring.3 Many of the Art Deco buildings became roach-infested crack houses, smelly retirement homes, or simply abandoned shells. But at the end of the decade, musicians, painters, and performance artists seeking cheap studio space had discovered Miami Beach. They began fixing up some of the buildings, opening a handful of funky restaurants, nightclubs, and boutiques amid the dollar stores and bodegas. The result was spectacular. The Art Deco buildings, originally painted in bland off-white or dirty beige, were repainted in a rainbow of Necco Wafer colors, such as lemon yellow and bubblegum pink, shades that pulsated under the tropical sun. Design magazines began producing spreads on the revival of the Art Deco district in South Beach.
The beach’s bohemian atmosphere and sleek tropical design drew the so-called guppies, or gay yuppies, from New York. They brought along their friends from the fashion world, who discovered an ideal new backdrop for their ad campaigns. In 1985, fashion photographer Bruce Weber shot a Calvin Klein Obsession underwear ad on the roof of the Breakwater Hotel in South Beach. Photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Patrick Demarchelier followed, and by the time Gianni arrived for Christmas 1991, South Beach was one lavish photo shoot. Models followed next. Within a few years, there were about twenty modeling agencies in the area, and Ocean Drive, the boardwalk that ran along the sea, became a real-life runway, with models in spandex hot pants and string-bikini tops inline skating to their next go-see with their portfolios tucked under their arms.
“There were so many gorgeous people here,” remembered Merle Weiss, owner of a boutique that sold clothes to drag queens. “You went to Publix [supermarket] and you could just tear your heart out.”4 Designers such as Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs began vacationing in South Beach, and on their heels came celebrities such as John F. Kennedy, Jr., Daryl Hannah, Jon Bon Jovi, Prince, and Elton John.
Gianni’s clothes became the unofficial uniform in South Beach clubs, and his store there boomed. Pretty Latin girls went to the Versace shop, where a sound track of thumping dance music was always playing, to buy slinky metal-mesh cocktail dresses and head straight to the clubs. Hunky gay men wore his garish silk print shirts unbuttoned to the navel.
On that Christmas trip, Gianni came across Casa Casuarina, a 13,500-square-foot mansion that sat directly on Ocean Drive, at the corner of Eleventh Street. Casa Casuarina was originally built in 1930 by Alden Freeman, an eccentric philanthropist, as an homage to the Alcázar de Colón, a mansion built in 1510 in Santo Domingo that was home to Christopher Columbus’s son Diego. (Freeman named the house after the casuarina tree, an Australian breed that was standing on the site when Freeman began building.) Diego had been viceroy of the Indies, and his wife was related to the Spanish monarchs, so the original Alcázar de Colón had Moorish, Spanish, and Byzantine influences. Freeman transposed many of those themes to Casa Casuarina, making for a gaudy confection of a residence.
By the time Gianni found Casa Casuarina, the building was a shadow of its former self. Previous owners had broken it up into thirty tiny apartments, and rented them out to a mix of down-and-out drug addicts, moribund old people, and edgy, penniless artists. Although developers had revived scores of Art Deco buildings, they were daunted by the cost of redoing Casa Casuarina.
“It was this mix of old Jews from New York dumped there by their kids and young artists who didn’t have much money,” Weiss recalled. “But it was very hip and funky. That’s what Gianni liked about it.”5
In 1992, Gianni spent nearly $8 million to buy both Casa Casuarina and a run-down hotel next door, which he razed to make space for a pool, guest wing, and garage. The entire compound covered half the block, and Casa Casuarina became the only private residence on Ocean Drive. It was an unusual choice for Gianni, given that his celebrity friends, such as Madonna and Sylvester Stallone, were buying homes—set far behind guarded gates—in mainland Miami on Brickell Avenue, known as Millionaire’s Row. But Gianni loved the idea of remaking the eccentric mansion. The house, with its Moorish tiles, white stucco façade, slate roof, and wrought-iron balconies, was a complete break with the house’s Art Deco neighbors. The main three-story building centers around an open-air courtyard enclosed on all four sides by balconies with wooden railings. On the roof is a large L-shaped terrace, covered in brightly colored Moroccan-style tiles. Next to the terrace is a domed observatory with a powerful telescope.
Gianni poured millions into renovating and furnishing Casa Casuarina, creating a flashy, mesmerizing style once described as “gay baroque.” He built two concentric walls to close the compound off from the street. The ironwork on the walls and balconies—even the drains—were dotted with golden medusa heads. He spent ten thousand dollars apiece to ship in a certain type of palm tree from California because the ones native to Florida didn’t have the right look.
His pool became legendary for its extravagance. He hired a Milanese craftsman, handed him one of his elaborate multicolored print scarves, and said, “Here, I want you to copy this.” Fifty craftsmen worked for a year to create images of entwined dolphins, tridents, shells, and geometric designs, all in a blaze of red, blue, and gold. Working in Milan, they had to break slabs of marble by hand into hundreds of thousands of tiny tiles—and because he didn’t want to wait months to receive them by boat, Gianni had them shipped by air, at an extra cost of $200,000. Between the pool area and the mosaic floors, ceilings, and walls inside the main house, they laid more than 21,500 square feet of tiles in all. The cost: $1.5 million.6 Underwater lights made the pool a shimmering oasis at night. “That pool is probably the most expensive pool ever built,” said the project manager for the house.7
Inside the mansion, Gianni was no more restrained. Carved wood panels, tiles, frescoes, and stained glass windows embellished the thirty-five rooms. In one room, a chandelier made of iron palm fronds hung from a ceiling that was, in turn, painted with trompe l’oeil palm fronds. In one bathroom, a golden seat sat on a marble toilet. Gianni’s own suite, which looked out onto the ocean, covered eight hundred square feet and featured stained glass windows, beamed ceilings, and frescos of puffy clouds against a deep blue sky. He stuffed the house with a madcap array of furnishings—six hundred items in all. He had mahogany and gilt chairs reupholstered in red, blue, or gold Versace prints, creating a riot of colors and styles. He had silk lampshades made up in purple leopard print, and he covered plush sofas in deep yellow leopard-skin patterns.
The renovations cost a fortune—by one estimate, as much as $30 million—and Gianni’s spending created tensions with Santo, who scrambled to pay the huge bills that arrived from art dealers, contractors, and craftsmen. After a heated call from Santo, Gianni railed against his brother. “I ’ate my brother!” Gianni screamed to the project manager. “I ’ate him! But you know what, darling? I’ll show him.” He then called his antiques dealers and bought something else.8 The Miami house was Gianni’s biggest splurge, and the tension it created between the brothers would persist for years to come.
From the very moment of the 1993 housewarming party, Casa Casuarina became the center of gravity on South Beach, and Gianni himself became a symbol of the area’s 1990s zeitgeist like no other celebrity. His parties, usually organized by Donatella, were the envy of the beach. She would dispatch her assistants to organize the food and entertainment. “How much can we spend?” they asked her. “Whatever you want,” she replied. “There’s no budget.” Drag queens, models, photographers, and muscle boys mixed with Elton John, Cindy Crawford, Jack Nicholson, and Alec Baldwin, all gaping at the extravagance of Casa Casuarina.
One year, Donatella and Gianni threw a birthday party for Madonna. The pop star had been a Miami habitué since around 1992, when she had shot part of her book Sex in a mansion in the city, which she subsequently bought. “She hung out with the top photographers at the time, which were the same ones I was working with,” Donatella would say later. “We moved in the same circles and saw each other at parties. For a while, it was just Ciao, ciao. Then one day, she called me and said, ‘We need to talk.’”9
Madonna was in the market for a new image. Donatella courted the star assiduously, sending diamond jewelry along with free couture dresses. Then, in 1995, Madonna agreed to appear in a Versace ad campaign, shot at Donald Trump’s Mar al Lago estate in Palm Beach. For Versace, which had had more success in recruiting male stars, the ads featuring Madonna were a breakthrough, creating an association between Versace and celebrities that garnered endless press coverage. After Madonna, Donatella drafted one celebrity after another—Demi Moore, Courtney Love, Halle Berry—for her ad campaigns. (Madonna herself appeared twice more in Versace ads.) For Madonna’s birthday, Donatella chose a cake so big that it had to be lowered into the turquoise pool of Casa Casuarina, where it drifted like a giant water-borne float. Men in Versace bikinis waded in to cut slices for the guests.
In 1992, Gianni dedicated a collection to South Beach that became a hit with club-goers there. It included pastel-colored silk shirts embellished with cartoonish images of 1950s-era Cadillacs, with “South Beach” spelled out on the back. He sent the entire collection—dozens of shirts, dresses, belts, and leggings—gratis to trendsetters on the beach.
“He must have sent me one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of clothes,” remembered Lee Schrager, then owner of Torpedo, a popular gay club. “There were twenty shirts, tons of belts. There were boxes and boxes of clothes.”10
Once Gianni opened his house, he began flying to Miami Beach a half dozen times a year, usually taking the Concorde from Paris to New York and then hopping a flight down to Miami. (After Gianni’s father died in 1992, Gianni celebrated Christmas in Miami rather than Como.) While Santo came only rarely—Cristiana preferred their family to vacation separately—Donatella was a devotee of South Beach. Before Gianni bought Casa Casuarina, she traveled there frequently, staying at the Fontainebleau Resort, a huge 1950s-era luxury hotel, with Paul and the children. After Gianni finished his house, she visited even more often.
With the whole clan there, even trips across Ocean Drive to the beach were done in high style. The staff blanketed a thirty-foot-square patch of sand with colorful Versace towels. Donatella would sit on a lounge chair, smoking and tanning, clad in a chartreuse bikini and colorful little wrap skirts, a huge Louis Vuitton tote full of suntan lotion and Marlboro Reds by her side.11 (Sometimes, Donatella’s fame in South Beach was too much. One transvestite, dolled up to resemble Donatella, often stood outside Casa Casuarina’s gates. “Donatella, come out here!” she shouted. “I’m the original Donatella. You’re just a fake!”)
Gianni found his own temptation in the thriving gay scene on South Beach. He was a magnet for the buff young aspiring male models there. (He once shot a campaign at a park that was a popular cruising area for gays.) In turn, Gianni wasn’t above using his superstar status in the gay world to have some fun. At Paragon, a gay club in South Beach, Gianni once homed in on a handsome go-go dancer there, beckoning to him—but the young guy, perhaps thinking the designer was just another older man on the make, ignored him. Finally, Gianni began gesturing to himself, mouthing what one local gossip columnist called “the magical word that will open any hustler’s heart: Versace.”12
Miami Beach’s surfeit of ripe male flesh made for a thriving prostitution business, something Gianni and Antonio had indulged in from their first trips to South Beach in the early 1990s. Antonio and Gianni were largely faithful to each other, but each liked something on the side. In an interview with Miami police after Gianni’s murder, Antonio stated that Gianni met an aspiring model named Jaime Cardona, who would discreetly provide him and Antonio with willing young men. Cardona also worked at the Warsaw Ballroom nightclub, Gianni’s favorite haunt, where the entertainment was racy even by South Beach standards. There were amateur strip contests and drag queen shows, but the main attraction was Lady Hennessey Brown, whose show consisted of pulling objects, such as handkerchiefs and scarves, from her vagina. She could even make milk pour from her nipples.13
In the early days, Gianni went to the Warsaw with Antonio and a few Italian friends. Later, his entourage expanded to include the likes of Sting, Cindy Crawford, Elton John, and Ingrid Casares, a pretty Cuban who resembled Audrey Hepburn, with a short pixie haircut and dark Bambi eyes. (Casares, featured in Madonna’s Sex book French-kissing the pop star, was reputed to be Madonna’s lover for a time.)
“I remember Gianni would invite us over for tea, and it would be Elton John, Sting, Cindy Crawford, Madonna,” said Casares. “We would all walk to the News Café and sit to organize our night out. Then we’d walk to Warsaw or wherever, and nobody bothered anybody. There was no paparazzi yet.”14
At the Warsaw, Cardona got to know South Beach’s hippest crowd, and he became a fixture in the Versace galaxy. Gianni had Cardona show him and Antonio around Miami Beach, taking them to the hottest clubs. He later did some modeling for Gianni. Gradually, Cardona became Gianni’s informal social secretary, compiling the guest lists for the parties at Casa Casuarina.
“He would decide who was cool and who wasn’t,” said Louis Canales, a longtime publicist who did work for Gianni. “He had immense power.”15
Cardona’s help soon extended to more private encounters. According to statements provided to Miami Beach police by Cardona after Gianni’s murder, Cardona sorted through the ads for male escorts and vetted the men at a bar near Casa Casuarina. He once found an escort who went by the name of Kyle and brought him to the back door of the mansion, instructing him to go straight up a private staircase that led to Gianni and Antonio’s rooms. There, the three chatted briefly, and Kyle had sex with each man. Afterward, Antonio paid him. Kyle got the impression that such encounters were more for Antonio’s benefit than for Gianni’s. Sometimes, Gianni appeared disinterested or even left the room.16
Gianni moved blithely around South Beach, never worrying about his own personal safety. While Donatella often used bodyguards and sometimes pestered him to get his own security, Gianni didn’t see the need. Despite Miami’s reputation as a dangerous city—eight foreign tourists were killed there in less than a year in 1993—he was remarkably sanguine. Once, Andrea Tremolada, Versace’s head of advertising, who had flown in from Milan, left the mansion one day with Gianni to go to lunch. When they swung open the gates on Ocean Drive, they found a large group of fans waiting with cameras on the sidewalk to snap a picture of Gianni. The intrusion unnerved Tremolada. “Signor Versace, aren’t you afraid that someone could hurt you?” he asked.
“Why should I?” Gianni replied. “I’ve never hurt anyone, and I don’t see why anyone would want to harm me.”17
Once Gianni bought the mansion in South Beach, Miami became the exclamation point on the high life Donatella and Paul were enjoying. Drugs were as available as Good & Plenty candy in South Beach in the 1980s and 1990s, as Latin American drug cartels found a rich market in the anything-goes club scene there, selling everything from marijuana to a nasty mix of heroin, cocaine, and horse tranquilizer known as Special K.
Donatella became part of a tight celebrity pack that included Naomi Campbell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Moss, Madonna, and Ingrid Casares. Before Donatella arrived in South Beach, the staff at Casa Casuarina called around to see which celebrities were in town and what parties were being planned. In 1994, she went to Madonna’s thirty-sixth birthday party at her Brickell Avenue house. Organized by Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone, the party featured performances by drag queens and strippers, and culminated in Madonna baring her breasts to her guests and jumping into the pool fully dressed. Donatella danced most of the evening, clad in a gold dress covered with medusa heads.18
By the time her forty-first birthday rolled around in May 1996, Donatella’s partying was hitting a new peak. That year, Casares threw a party for Donatella’s birthday at Liquid, a club she owned. She invited about 150 guests to the private lounge downstairs from the main club, hired drag queens to make cotton candy and fresh popcorn for the guests, and brought in about a dozen male models, clad only in tight Versace underwear, to carry out a huge sheet cake, festooned with sparklers and emblazoned “Happy Birthday Donatella” in huge letters. One model dangled from a swing mounted from the ceiling and others danced on the bar. Paul and Allegra had come early in the evening, but Paul took the little girl home before the entertainment started.
Later that evening, Donatella and some friends went to an office upstairs in the club. She had someone there to fix her hair, brushing and touching up her blond extensions. While the hairdresser fussed, Donatella pulled out a slim hard case. She carefully unscrewed the top. Habitual users of cocaine often store their drugs in small containers slightly larger than cigarette lighters, which fit easily into pockets or small purses. Oftentimes, a tiny spoon, which is used to scoop out the cocaine, is attached to the side. When Donatella pulled out her case, her companions were amazed. She had come a long way from Bic pens and rolled-up dollar bills. Attached to the case was a tiny gold spoon with a finely wrought medusa on the handle. Donatella rolled her hair back over her shoulder in a practiced motion and leaned over, deftly scooping out some cocaine from her tiny case. After a while, the group went back downstairs to rejoin the other guests. Donatella arrived back at Casa Casuarina at around 4 a.m.19 Despite the raucous evening, Donatella was always in control, even when she was high. “I never saw her out of control or messy,” said Kevin Crawford, a friend who helped organize her birthday party.20
Gianni tried hard to ignore his sister’s problem, rarely speaking of it even to his closest confidantes. “My sister is crazy,” he often said, a veiled allusion to her hard-living lifestyle, his tone suggesting that it was a topic he didn’t care to talk about. Despite his reputation as the wild man in fashion, he was a homebody, content to be in bed by 10 p.m. With his natural store of adrenaline, he had never felt the need to turn to drugs for a jolt. His sister’s appetite for dope confounded and frustrated him, and her refusal to stop using cocaine was gradually helping to erode his bond with her.
But Gianni could hardly deny that Donatella’s penchant for full-on excess was enormously useful to his empire. The more the rumors spread about the wild parties she threw—with the best-looking people, the best drugs, and the best music—the hotter his brand became. Gianni had long relied on her to add louche glamour to his image, with her blaze of diamonds, candy-gloss hair, and poured-on dresses. She had been his mascot and muse since he had dressed her back in Reggio. Now that her high-octane lifestyle was pushing his brand to a heady peak, he was castigating the very behavior that had helped him create the life he now enjoyed.
Not long after he bought Casa Casuarina, Gianni drafted Bruce Weber, a Versace favorite, to gin up a gauzy testimonial to family life à la Versace for all the world to see. Weber shot Allegra, then six, and Daniel, not yet two, playing on the beach with their buffed parents. Donatella’s tiny black thong bikini showed off her trim and muscled legs and arms and her washboard stomach. In one shot Allegra holds a ballet pose while immersed in the water and in another she dances nude on the beach, her blond hair whipping in the wind while a guitarist plays nearby. In the book, titled South Beach Stories, the shots of the children were interspersed with pictures of drag queens, a male stripper, and male models wearing tight Versace bathing suits, bright silk shirts opened to the navel, and black-leather studded outfits.
By the time South Beach Stories came out in 1993, Gianni was increasingly channeling his familial devotion onto Allegra. From the time she was a toddler, Allegra was a precocious little girl. Blond with brown eyes, she had a seraphic, intelligent face and a sensitive character. She took up ballet early, and moved with a grace and poise unusual for children her age. Gianni fell madly in love with the little girl, even helping to choose her name. (Her brother, Daniel, who was born in December 1990, was named for the Elton John song.) Much more than just a doting uncle, he called her his principessa and showered her with gifts such as an antique tiara and a ruby necklace.
Allegra grew up a coddled, exceptional child in the red-hot core of Donatella and Gianni’s celebrity world. Gianni took her to his runway shows and to the dinners afterward, where she chatted with models and celebrities as if they were ordinary family friends. Her uncle’s supermodels, particularly Naomi, were like doting aunts. She hung out with the children of rock stars and world-famous actors. When Sting and his wife were guests, Allegra and their children made cookies together. She shared a desk with the son of Eric Clapton at her grammar school in Milan. For one birthday, Elton John sent her a grand piano, and when he visited he often serenaded the little girl. Donatella hired caretakers who treated Allegra like a fragile doll. She typically sent Allegra for visits to Calabria with an au pair, and on one visit, her old friends and family were horrified when the nanny refused to let them kiss the little girl and tested the temperature of the rooms Allegra stayed in to make sure they weren’t too hot or cold.
Both mother and uncle happily employed Allegra and Daniel in the Versace promotional machine. The children quickly grew used to being photographed constantly, at Versace events, in glossy publicity photos of models and celebrities, and in advertisements. Allegra and Daniel would become the faces of Gianni’s children’s fragrance. By contrast, Santo scrupulously shielded his children from the public eye. Gianni cared far less for Santo’s children, in part due to his antipathy for Cristiana.
While she reveled in the public image of glossy motherhood, Donatella was a restless parent. Anxious to escape Gianni’s grip, she spent weeks at a time in the United States for ad campaigns, which were shot four times a year. She had long found Milan suffocating and tedious, while the high energy of New York suited her skittish, restless character—even as her travels separated her from her children. She doted affectionately on the pregnant women in the office, sending elaborate gifts when their children arrived and cooing over baby pictures. But for herself, the impulse to play the doting Italian mamma who clucked over every detail of her children’s lives battled with the temptations that beckoned far away from home.
Donatella threw birthday parties for Allegra that were the envy of la Milano bene, the lofty circle of the city’s richest families such as the Berlusconis. Organized by Gianni’s top assistants, the party included some fifty children who would be invited for an afternoon at Via Gesù. Gianni often made a special party dress for Allegra. (Annoyed by the presence of other children, he didn’t usually attend the party itself.) Each year, the children’s mothers would receive a custom-made invitation, done in the theme Donatella had chosen for the party. One year the theme was Alice in Wonderland, featuring a full-blown show with live music and actors to entertain the kids. At the end of the party, each child (and his or her caretaker) could pick from a mountain of gifts piled on a table: Versace perfumes, T-shirts, or little purses. Other mothers—gray-flannel, bourgeois ladies who normally turned their nose up at the flashy Donatella—often tagged along with their nannies and the kids to see the spectacle for themselves.
Just as Donatella treated her daughter like a doll, so did Gianni dress her like one. He often made outfits for his niece that became the basis for some of the Versace children’s collection. His seamstresses kept Allegra’s measurements in the atelier, although her nanny often brought the little girl in for fittings when she visited Gianni. Donatella sometimes had the seamstresses make identical mother-daughter outfits.
But the glare of the Versace spotlight seared Allegra’s innocence. While her friends were playing innocent dress-up games, Allegra was being dolled up like a miniature Versace model. She was often made up, complete with mascara and eyeliner, for the house’s events. She wore smaller versions of adult fashion-forward clothes, such as flared pants and chain belts. For one Versace party, Donatella, wearing one of Gianni’s elaborate sadomasochism gowns, dressed her six-year-old daughter in a dress made in leopard-skin print, which made for a jarring mother-daughter tableau. “My mom dressed me in silk to go to elementary school,” Allegra told Harper’s Bazaar years later. “In kindergarten, they sent me home because I couldn’t do finger painting in my dress.”21
Gianni’s devotion to Allegra had little regard for the needs of a growing girl. He frequently had Donatella take her out of school so that she could accompany him on his trips to Miami and New York, where he took her to museum after museum.
“My children were his children,” Donatella recalled years later. “Since she was nine years old only, she was going to see museums with him. She knew all the museums in America, in France, in England. She would sit with him and go through art books. … It was adorable.”22
Meanwhile, Allegra was growing up in a household with contrasting messages regarding food. Donatella was enormously disciplined when it came to her own diet, ordering her chef to cook her own meals using low-fat ingredients, without salt and with very little oil. But while she followed a strict regimen, Donatella embraced the tradition of a country where so much hospitality revolves around eating. At her dinner parties, she was keenly involved in planning the menus and the presentation of the cuisine. She often had her chefs emulate trends she found in hip new restaurants, and guests were presented with their meals elaborately arranged on each plate. “Here, you have to eat!” she often encouraged her guests, pushing dishes at them.
At the same time, in Italy, la bella figura, or the imperative of looking perfectly turned out, extends to children, so that many Italian mothers dress and groom their kids as painstakingly as if they were adults.
“Donatella was very demanding with Allegra, about her clothes and how she looked,” recalled an employee who worked for years with the family. “She wanted her to be this glamorous little girl.”
Allegra was also growing up among the world’s most beautiful women. When Allegra visited her uncle during the days before a show, he encouraged her to emulate the models. “Pretend you’re Marpessa!” Gianni urged her as she cavorted on the runway, referring to a dark-haired beauty who was one of his favorite models.
By the time Allegra reached the cusp of adolescence, she was a sensitive girl who seemed oddly refined and mature for her age, an exacting perfectionist of a child, concentrating furiously when she drew and excelling in her studies. She took great care in how she dressed and looked, and moved with a self-conscious grace that often struck adults as overly mature. She was an obedient daughter, following Donatella’s edicts without protest.
Her brother, Daniel, had an easier time of it, although his uncle had made himself a looming presence even before he was born. In 1990, when Donatella found out her second child would arrive around January 18 of the next year, Gianni squawked, “You must be nuts if you’re thinking of having the baby during the men’s shows or the couture shows,” he told her. “I won’t hear of it. The baby has to be born at the latest between Christmas and New Year’s.” So Donatella convinced her doctors to move the Cesarean birth to December 28.23 Gianni loved Daniel, affectionately calling him his “Teddy-boy,” but he grew into a normal little child, playing pickup soccer games with friends.
Both children had to reckon with the strikingly different parenting habits of their mother and father. Donatella tended to take the kids to five-star hotels and restaurants. Once, when she took Allegra ice skating at the posh Swiss resort of St. Moritz, Donatella wore a black catsuit, a gold ski jacket, and diamond bracelets, and was trailed by several beefy bodyguards.24
By contrast, Paul was a fun, down-to-earth parent, happy to play Mr. Mom. He had hankered for kids and used to dote on the children of Donatella’s girlfriends. He took the kids to the beach or bike riding or tooling around Lake Como in his boat. When the kids were old enough, they attended an elite British school in Milan, where about half the students were children of foreign parents. (Allegra and Daniel both grew up bilingual in English and Italian.) He was an enthusiastic leader of Daniel’s Boy Scout troop, happy to dress in the corny uniform of shorts and a yellow hat. He would pull up after school in his convertible to pick the kids up and take them for an ice cream, and he never missed Allegra’s dance recitals.
“I remember how Allegra would light up when she saw her father in the audience,” said another parent. “She was this little girl in this pink tutu. That dance teacher was quite a tough cookie, but it was clear that Allegra was among the best girls there. She loved it.”
However, as Gianni’s relationships with Santo and Donatella broke down, Allegra increasingly bore the weight of her uncle’s high expectations. Those expectations would come to burden her almost unbearably in the years ahead.
While Gianni and Donatella reveled in their red-hot lifestyle and the rising notoriety of the Versace brand, Santo remained the grounded, paternal figure of the house, a mix of the down-to-earth parent who cleaned up after his offspring’s grandiose habits and the charismatic leader who goaded his team to beat the previous year’s sales figures. By the mid-1990s, as the Versace business grew, so did Santo’s stature. By then, nearing fifty, he began to look the part of the elder statesman, with his distinguished gray hair and impeccable dark suits with a matching mock turtleneck underneath. But while he was one of Italy’s best-known businessmen by then, Santo largely shunned the limelight except for the obligatory press interviews, happy to continue to play his life’s role as the family’s pragmatic fixer.
At home, Santo’s personal life had none of the theater of his siblings’ lives. He and Cristiana sent their children, Francesca and Antonio, to Milan’s German-language school, believing the place would instill a Teutonic discipline in them. “If you can learn in German, everything else is easy,” he told friends. Even though he was now a bigwig in Italian business circles, he was happy to walk to work each day from the comfortable rental apartment near the company headquarters that he and his family moved into early in his marriage. Because it was far less grand than Gianni’s apartments in Via Gesù or Donatella’s sprawling home, he virtually never held Versace events there. Aside from a passion for sports, he had few hobbies, preferring to spend weekends and evenings in the office.
Santo traveled constantly, monitoring the Versace shops. In the showroom in Milan, he ran his finger along the shelves to make sure they were immaculate. He was enormously popular with his staff—he was careful always to knock on a manager’s door before entering his office—even as he pushed them to work long hours. “He used to say, ‘Brava, you did a good job, but now I want you to do this and that,’” recalled one longtime manager. “I used to wonder if I was ever going to get a break. But he was so excited by what was happening that he just pulled you along with him.”
One winter, during a visit to Beijing for the opening of a new boutique, Santo and his team went to visit the Great Wall. While there, Santo spotted two French tourists clad in Versace jeans. He excitedly approached the pair to compliment them on their outfits, and promptly invited them to Gianni’s next couture show back in Paris. Back in the office in Milan, he extended the paternalist role he played with his siblings to Versace employees. The staff, knowing he was a rabid sports fan, often asked him to procure tickets for soccer matches at Milan’s giant San Siro Stadium. When employees brought their kids into the headquarters, he invited the children into his office, sitting them at a table near his desk so that they could draw.
Santo’s exuberance and hyperkinetic energy waned little with age; he restlessly paced his office and spoke at such a rapid clip that guests had to strain to keep up with him. He had an extraordinary memory and grasp of even small details. Even as Gianni’s label soared and became a global name, Santo remained the go-to person for the flood of new projects—boutique openings, licensing agreements, expanding factory space—that came in. He worked harder than ever, often eating dinner in the office and staying at his desk until nearly midnight.
During the first half of the 1990s, Santo embarked on a new strategy to ride Gianni’s hot image and take the house to a new level. At the time, a new middle-class hunger for luxury goods was growing, creating a huge market for designers who found ways to sell little slices of the dream they served up in ad campaigns and on the runway. Companies such as Gucci, Prada, and Louis Vuitton began making millions not on couture dresses and ten-thousand-dollar traveling trunks but on nylon bags, leather wallets, and perfumes that cost hundreds.
Indeed, Santo knew that Gianni’s one-of-a-kind couture dresses didn’t make money. Couture in general had been losing millions for decades. (In 1993, Yves Saint Laurent’s couture line was losing more than $5 million a year.25) But it hardly mattered to him. Couture had become a marketing vehicle to sell oodles of less pricey items, including everyday clothes. Indeed, unlike many designers who remain trapped in an ivory tower of designing for a few fashion-forward women, Gianni enthusiastically supported Santo’s sales force. The day after a show, his team put together a large album of photos of the collection, and he tacked stickers on the outfits he wanted Santo’s salespeople to sell the most of, along with sales targets. To Santo’s delight, Gianni pushed his designers to update core items that always sold well—day suits, jackets, pants. His daywear was popular with women who wanted a more feminine uniform than Armani’s androgynous suits. He updated Chanel’s famous day suits by putting black leather straps down the front of a crisp white form-fitting wool suit. He made sure the pattern makers at the factory made them in sizes big enough to fit real women—up to a size twelve. “Loosen them up,” he urged them. “Make it bigger. Not all women are runway models.”26
“Of all the sexy things he made, what we used to sell were the suits,” said Ron Frasch, chief executive of Neiman Marcus at the time. “They were great fitting and very structured. You didn’t have to be a stick to wear them. It made a woman feel very strong.”27
In the early 1990s, Santo pushed the Versace brand harder by adding a raft of new licenses for products that a bigger range of shoppers could afford, adding to the relatively small clutch of licenses he’d signed in the 1980s. For years, Gianni swore he would never design everyday items such as jeans or sportswear, but Santo gradually wore him down, pointing out how successful other brands, particularly Armani, had been with such products. It was a risky strategy, however, because licensees are always tempted to cut corners on the quality of the products in order to slash prices and sell more. Santo felt that, if he watched them carefully, licenses could boost Versace’s growth. So he signed contracts for everything from jeans and perfumes for children to bathing suits, underwear, umbrellas, plus-sized clothes, and home furnishings. In 1989, he created Versus, a less expensive, edgier line aimed at twenty-something shoppers, as well as Versace Jeans Couture.
Santo’s strategy worked. Gianni’s image—fueled by his glitzy runway shows, his celebrity pals in South Beach, his spitfire sister—intrigued shoppers, who snapped up the more-affordable items. As a result, revenues from licensed products—led by the jeans—soon outstripped those of the house’s main lines. In 1991, before Santo’s most lucrative licensing deals, overall sales of Versace products were 770 billion lire (about $360 million), of which just less than half came from licensed products; most of the rest came from sales of the main men’s and women’s line.28 In just five years, the picture changed dramatically. Overall sales had nearly doubled, to 1.52 billion lire (about $800 million). Two-thirds of that came from licenses, with the rest from the house’s main lines.
But from the beginning, the licenses and extra lines were a source of worry for Santo. Shoppers didn’t understand that some of the lines—such as Istante and Signatures, two toned-down variations on the main line—were produced by Versace. Some of the collections were too similar and would cannibalize one another’s sales. Others, such as the plus-sized collection, detracted from the luster of the Versace image. Santo’s salespeople pushed the franchisees hard to load up on licensed products, knowing that a percentage of sales flowed into the coffers of Via Gesù. But the franchisees often squawked, arguing that shoppers in their markets wouldn’t buy all the goods. Years later, managers of rival fashion brands would cite Versace as an example of a company that overplayed its licensing strategy.
But in the 1990s, Santo pushed the licenses because he needed the extra money for a new business model that was gaining ground in fashion. It was the first rumblings of the luxury goods boom that would peak at the turn of the millennium, and the cornerstone of the new approach was fully owned boutiques. Around 1990, Louis Vuitton and Prada began spurning franchise contracts and instead started to open shops themselves. A franchise approach suits a company when it’s just starting out, by sharing the burden and expense of opening new stores with boutique owners willing to take a risk on a new brand. However, when a brand begins to grow quickly, the franchisees pocket most of the gains. Santo saw that Versace could make far more money if it chucked the franchisees and opened more of its own shops.
The strategy of shunning the franchisees, however, cost a fortune. Prada, Vuitton, and later, Gucci were opening opulent stores that cost millions of dollars each. The booming economy sent rents on streets such as Fifth Avenue in New York and Bond Street in London soaring. The core of the model was the huge flagship store, complete with VIP rooms and ornate furnishings that were showcases for a house’s full collection. The flagships often lost money, but their owners hardly cared. They were valuable marketing vehicles, rather than simple sales outlets. When a Japanese shopper came to Paris to buy a coveted Louis Vuitton bag at the boutique on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, she wanted a dazzling experience. But the approach was very risky: When sales fell, the fixed costs of the shop—huge rents, large amounts of stock, and trained sales staff—were impossible to cut, throwing the stores quickly into the red.
In the early 1990s, when Gianni’s collections were hot, the risks seemed slim to Santo, and he began buying back franchises. In turn, Gianni threw himself into planning a series of stunningly opulent flagships, designed by the best architects and with the highest quality materials. While other brands saved money by choosing a single image for all its shops and negotiating volume discounts for the renovations, Gianni treated the shops like his personal playthings, designing a different look for each big new boutique.
In 1991, Versace opened a twelve-thousand-square-foot store—his third in Paris—on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré complete with a large VIP room for couture clients. In Milan, the company opened a second shop on Via Montenapoleone, a three-story boutique with marble and mosaic floors, pillars, and trompe l’oeil paintings on the moldings of the arches. But the performance of the new shop was an ominous sign for the future: Sales of the two Via Montenapoleone stores remained the same. Adding a new shop had doubled costs but only cannibalized sales from the original boutique. Within just a few years, Santo’s ambitious expansion strategy would come back to haunt him.
As Versace’s growth soared, Gianni kept up a frenetic pace, fearful perhaps of letting the fruits of his extraordinary success slip through his fingers. He worked constantly, during vacations, holidays, and even during family events such as Allegra’s baptism. By then, Via Gesù was the casa-bottega (house-and-shop) he’d always dreamed of, the atelier an extension of his own home. While his private apartments were richly furnished, the atelier on the upper floor was almost plain, workaday. Two cream-colored salons with floor-to-ceiling mirrors had plenty of space to hold fittings, receive suppliers, and lay out photos for ad campaigns. Along the corridors were shelves and shelves of books. He owned about twenty thousand volumes that served as inspiration for his collections, and he hired a librarian to manage them all.
As the company grew, his days became marathons, and at times he resented the unforgiving pace. “Are you trying to kill me?” he roared when he saw how many meetings his secretaries jammed into his schedule. The first one to arrive in the atelier in the morning, he left around 6:30 p.m. each evening, only to return many nights around 9, clad in one of his silk dressing gowns, to work as late as 3 a.m.
He was unstintingly generous with employees who met his high expectations. He bought a block of apartments in a building in the center of Milan so that his favorite associates could live rent-free. He adored a middle-aged couple, Lucia and Giovanni, who were his personal valets. When he learned that Giovanni, as a young man, hadn’t been able to afford an engagement ring for Lucia, Gianni immediately sent an assistant down to his favorite jeweler to buy her one.
But in spite of his kindness, Gianni could also be a tyrant. If he felt disappointed with an employee’s work, he seemed to take it personally, refusing to speak with that person for months at a time. He sometimes emerged from a meeting room after an argument with a supplier with his face red with rage and his hair flying around his head like Beethoven’s. He engaged in a bitter war with the close friend who had bought half of Villa Fontanelle when Gianni himself hadn’t had the money to buy it all. After a series of arguments over the renovation of the estate, Gianni turned petty and mean, cutting the electricity off in the friend’s half of the property and even tossing her lounge chair into the lake in a fit of pique. His posturing could veer into prevarication and vanity. He blithely fed journalists lies that puffed up his image, claiming to have met Picasso when he was twenty-two (an age when he was still living in Calabria) and to have discovered the medusa logo in an ancient mosaic tile floor near his family home in Reggio, not on a door handle of Via Gesù.
In order to escape the pressure of the atelier, he and Antonio left for Villa Fontanelle every Thursday evening. Every Friday and Saturday, he had his silk suppliers bring him samples of his prints, and he happily pored over the color swaths laid out on large tables in the main salon. He brought guests to a restaurant on Isola Comacina, a tiny island, and took them for a tour of the lake afterward in his small boat. He and Antonio went for tea at nearby Villa D’Este, a five-star hotel with a plush gym where Antonio worked out every evening. Sometimes, Gianni joined his celebrity guests such as Sylvester Stallone or Madonna for a desultory session at the gym, but otherwise he mostly soaked in the sauna.
As he became more famous, he shunned the limelight. He had never liked appearing even in his own publicity photos, and he started wearing dark sunglasses more often. He and Antonio ate dinner mostly at home because he hated being stared at in restaurants. Once, he took Allegra to the opera in Miami, but left halfway through because so many people approached him for an autograph. He generally let his sister tend to the celebrities, his tastes running more toward art and theater. According to Ingrid Sischy, then editor of Interview Magazine and a close friend of Gianni’s, at a dinner in New York, he once sat next to Madonna, Elton John, and the rapper Tupac Shakur, “but the person he left with at two a.m. was Philip Taaffe”—the prominent New York artist—“because he wanted to go to the studio. He wasn’t running off with Madonna to a late-night cabaret. He had a lot of options that night. But what he wanted to do was look at this artist’s studio.”29