Gianni Versace: 20th Anniversary

 

Remembering Gianni Versace: 20 years after the designer's death, we celebrate his enduring legacy.......For my parents’ generation, the one defining moment when everyone remembered exactly where they were was when they heard of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination; for my own it was the shooting of John Lennon in New York; but in the fashion community it will always be the murder of Gianni Versace outside his mansion, Casa Casuarina, in South Beach, Miami.

 

Gianni’s murder marked the cold realisation that fashion had become a major social and artistic phenomenon. His assassination on the doorstep of his own house by deranged killer Andrew Cunanan on July 15, 1997, marked the end of fashion innocence. 

Looking back, it’s hard to underestimate the impact Gianni had on fashion, and greater pop culture when he exploded onto the scene. Quite simply, Gianni revolutionised fashion with his high-octane blend of rock and roll and couture.

 

When he first took Atelier Versace, the haute couture arm of his label, to Paris, venerable French houses were still staging shows with an MC calling out the number and reference of each look. Audiences were composed of surgically enhanced Park Avenue billionaires’ wives, Ladies Who Lunch or obscure Middle Eastern princesses.

 

Gianni blasted this staid institution apart, reinventing it as a global glam fest – luring everyone from Madonna, Sting, Bon Jovi and George Michael to Hugh Grant, Jackie Collins and Rupert Everett to his front row for epic shows, staged on a Perspex catwalk over the swimming pool of The Ritz. Suddenly, hundreds of screaming fans fought to get into his supermodel-packed shows inside the hotel.   

 

His final Ritz show – barely a week before his death – featured Naomi Campbell in a dazzling white silk column dress, a huge crystal choker around her neck, and Erin O’Connor in a micro leather cocktail number embroidered with Chinese script.

The silhouette was so figure-hugging, the supermodels looked as if they were poured into his creations. Gianni’s skill was to connect raunchy sex with couture audacity – like his iconic safety pin dress, catapulted into fashion history by Liz Hurley. It even has its own Wikipedia page, where it is listed as ‘That Dress’.  

 

With the celebrities came intense security – Prince famously danced surrounded by four immense heavies at a Versace after-party, and kept a handler with a terrifying Doberman outside The Ritz throughout his stay. But when Gianni went for his final fateful walk in South Beach to buy Italian newspapers in News Café, despite the fact he was already a fashion legend, there was no bodyguard around.  

"Gianni opened couture to a much wider world. And we both had such fun doing that! He made couture sexy. He was not a quiet designer," recalls his younger sister Donatella, in the sitting room of the family palazzo on Via Gesù.

Gianni was born on December 2, 1946, in Reggio Calabria, the toe of Italy’s boot, a city still scarred by the war. Like many of the great designers, Gianni came from a modest background. His father Antonio was a local coal merchant, his seamstress mother Francesca sewed dresses for local gentry, and Gianni made his first dress – a blue one-shoulder evening gown – at the age of nine. Princess Diana wore a version of that creation some 40 years later.  

After studying architecture, he moved north to Milan aged 26, spending 10 years as an everyman for a variety of mainstream labels, before he came to attention in the late 1970s when he staged his first signature show in the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan.
From the get go his clothes were revolutionary,  particularly his fabric mixes – leather and lace with metal, studs and Swarovski crystals. Using three elements in the same dress was unheard of at the time.  He was a naturally great colourist – Italy’s answer to Yves Saint Laurent, though with a sherbet Italian palette. He was also a brilliant draper, who knew his fashion history. His greatest work contained savvy references to the Grecian goddess gowns of Madame Grès, and the bias-cut designs of Madeleine Vionnet that accentuated the human form. 

 

Moreover, Gianni had a genius for branding – giving his label a triple stamp: the golden name Versace; the Medusa head and most memorably, the Grecian frieze. The latter was inspired by his native Reggio Calabria, an ancient Greek colony of Magna Grecia, and showed up in every collection, even his underwear.

 

 His business grew incredibly rapidly, creating a fortune large enough to afford his private palazzo on Via Gesù and his magnificent Villa Fontanelle on Lake Como – all containing his eclectic mix of ancient Greek and Roman statuary, Renaissance furniture and modern art.  

 

No client meant more to Gianni than Princess Diana, whom he famously dressed for a Vanity Fair cover in a white haute couture gown, shot by Mario Testino. "Ah, those times will never come back. Once I got to meet Prince Charles in London and I introduced Prince to him. And I said, 'Prince, this is the Prince'!" says Donatella, with her signature husky laugh.

 

In our era of LGBT, it’s easy to forget that 20 years ago most homosexuals were still in the closet. Gianni was openly gay, living publically with loyal partner Antonio D’Amico. Yet he was also very much a family man, which appealed to traditional ideas of the Italian famiglia. Gianni’s brother Santo ran the commercial side, while Donatella, 11 years his junior, would design the sportswear line of the business.

 

Gianni also rewrote the book on how to communicate fashion, creating a brilliant new world of fantasy opulence – mingling Slim Aarons with MTV – in his ad campaigns. He understood by spending money on photography greats (Richard Avedon for Atelier Versace; Steven Meisel for the signature line and Bruce Weber for Versus), and hiring only supermodels, he could simply give these images to key colour supplements in emerging markets who could only dream of publishing such fashion legends in their pages.

 

 It was a brilliantly innovative early form of advertorial in a way – and garnered him endless 10-page magazine features starring the likes of Nadja Auermann and Claudia Schiffer.

 He was also the first designer to take fashion on the road: staging his Versus catwalk shows in New York and Atelier Versace in Paris. And the first to fly around a loyal group of journalists to attend. 

Personally, I met Gianni a half-dozen times when, as bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily, he would receive me for previews of the Atelier collection before the show. In a pre-internet era, we would shoot several looks, send a high-speed motorbike messenger to Charles de Gaulle to catch the Concorde, develop the film in New York the next day and thus be able to have a brand new Versace look on the cover of WWD on the morning before the evening show had taken place.  

 

He spoke heavily accented but charming English. He did not so much love life, as drink it like a rich nectar. Physically, he had the high forehead, proud bearing and dash of a Renaissance duke, worthy of a portrait by Piero della Francesca.
Like those aristocrats, he had his sworn rivals, too. In his case, Giorgio Armani, the master minimalist. When his beloved Eric Clapton began wearing Armani suits, Gianni sneered that the great axman "looked like an accountant".

 

 There was always lots to write about with Gianni. A true Renaissance man who loved the arts, and a great collector, he was among the first to put giant art works in his Fifth Avenue stores, with pieces by Frank Stella and Julian Schnabel hanging on the walls.

 

He threw dinner parties for Woody Allen in his Upper East Side townhouse, and had an unerring ability to pick the right friends – advertising heavily in Interview magazine, whose editor Ingrid Sischy introduced him to the entire art world. 

 

A workaholic, he stayed late putting the final touches to each collection the night before. Gianni was known to sketch all night. So talented an illustrator that he used to send and receive sketches from fashion’s other legendary sketcher Karl Lagerfeld. So enamoured was Karl, the pair once threw a joint dinner party inside Lagerfeld’s St Germain hôtel particulier, where the German designer danced until the wee hours with Kate Moss.

 Above all, Versace was the first to understand power of rock music, and how hinging it to fashion generated enormous attention. He courted rock legends – dressing them in his designs and letting stars like Madonna and Bruce Springsteen stay in his homes. 

After he discovered Miami, he almost singlehandedly made South Beach fashionable, acquiring Casa Casuarina in 1992 and turning it into his power base. He ripped down a 10-storey adjacent hotel to create space for a swimming pool, with Grecian frieze of course, and flew in an army of stonemasons from Italy to achieve the exact effect he wanted.

 

Friends like Anna Wintour would come to stay with her family, and picnic in splendour on the beach. But also, party animals like Whitney Huston and Bobby Brown, for whom he threw legendary parties  –  with fake Renaissance frescos of Gianni and Antonio in various states of undress amid Arcadian landscapes.

 

Which is where he ultimately met his death, shot down by Cunanan, a failed dreamer who had met Gianni seven years before – when the designer dressed the San Francisco Opera – and felt bizarrely embittered about him. In the days before his death, Gianni had been meeting bankers in New York to discuss an IPO. But death interrupted all that.  

"I first heard news of Gianni’s death while I was in Rome preparing a Versus show. We did one every year on the Spanish Steps," Donatella tells me. "The day before Gianni had left for Miami. He was supposed to stay for the show. But I told him, 'I will manage'. Anyway, the next morning at eight o’clock, Gianni was on the phone again, saying that he was thinking of coming back. I said, 'Leave me alone, I need to do a show!' And then the next call was from the hospital, saying that my brother was in an accident. And then they called to tell me the time he had died." 

 "I don’t know why that guy killed him, why he hated him? He must have wanted to be remembered, like a star. Gianni was a celebrity and he attracted the world of Hollywood and music. When someone is well known they become a target. That’s just the way it is," she sighs.

 

His funeral packed out Milan’s great cathedral, Il Duomo. Diana arrived to pay her respects, and the entire fashion industry came to pay homage. Within just six weeks Diana was dead too.
Gianni’s huge aesthetic legacy is apparent every season in fashion – with a new generation of creators as diverse as Christopher Kane, Riccardo Tisci, Fausto Puglisi and Olivier Rousteing all openly admitting the Versace inspiration, while a new wave of contemporary music icons including Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj have fallen for the brand all over again.

 

 "Gianni Versace was about pure, unadulterated glamour and his collections were always joyful moments in fashion. Within that exuberance, though, was a designer with an eye for precision and superb tailoring and who above all else loved women," says William Banks-Blaney, the founder of luxury vintage brand William Vintage which will be offering over 300 pieces of rare and valuable Gianni-era Versace (photographed here) for sale..

Noticing a resurgence in popularity of the late designer’s work, Banks-Blaney has spent three years scouring the globe to amass a museum-worthy collection than spans Gianni’s glory days between 1981 and his final autumn/winter 1997 collection.

"From the Pop collection of 1991 to the 1992 S&M collection and the Punk collection of 1994, he changed the perception of fashion, and created the idea of the supermodel; the confident, unapologetic and unashamedly feminine woman," says Banks-Blaney.  

 

"Gianni was a king in fashion. Even after he died, he still ruled," says Donatella, whose tenure at the house has not always been plain sailing. "At the beginning of my work I made so many mistakes and I did not really know what to do because I listened to too many people. When I finally found my own path it was much better." 
After Gianni was murdered, it was announced that Donatella would become creative director, with a 20 per cent share of the business, and Santo was appointed CEO, with a 30 per cent share. 

 

(Donatella’s 11-year-old daughter Allegra was left a 50 per cent stake, which she assumed control over on her 18th birthday.)
But having reached almost $1bn in annual revenue before his death, over the next few years the business plummeted to less than half of that. By 2004 crisis point was reached as Milan banks threatened not to roll over the outstanding €100m bond that they had provided to pay the massive inheritance tax after Gianni’s death. Donatella admitted she had been addicted to cocaine for 18 years.

And so, after what Santo described as "seven years of woe," the family brought in outside executives to steady the listing ship. After an intervention by Elton John and Sischy, Donatella booked herself into rehab, cleaned up and got back to work with gusto. 

In 2008, Versace did see sales rise eight per cent to €336.3m, though net profit declined 30 per cent to just €9m. New CEO Gian Giacomo Ferraris made some tough decisions, laying off 350 employees. "Trading conditions in the wake of the global financial crisis have been severe and the company expects to make a loss in 2009," said Ferraris at the time.

 

As a result, Versace rationalised production facilities and quietly shuttered four boutiques in Japan, reflecting  the tough market conditions. Donatella, meanwhile, began receiving rave reviews.
Her autumn/winter 2011 collection was a standout – with Milan staging its most reined-in, ladylike season, Donatella showed a loud and proud collection – starring Napoleon coats, dominatrix boots and flirty split kilts, yet always with the right dose of femininity to render the effect pretty rather than kinky.

 

"I wanted a pure Versace moment and a great soundtrack, which is what I got," said Donatella, explaining that Prince had sent her a brand new song, which DJ Frédéric Sanchez had mixed into the brilliant show music.

 

By November 2011, she was taking Manhattan by storm. Her collaboration with retail giant H&M was a huge triumph – launching with a high-speed runway show, staged in a radically reupholstered pier on the Hudson River, with a groundbreaking after-party that featured its own boutique.

It was a bravura moment that included an exceptional jazz-funk live concert by Prince at his most redolent. The designer also riffed on Versace’s signature Greek motif trim, embossing it on slinky microfibre cocktail dresses and rockstar biker jackets to great effect. Even the classic Liz Hurley barely-there dress held – just about – together with Medusa-head safety pins, enjoyed a revival.

Few shows were more applauded than her spring 2016 collection – a stellar girl-power athletic-influenced show that blended active sports, pop art and an amazing cast. 

 

However, in a surprising turn of events, Ferraris suddenly quit the company in 2016, amid Italian reports that he was forced out by a combination of pressure from hedge fund Blackstone, which acquired 20 per cent of the Versace company for €210m, and Donatella’s concern that she was not seeing enough of her runway clothes in her flagship stores.
Donatella then hired savvy British executive Jonathan Akeroyd from Alexander McQueen as her new CEO, a position he describes as "like holding the steering wheel of the highest high-performance car. There is just so much power in this brand." 

 

Throughout the ups and downs, her dinners and parties on Via Gesù – where the likes of Beyoncé, Jay Z and Kate Moss mingle with Heather Graham, Serena Williams and assorted soccer stars – have become the ultimate insider destination in Italy. Indeed, Donatella has grown to be as legendary a fashion icon as Gianni in her own right, her 1.1 million followers allowed to view everything from backstage shots to snaps of her beloved Jack Russell, Audrey. 

Her own famiglia has grown up. Son Daniel, who is studying in London, spent New Year surfing in South Africa, while daughter Allegra is working on Versus, which has been reborn as a hothouse of fledgling talent, bringing in young design stars like Christopher Kane, Jonathan Anderson and Anthony Vaccarello, each of whom has gone on to achieve international success in their own right. This spring, ex-One Direction singer and teen heartthrob Zayn Malik will make his design debut for the brand in a move no one saw coming.

 

 Asked what to expect, she virtually shouts back: "Expect to see a young rebel!" An apt description of Donatella herself, and indeed Gianni, who built a fashion empire and a unique style that will influence fashion forever by leading a revolt against the staid values of bourgeois convention.