the untold

story
of genius,
murder,
and survival

House of Versace
Deborah Ball

Crown Publishers • New York

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 Copyright © 2010 by Deborah Ball
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ball, Deborah.
House of Versace / Deborah Ball.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Fashion design—Italy—History. 2. Gianni Versace S.p.A.—History.
3. Fashion designers—Italy. 4. Versace, Gianni. 5. Clothing trade—Italy—
History. I. Title.
TT504.6.I8B35 2009
746.9'2092—dc22 2009032748
ISBN 978-0-307-40651-4
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition

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To purchase a copy of 

House of Versace 
 

visit one of these online retailers:

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 Contents

one “They’ve Shot Gianni” 1

two The Black Sheep 23

three Breaking Free 41

four Sister, Playmate, Confidante 57

five A New Era 69

six Rivals and Lovers 84

seven Inspiration and Muse 98

eight Rock and Royalty 113

nine Supermodels, Superstar 131

ten Diva 146

eleven Spoiled by Success 158

twelve Conflict 180

thirteen Murder 197

fourteen Understudy on the Stage 214

vii

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 Contents
fifteen Inheritance and Loss 227

vii
sixteen Siblings at War 244

seventeen Toward Ruin 259

eighteen Breaking Down 275

nineteen Recovery 296

twenty A New Beginning 313

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 321

NOTES 325

INDEX 337

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 one

“They’ve Shot Gianni”

i T WAS MIDAFTERNOON ON JULY 15, 1997, AND A BREATHLESS

heat had settled on Rome, making the Eternal City so hot

that stiletto heels sank slightly into the melting asphalt,
leaving pockmarks on the sidewalk. Piazza di Spagna, with
its undulating, double-helix staircase, was a hive of activity.
Early that morning, police had cleared the cream-colored
marble steps, shooing away the penny-ante artists and the
slick Romeos who chatted up pretty tourists, so that televi-
sion crews could mount bulky cameras and lights onto two
makeshift towers.
The crews were setting up for the next evening’s
broadcast of Donna sotto le stelle, or Woman Under the Stars.
Donna sotto le stelle was the sort of eye candy that had be-
come a staple of Italian television in the 1980s. Eighteen
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
fashion houses, including Valentino and Fendi, would send their most
2 fabulous evening gowns sashaying down the floodlit Spanish Steps,
with the balmy backdrop of Rome adding to the festive air. To add a
pinch of drama, the organizers of the show always chose one designer
to honor. This year, they’d picked Gianni Versace.
Gianni’s sister, Donatella, had arrived the evening before at the
Hotel De La Ville, a seventeenth-century palazzo turned hotel
perched at the top of the steps. As usual, she stayed in the best
room—a deluxe eighth-floor penthouse with a wraparound terrace
that offered postcard views stretching from the cupola of the Vatican
to the Colosseum. The suite boasted a white baby grand piano, be-
queathed to the hotel by composer Leonard Bernstein, who had once
lived there for six months. Santo, the elder brother of Donatella and
Gianni, hated fancy suites and had unpacked his bags in a more mod-
est room at the same hotel.
That morning, each house had had an hour-long slot to rehearse
its models on the Spanish Steps, the trickiest of catwalks, with 135
marble stairs, many worn slippery smooth from centuries of tourist
traffic. Dozens of models gingerly tested their descents in the stilettos
they would wear the next day. Donatella had the first slot for the re-
hearsal that morning. The producers knew the ratings dropped soon
after the start of the show, as a marathon of pretty models in pretty
clothes tired viewers quickly, so they had scheduled the most impor-
tant designers first. This year, Versace was to open the show. Due to
the unwieldy number of designers, the show’s organizers had set a
limit of no more than fifteen dresses each. Donatella had ignored the
quota and brought thirty-five, confident that the house’s signature
glitz would be irresistible to the show’s producers and that no one
would complain.
Moreover, she was bringing Naomi Campbell, the star of super-
models, famous for her perfect body, her showmanship, and her abil-
ity to work a dress with grace and swagger. Naomi was too important
to attend that morning’s run-through, so another girl had stood in for
her. Naomi had arrived in Italy a few days before to take in a quick
holiday on the Amalfi coast, and a chauffeured car was ferrying her
to Rome for the evening dress rehearsal. Even in a world crowded
with million-dollar egos, Naomi was the ultimate diva, thanks as

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
much to her personal antics as to her lithe body. The twenty-seven-
year-old superstar’s appetite for gorgeous men, fast cars, and copious
amounts of cocaine provided endless fodder for gossip columns.
Naomi’s tantrums were legendary: She would throw such a violent fit
over lost luggage in London that police officers had to drag her kick-
ing and screaming from the plane. Another time, she threw a cell
phone at her maid, leaving a gash that required stitches.
But with Gianni, Naomi was a different, more tractable crea-
ture. She had long been his favorite model—the woman he often had
in mind when he designed his gowns. She showed off his frocks in
their full glamour, her feline grace a perfect foil for his lissome
dresses. Versace had brought her fame as one of the original super-
models, the group of exquisite girls Gianni had launched. He also
played the role of the protective big brother, a salve to her skittish,
high-strung character. Cementing her bond with the clan, Naomi
had become fast friends with Donatella, who often invited her for
weekends at the Versace mansion on Lake Como.
As Naomi made her way to Rome, two conference rooms on the
first floor of the Hotel De La Ville had been transformed into a
makeshift backstage, overflowing with pre-fashion-show detritus, as
makeup artists, hairdressers, and seamstresses wrangled the girls into
the highly polished, über-sexy Versace look for the dress rehearsal.
Dressed in skinny jeans and devoid of makeup, the girls sat giggling
and gossiping, sipping on cans of Diet Coke and chatting as they
waited their turns. Some were as young as fourteen and still had pre-
pubescent, almost boyish figures. Indeed, aside from the supermod-
els, many models are surprisingly plain without makeup. They are
chameleons that designers can transform into the type of women
they want to project that season.
Against one wall stood a line of vanity tables, outfitted with
bright klieg lights and littered with bottles, tubes, and hairpieces.
Makeup artists held the girls’ chins firmly, turning their heads left
and right to get a good look at their work. The room grew stifling
with the sickly smell of hair spray, cigarette smoke, and espresso va-
pors. Because the show was just a one-night stand and not part of a
fashion marathon, the hair and makeup people had a relatively easy
time of it. During fashion week, when the girls scurry from show to
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
show, the hair and makeup artists have to rush to remove the fake
4 nails, elaborate hairdos, or full-body bronzing gel that the last de-
signer demanded. A model who works the whole five-week runway
season will find her skin, hair, and nails wrecked by the relentless
grooming.
Once made up, the bare-breasted models stripped down to just
heels and tiny G-strings, their Brazilian bikini waxes on full display,
and waited for dressers to help them wiggle into the clothes without
smudging their makeup or leaving stains on the dresses from the
greasy lotion they’d applied to their legs to make them shine under
the lights. Models often crash-dieted or downed laxatives before a big
show, so Versace’s motherly seamstresses, pins hanging from their
mouths, stood ready to nip and tuck dresses to make them fit again.
Double-sided tape was strapped to the models’ breasts to keep them
from popping out of Versace’s signature plunging necklines on stage.
Trays of food sat untouched.
Donatella’s assistants then took Polaroid shots of each woman
in her assigned dress, complete with any jewelry and handbags she
would wear for the show. The photos were then taped to a rack hold-
ing the entire outfit, so that the models wouldn’t forget anything.
Donatella was watching a seamstress fit a model into a dress, mulling
some last-minute changes to the lineup, when her cell phone rang. Of
course, it was Gianni, calling from Miami Beach to pepper her with
questions.
Since the 1970s, Gianni had staged scores of fashion shows and
had long since mastered the kind of catwalk orchestration that Don-
atella was attempting now. He knew that a runway show—with as
many as sixty outfits flying by in fifteen minutes—had to be as
tightly choreographed as a ballet, with weeks going into choosing just
the right music, lights, and girls. The music must set the tone and es-
tablish the pace for the models; the designer must decide which
model shows off a particular outfit in its best light; and the order in
which the outfits are shown will determine the overall impact of a
collection, with the opening and closing pieces being the most impor-
tant choices. A model normally shows at least two outfits per show,
and may have as little as thirty seconds to change, further complicat-

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
ing the task of matching the right girl with the right dress in the
right sequence.
Gianni, hyperaware that a miscalculation of any of these vari-
ables can mean the difference between a hit show and a flop, grilled
Donatella on what dresses she had decided to show and how each one
looked on certain girls. The Rome show, strictly television entertain-
ment, was less critical than the Milan and Paris catwalks, since buy-
ers and the top fashion editors didn’t attend it. Nonetheless, Gianni
was still obsessed with the show being perfect and was nervous about
how Donatella would handle the event. While Gianni loved his sister
profoundly, he didn’t fully trust her judgment.
When Gianni was diagnosed with a rare type of inner-ear cancer
in the summer of 1994, he’d been forced to entrust Donatella with
more of the day-to-day responsibility of running the house as he un-
derwent chemotherapy treatments. Donatella and Gianni’s relation-
ship had a tenor that some likened to that of twins, and she had long
played the role of Gianni’s sounding board and alter ego in what be-
came one of the greatest collaborations in fashion. Several years ear-
lier, he’d agreed to let her design a new line, Versus, despite the fact
that Donatella had no formal design training and couldn’t even
sketch. Versus—with rock-chick pieces heavy on the leather and
studs that echoed the aesthetic of its designer and prices that were a
quarter that of Gianni’s signature line—had gotten reasonably posi-
tive reviews. But it was when Gianni fell ill that Donatella—at age
forty-two, nine years younger than her brother—truly stepped out of
his shadow for the first time. She reveled in the limelight, happily di-
recting Gianni’s team, most of whom had been with him since the
birth of his empire. She gave interviews for fawning magazine pro-
files, including a ten-page spread titled “La Bella Donatella” that
had appeared in Vanity Fair. But after Gianni recovered from his
cancer treatments, the pair started to clash. Gianni sensed his team
was still looking to Donatella for direction, and he resented it. For
months, their relationship was prickly.
By 1997, tensions still simmered. A week before the Rome tele-
vision show, Donatella and Gianni had been together in Paris for the
Versace couture show, which Gianni had spent tens of thousands of

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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
francs to stage at the frescoed pool bar at the Ritz, the opulent
6 hotel that sits in Place Vendôme. Several years earlier, when Gianni
decided to start presenting a couture show at the Ritz, some in the
French establishment were miffed. The Ritz was an institution in
Paris, hosting luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, for whom a bar
in the hotel is named, and Coco Chanel, who made a duplex suite in
the hotel her home for more than thirty years and who represented
the very institution of French fashion that Versace, the brash upstart
from southern Italy, was intent on supplanting.
For Gianni’s July 1997 show at the Ritz, he intended for the
models to descend a double staircase to a glass walkway he’d had built
over the turquoise pool. Donatella had urged Gianni to use Karen
Elson as the final model, the one who wears couture’s traditional
pièce de résistance, the wedding dress. Elson was the girl of the mo-
ment, her fame ignited earlier that year when photographer Steven
Meisel convinced her to shave off her eyebrows and dye her hair
bright red for her first cover for Italian Vogue. But the day before the
show, Donatella sat in an empty front row, watching Gianni, dressed
in a simple pullover sweater and pleated pants, pace up and down
over the clear plastic tarp that had been laid over the glass runway to
keep it perfectly clean. He bristled as he watched Elson nervously de-
scend the stairs and walk the runway. Gianni didn’t like her lopey,
horselike gait, and he raged at Donatella for having suggested the girl
in the first place. So he substituted Naomi, who did him proud as she
sauntered by in the wedding dress—a baby-doll-like slip of slinky
metal mesh adorned with oversized silver crosses. Elson burst into a
fit of tears, while Donatella wore a stony look on her face. Gianni’s
ruling showed he didn’t trust her with key decisions.
After the contretemps in Paris, Donatella was determined to
retain some degree of autonomy. She was happy to see Gianni skip
the Rome show and get an early start on his summer holiday. Gi-
anni had long since stopped coming to Donna sotto le stelle anyway.
He hated how he and his rival designers were crammed together
into one mind-numbing production, where petty jealousies in-
evitably erupted. The designers had to share the models hired for the
show, and some tried to hog the prettiest women by taking too long to
dress them. Giorgio Armani and Valentino had once gotten into a

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
screaming match when Valentino took more than his allocated
time to rehearse his models.1 The heat was also a constant problem.
The designers showed their latest collections—clothes for fall and
winter—and the girls wilted under heavy dresses and fur coats, their
elaborate makeup melting. But mostly Gianni didn’t come because he
was just plain exhausted. The show at the Ritz had demanded a week
of eighteen-hour days as Gianni readied more than one hundred
handmade gowns. Much to everyone’s relief, Gianni and Antonio
D’Amico, his companion of fifteen years, had flown off to spend a
few days in Gianni’s thirty-five-room Miami Beach mansion.
With Versace as the show’s featured house, it would be Donatella
who would close the broadcast, descending the Spanish Steps hand in
hand with Naomi—a triumphant moment for a woman who as her
brother’s muse had thrived even as she felt confined to his shadow.
Donatella recognized that Gianni was the strongest link of the Ver-
sace trio, his genius providing the spark that had brought success and
its spoils to them all. His presence was the ballast that steadied the
lives of all three siblings. And, despite his recent illness, creatively
and commercially he was still at the top of his game. By the late
1990s, Gianni had refined and honed his look, eliminating the gar-
ishness that had marred some of his earliest designs. He had come to
define the have-it-all ethos of the millennium’s final decade. He was
now counted among Yves Saint Laurent, Coco Chanel, and Giorgio
Armani as one of fashion’s greatest designers.
It was barely after lunchtime in Rome—and dawn in Miami—
when Donatella got Gianni’s first call. He bugged her with questions
about how the rehearsal was going, and she grew more and more an-
noyed. Finally she snapped, “Gianni, you can’t help me from there,”
and hung up.2 When he called again a half hour later, she ignored the
phone and continued to fit the models.
A short time later, Santo, the oldest and most businesslike of the
Versace siblings, got a call on his cell phone. He figured it was his
brother, but instead it was a Versace assistant calling from Milan.
“They’ve shot Gianni,” she told him. That was all she knew.
In that horrible moment, Santo felt a flash of practical anger.
Why had his brother gone to Miami, a city notorious for its violence?
How many times had he urged Gianni to hire bodyguards? Ever the
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
problem solver in the family, Santo began thinking of how he would
8 get Gianni back to Italy and into a hospital to recover.
His face grim, he ran to find Donatella, pulling her away from a
fitting with a model. “Donatella, vieni qua subito! Come with me!” he
shouted in a panicked voice that jolted the models and assistants, who
knew Santo to have the coolest head of the three siblings. Donatella,
alarmed, trailed behind him. When they were alone, Santo told her,
“A lunatic has shot Gianni. But don’t worry. He’s already on the way
to the hospital, and they’ll take care of him.”
Donatella didn’t believe her brother. Immediately she began
making calls to Miami. When she reached a Versace assistant who
was in touch with the hospital, she screamed hysterically with her
premonition that her brother Gianni was dead.
“Yes, Donatella,” said the grim voice on the other end. “Gi-
anni’s dead.”
Donatella let out a cry that reached the models still rehearsing
on the steps outside. Then she fainted. Santo, standing next to her,
blanched and began to shake. After a few minutes, he and Emanuela
Schmeidler, Versace’s longtime PR chief, managed to carry Donatella
up to her suite.
In her room, she came to and sat slumped on the bed, sobbing
with Santo. Suddenly, she shot upright, alarmed with concern that
the children would hear the news on the television. An aide ran to the
bedroom next door, where Donatella’s children, eleven-year-old Alle-
gra and six-year-old Daniel, had been watching cartoons. It was too
late. Italian television was running bulletins with news of Gianni’s
death and the kids had seen it. Distraught, they ran to their mother.
The events that followed would be a blur for Santo and Dona-
tella; both of them were overcome with shock, pain, and grief. It took
thirty bodyguards to hustle them through the scrum of photogra-
phers outside the Hotel De La Ville; one of them had even tried to
climb down the side of the building to steal a photo of the pair in
their suite. A paparazzo got a shot of Donatella, hunched in the back-
seat of a black Mercedes, the pain on her face visible behind giant
black sunglasses. The car drove them to Ciampino, Rome’s military
airport. Italy’s richest man, Silvio Berlusconi, who would later be-

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
come the country’s prime minister, had offered to lend the family his
private jet to fly them to Miami, but an Italian construction magnate
beat him to it, making his private plane immediately available.
After a ten-hour flight, Donatella and Santo landed at Miami’s
airport at 3:30 a.m. and drove straight to Gianni’s mansion on Ocean
Drive, in the heart of the South Beach district that the Versace
lifestyle had done so much to popularize.3 Madonna had offered to let
them stay at her house if they didn’t want to stay at Gianni’s home,
but they declined. They would spend the next day and a half at the
palazzo Gianni had spent millions to renovate and had loved so
much—and which was now the scene of the crime.
The house was under siege from the media. Television heli-
copters circled overhead, while dozens of photographers and camera-
men camped out on the street, snapping photos of the impromptu
shrine of flowers and candles that had sprung up on the front steps
where Gianni’s blood had just been washed away. When word spread
that Donatella and Santo had arrived, part of the pack shifted to the
back door in the alley behind the mansion. Later, when Donatella
and Santo prepared to leave for the funeral home, Gianni’s staff dis-
patched several extra limos as decoys to try to clear the area of pa-
parazzi, but it didn’t work. Bodyguards had to surround them,
holding oversized umbrellas to shield them, and a shoving match en-
sued as the bereaved pair struggled to get into a limo.
At 5 p.m., Santo, Donatella, and Gianni’s partner, Antonio, ar-
rived at the funeral home, a run-down place in a dreary Miami sub-
urb, to see Gianni for the last time. His face was partially disfigured
from the bullets, despite the efforts of the mortician to cover the
damage.4 Donatella insisted on dressing Gianni personally, overcom-
ing Santo’s protests. With a dozen bodyguards and police officers
standing sentry outside, they conducted a small ceremony in the fu-
neral home’s chapel and then cremated Gianni’s body.
That evening, the family sat down to dinner. Santo and Dona-
tella had expressed little emotion all day, surrounded as they were
with lawyers, PR people, and friends who had filled the house. Gi-
anni’s chef made a simple pasta dish. Afterward he served vanilla
budino, an Italian version of flan, which had been Gianni’s favorite

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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
dessert. Seeing it, Donatella and Santo broke down and cried.5 In the
10 middle of the night, when the media siege had ebbed, Donatella
sneaked outside to kiss the spot where Gianni had been shot.
The next day, Donatella, Santo, and Antonio boarded a flight
back to Milan. Santo held the bronze box containing Gianni’s ashes
cradled in his lap. The trio spoke little during the long flight home. In
Miami, they left behind one of the biggest manhunts ever under-
taken in the United States.

✥ V✥
While Donatella and Santo flew back home, the Versace PR office got
busy preparing for the funeral. They decided to hold it on Tuesday,
July 22, 1997, exactly one week after Gianni’s murder. From Miami,
Donatella, reeling in a mix of searing grief and anger over Gianni’s
violent death, had decided she wanted to stage a funeral the world
would never forget. “Gianni was killed like a stray dog,” she spat at
her public relations chief. “I want him to have a funeral fit for a
prince.” She directed her assistant to look over films of royal funerals
for ideas on how to stage it. She decided that only one site was fitting
for her beloved brother’s commemoration: the Duomo, Milan’s mag-
nificent cathedral. Santo initially appeared shocked at his sister’s de-
cision, but he acquiesced.
While the fashion house was based in Milan, none of the Ver-
saces had particularly liked the city. They had come from Italy’s
deep south, a languid, backward, mafia-ridden region that was the
antithesis of the ascetic, hardworking north, where meridionali, or
southerners, were regarded with suspicion and prejudice. Gianni
had always found Milan a sad city, with its brown and gray palette
and pinched, conservative people. Like many southerners who
moved north in search of opportunity, Gianni respected the Mila-
nese’s Calvinist work ethic, but he nonetheless escaped the city every
Thursday evening to spend the weekends on Lake Como. Donatella,
with her bleached blond hair and loud clothing, felt that the snobby
Milanese looked down on her. Santo also appreciated the opportu-
nity Milan offered him but resented the antisouthern sentiment so
common in the city.

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
Indeed, Milan’s old-line families had never entirely welcomed
the Versaces, with their rough manners, southern accents, and flashy
lifestyles. From the time of the postwar economic boom, many Mila-
nese harbored a deep antipathy for southerners like the Versaces, re-
garding them as corrupt wastrels who lived off the industriousness of
the north. By the time of Gianni’s death, this sentiment had found a
powerful outlet in the Northern League, a new political party that
advocated outright secession from the rest of Italy. To blue-blood Mil-
anese, Gianni’s designs, so popular with the nouveau riche that had
emerged with the Milan stock market booms of the 1980s and 1990s,
were vulgar and in poor taste. Giorgio Armani, with his cerebral
suits, northern heritage, and more discreet homosexuality, was far
more acceptable. So, too, was Miuccia Prada, who came from an up-
standing Milanese family that had made leather traveling trunks for
the city’s upper crust since before the war. But the city’s haute bour-
geoisie, with their double-barreled names and their preference for
the restrained elegance of French couture, couldn’t fathom the popu-
larity of Gianni’s clothes. Who would dare buy those outfits? All that
money the company made, they whispered, could only have come
from the mafia.
So when Donatella demanded that Gianni’s funeral be held in
the Duomo, some Milanese found the request outrageous. In recent
years, even the cream of the city’s society were no longer afforded a
funeral in the Duomo. The church, with a capacity of more than four
thousand, was just too big. It was the site of only civic funerals, such
as the one for the victims of a mafia bombing in Milan in 1993.
The world’s third largest Catholic church, the Duomo di Milano
is a great, hulking triangle that seems to sink into the square. Erected
over the course of six centuries but never fully completed, Milan’s
cathedral was originally meant to evoke the airy grace of French
Gothic landmarks such as Notre Dame. Instead, it had morphed into
a jumble of styles, as one architect after another tried to impose his
vision on it. Though impressive in terms of pure size, the church is
rather gloomy; it’s so large that even the brightest sunlight doesn’t
pierce the stained glass windows enough to lift the penumbra inside.
Three rows of Sequoia-sized columns, their pink Candoglia marble

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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
gone grayish-yellow with age, make it even more oppressive. But for
12 all its gloominess, the Duomo represents the nostalgic heart of the
city for the Milanese. Soaring above the roof is the Madonnina, a
four-meter-high gold-plated statue of Mary that is the symbol of
Milan. Donatella was demanding nothing short of a state funeral for
her brother—a celebration of the truncated life of her sexy, icono-
clastic, modern, and subversive brother to be held in the heart of the
Italian establishment.
When Versace’s PR office asked the mayor to forward the Ver-
saces’ request to the city’s cardinal, ecclesiastical authorities worried
that the Mass would become a sort of fashion show–cum–gay pride
spectacle for a man who had publicly repudiated the Church. Eventu-
ally Don Angelo Mayo, the Duomo’s head priest, relented, acceding
to the reality that the Duomo was the only site big and grand enough
to accommodate the celebrities expected at the funeral.
The house of Versace produced the funeral as if it were the ulti-
mate fashion show—which it was. Staffers sent invitations to the
house’s favorite stars, who were then booked at the Four Seasons, the
five-star hotel next door to Versace’s headquarters in the heart of
the Via Montenapoleone neighborhood. In the top-floor atelier of
Versace headquarters, Gianni’s couture seamstresses pulled out the
detailed measurements that recorded the sizes of the house’s favored
VIPs. Around the clock, they churned out sober outfits for the female
members of the Versace family, as well as for VIPs such as Princess
Diana and Naomi Campbell. Assistants then laid out the outfits—
complete with handbags, black lace veils, and shoes—in their hotel
suites. Seating charts were done and redone as the guests confirmed
their attendance.
Once Don Mayo had agreed to the Mass, the press office man-
aged to secure a series of allowances from the Duomo and the city au-
thorities that surprised many in Milan. They convinced the city to
close off the whole length of Via dell’Arcivescovado, the broad av-
enue that runs along the south side of the cathedral, a concession not
even granted to Pope John Paul II during his visit to the city several
years earlier. The Duomo canceled two of its eleven daily masses and
arranged to clear the church of tourists an hour before the 6 p.m. ser-
vice. To manage the crowds and protect the luminaries, the city de-

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
ployed hundreds of extra police officers around the Duomo and in
front of Versace headquarters, supplementing the scores of private
security personnel hired by the family. The Duomo agreed to set off
about twenty pews in the central nave with wood barriers, to block
off access to the VIPs. Rumors instantly circulated that Santo had
greased the path with a $500,000 payment to convince the church to
hold the Mass; he vehemently denied having paid so much and said
that he gave the usual small sum the family would have donated to
the church for a funeral.
By the day of the funeral, the world’s media had descended on
Milan. The American networks sent crews from New York, paying
thousands of dollars to secure satellite time to transmit live feeds via
television trucks parked outside the cathedral. Crews from the BBC,
CNN, and Japanese and French television stations had taken rooms in
hotels around the Duomo. In an effort to impose a modicum of sobri-
ety to the media melee, the cathedral’s press office told journalists
seeking accreditation to dress appropriately: Men had to wear dark
suits, and women couldn’t wear dresses exposing their shoulders or
too much leg. Inside the church, Versace aides cordoned off an area
immediately inside the VIP entrance for the press, so that they would
have the best shots of the star-filled front rows. By the time the first
guests started to arrive, the journalists had been in place for hours,
jostling for the best vantage points.
In the summer, the Duomo offers refuge from the heat, and
guests entering the church for Gianni’s funeral were grateful to step
into the dark coolness. The local citizenry entered through the main
bronze doors from Piazza del Duomo and quickly filled the entire
rear half of the church. Some used plastic bags and purses as place-
holders hours before the Mass was to start. Others stood on pews to
get a glimpse of the luminaries entering in the front.
At about 5:30 p.m., a cortege of dark Mercedes pulled up to the
designated VIP entrance on Via dell’Arcivescovado. Each VIP held
a white embossed invitation. Just like at red-carpet events, photog-
raphers and reporters were lined up on the far side of a barrier out-
side the entrance. A phalanx of gawkers stood under the blazing
sun, some wolf-whistling at the prettier models, others reaching
out toward celebrities for an autograph, which was nearly always
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
refused. Handsome young men dressed in black Versace suits were
14 deployed just inside the entrance to escort the notables to their pews
in front of the altar. To reach the VIP section, attendees had to pass
in front of one of the cathedral’s most curious statues: a skeletal St.
Bartholomew, his loose skin slung over his back like an empty sack
after being flayed alive.
The press office had made sure the Duomo’s insistence on a
sober ritual was respected. (They had instructed friends to make do-
nations to a cancer charity rather than send flowers; Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman gave $25,000.) Several simple arrangements, heavy
on the white roses that were among Gianni’s favorite, sat at the base
of the pillars on either side of the altar, but the church was otherwise
unadorned. The press office had arranged for the family and their
closest celebrity guests to dress in black or midnight blue, to avoid
any hint of ostentation. Despite the heat, Donatella and Allegra wore
black lace veils and long black gloves.
In the front row, the family was a tableau of grief. Santo, looking
drawn and tired, wore a loosely cut black jacket over a dark mock
turtleneck and pleated trousers. With his arms crossed and his face
stony, he followed the Mass distractedly, occasionally turning to the
pew behind him to comfort his distraught eldest child, Francesca. On
his right sat his wife, Cristiana. At the far end of the pew, separated by
a few significant feet from the other family members, was Antonio
D’Amico, clad in a dark suit, black tie, and the white shirt that was
worn principally for formal occasions in Italy. D’Amico had been in-
consolable over the last week and had found himself almost unable to
attend the Mass. His relations with his lover’s family had been
strained since the moment he met Gianni at a dinner fifteen years ear-
lier, particularly with Donatella, who resented anyone who competed
for her brother’s affection. Now with Gianni gone, neither Santo nor
Donatella had to maintain the pretense of getting along with Antonio,
and his relationship with them deteriorated quickly. Glassy-eyed, An-
tonio stared at the floor, clutching his arms in front of him.
On Santo’s left sat Donatella, shorn of her usual tumble of jew-
elry, her loose hair covered with a black mantilla and her face only
lightly made up, gazing disconsolately into the middle distance,
barely following the service. Next to her was Allegra, squirming in

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
the heat under her Empire-style black dress. Allegra was on the cusp
of adolescence, still displaying the chipmunk cheeks, baby fat, and
polished skin of a healthy child, yet showing the first signs of young
womanhood in the self-possessed way she moved. She occasionally
struggled to pull her veil back over her sun-flecked chestnut hair,
which was held in place by a simple headband. She cried frequently
into the white handkerchief an assistant had given her, looking fret-
fully across to the press photographers snapping pictures of her. She
periodically raised her face to her mother for comfort, tilting her
head to lay it on Donatella’s shoulder, but her mother stared blank-
eyed at the floor. When Allegra broke out in heavy sobs during the
reading of the gospel, Donatella stirred, curving her arm around her
daughter to pull her close.
Paul Beck, Donatella’s husband, sat in the pew behind his wife
and Santo, clutching his squirming son, Daniel, in his lap, occasion-
ally nuzzling the boy to quiet him. Paul, with his carefully trimmed
goatee and highlighted blond hair swept back from a neat middle
part, towered over the whole group. His height was rivaled only by
that of Naomi, who stood next to him, nearly six feet tall in her heels.
The supermodel hung her head low, a dark veil falling to her
shoulders. She wore a simple black sheath the Versace seamstresses
had made for her, topped by a long-sleeved jacket with no lapels, and
a large silver cross at her throat. Her long hair hung straight down to
her waist, her legs were bare, and she wore unadorned low black
pumps. Since Gianni’s death, she’d been inconsolable. After the mur-
der, her London agent had barely been able to convince Naomi to
keep an assignment in South Africa for an appearance at a special
event with Nelson Mandela. (Mandela personally called the model
to talk her out of canceling the trip.) The morning of the funeral, as
she ran the gauntlet of the press to reach the Versace palazzo, she’d
broken down in tears, clutching her purse to her face to block the
flashbulbs.
By the time of Gianni’s death, Naomi was as close to Donatella
as a sister would be—Donatella once flew in a star hairdresser from
New York to give them both hair extensions while they ate spaghetti
in Donatella’s marble bathroom. Naomi also played the role of an un-
likely aunt to Allegra. During the Mass, when Don Mayo invited the
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
congregation to exchange gestures of peace, Allegra embraced her
16 mother first and then stood on tiptoe to receive a hug from Naomi.
Across the aisle, in the adjacent front row, sat as unlikely a group
as one would see in a church. Front and center was Elton John, his
pudgy frame swathed in a dark Versace jacket with a Chinese-style
high collar. With his single earring and pageboy haircut, he resem-
bled an aging schoolboy. He and his partner, David Furnish, had
flown in on his private jet that morning from St. Tropez, where the
singer had recently bought a new home. David, fresh-faced in an
open-necked white shirt and dark jacket, sat alongside Elton, protec-
tively patting the arm of his lover.
Elton was one of Gianni’s closest friends and a fierce admirer.
They first met in the mid-1980s, when Elton, who already wore Gi-
anni’s designs, was shopping in Versace’s flagship store on Via Monte-
napoleone in Milan and asked to meet the designer. The two clicked
instantly, sharing an artist’s restlessness, and the pair often hit the an-
tiques galleries and auction houses together. At Gianni’s Manhattan
townhouse, Elton had his own suite, complete with a bed that Gianni
had specially commissioned from the hot New York artist Julian
Schnabel. The longtime rock star dressed almost exclusively in Ver-
sace. “Elton practically has a museum of my creations in his house,”
Gianni once said. “He’s got more pieces in his closet than I have in
my archives.”
Next to Elton sat Gianni Versace’s most famous client, Princess
Diana. Elton, who had helped Gianni cultivate a friendship with
Diana, had sent his private jet to pick her up from the south of
France, where for the last week, she had been making waves with her
first much-publicized holiday with new boyfriend Dodi al-Fayed, the
forty-one-year-old son of the billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed, owner
of Harrods. About five years earlier, Diana had become arguably Gi-
anni’s biggest trophy when she came to him, newly separated from
her husband, Charles, the Prince of Wales, and looking for a sleek
new style. Gianni came up with a series of outfits that were classic
but possessed a dash of glamour—sheaths that fit like gloves, slim
gowns in bold colors, and form-fitting suits. After Diana’s separation,
Elton had started inviting her to his spread in Windsor, where she
often saw Gianni. Always savvy at cultivating his celebrity clients, Gi-

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
anni charmed Diana, personally handling some of her fittings. When
she heard of Gianni’s murder, Diana had immediately agreed to
come to the funeral. She and Gianni had not been close friends, but
she was genuinely traumatized by his death. Moreover, Diana loved a
good funeral; the pathos appealed to her self-image as comforter of
the afflicted, the elegant dark clothing feeding her sense of drama.
“Don’t worry,” Diana told Donatella before the funeral. “Gianni is in
a better place now.”
Diana was, of course, wearing a Versace outfit designed for the
occasion. Gianni’s seamstresses had whipped up a midnight blue
sleeveless sheath topped by a dark jacket. A string of marble-sized
pearls set off her summer tan and complemented her sober, doe-eyed
gaze and glossy pink lipstick. Despite the heat outside, she wore black
stockings. Halfway through the Mass, she shed the dark jacket, un-
aware of the church’s proscription against uncovered skin. At her feet
sat a shiny crocodile purse, embellished with large gilt medusas, the
Versace logo. Unable to follow the Mass in Italian, she grew more dis-
tracted as the service went on, her hands flitting from the cream-
colored missal to her pearls. Gianni’s service would be one of the last
public appearances of Diana’s life. Just six weeks later, she would die
in a grisly car crash in Paris, and many of the same VIPs would
gather once again to commemorate the young princess.
On the other side of Diana sat Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler,
who was covered in an oversized peasant-style black veil that
wrapped over each shoulder. Arrayed behind them was the royalty of
fashion. Her signature sunglasses firmly in place despite the gloom of
the cathedral, Anna Wintour, powerful editor in chief of American
Vogue, sat next to André Leon Talley, Vogue’s influential editor at
large, who stole curious glances at Diana throughout the Mass. On
the other side of her, Karl Lagerfeld, the imperious designer of
Chanel and a close friend of Gianni’s, stared straight ahead, his
chalk-white hair tucked back into his signature ponytail. Behind
them sat the editors of French, British, and Italian Vogue.
Also behind Diana was Giorgio Armani, dressed in his usual uni-
form of a long-sleeved, dark stretch sweater, dark pleated pants, and
white tennis shoes. Armani and Versace were the yin and yang of
Italian fashion, setting out two distinct looks that would come to
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
define the two extremes of Milanese style. For more than two
18 decades they had embraced different aesthetics and succeeded equally
at them. Both had broken from the pack of aspiring designers at vir-
tually the same time in the mid-1970s. In their different ways, they
each created a fresh style of dressing for a new generation of inde-
pendent, professional women who didn’t want to be trussed up in the
stuffy French designs their mothers wore. In later years, when they’d
both reached global fame, it was said that Armani dressed the wife,
and Versace the mistress.
Armani and Versace shared a prodigious work ethic and hunger
for success; both men lived in apartments above their studios in order
to devote as much time to work as possible. But otherwise, the two
could hardly have been more different. If Versace’s shows were exu-
berant, Armani’s shows were ostentatiously muted. Gianni Versace’s
homes were overflowing baroque containers for all manner of art,
furniture, and homoerotic sculptures; Armani’s were spare in their el-
egance, the walls bare of paintings, the occasional orchid a rare
adornment. While Gianni spun an elaborate tale of his childhood as
the son of a provincial seamstress, Armani scrupulously refused to
embellish his own modest origins.
Armani may have been grieving the violent death of his rival at
the funeral Mass, but by no measure were the men friends. Milan
would never have become a fashion mecca without the both of them,
yet the pair nonetheless loathed each other. To Armani, Versace, with
his sadomasochistic flourishes, punk collections, and general garish-
ness, was an abomination, an insult to women. Armani had been pub-
lic in his criticism, declaring that Versace presents women “as bait for
men, the incarnation of vulgar sex fantasies, a sort of nightclub
where they do strip teases for local hoods.”6
Versace, in turn, found Armani tedious and lacking in passion. “I
dress a woman who is more beautiful, more glamorous,” Gianni told
the New Yorker shortly before his death. “He, on the other hand, has
a type of woman who is always a little somber, a little dull. They call
it chic. I’ve never seen it as chic, but everyone has his own opinion.”7
The funeral audience fumbled with their programs as Don
Mayo read his sermon. “Today’s service isn’t something driven by op-
portunism, or, worse still, a spectacle,” he said, with perhaps more

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
cautionary hopefulness than accuracy. “It is a gesture of faith, rich
with meaning. . . . We share in the sorrow of Donatella and Santo
with discretion and respect.”
Next came the testaments, musical and otherwise, from Gianni’s
spectacular friends. A Versace assistant gave Sting and Elton John the
signal, and the pair slipped out of the pew. They crossed in front of
the altar, Sting kneeling quickly to make the sign of the cross, Elton
giving a curt bow. They climbed the three steps to the spot where a
microphone stood. Don Mayo had warned against anything except
religious music at the service, so the press office had chosen “The
Lord Is My Shepherd.” Despite the simplicity of the psalm, the
seventy-eight-year-old priest who directed the cathedral’s choir had
demanded that Sting and Elton John audition before he gave permis-
sion for them to sing.
Clutching the lyrics, the pair sang unaccompanied. For an in-
stant, Elton choked up, and Sting put a hand on his back to steady
him. Donatella broke down in tears. Santo, for the first time during
the Mass, buried his face in his hands, sobbing. As the last strains of
the psalm faded, a line slowly formed for those taking Communion,
many of them gawkers grabbing the chance to approach the altar and
steal a look at the stars.
After hours penned behind the wooden barricades, the press at
last got the money shot they’d been waiting for when, during Com-
munion, Elton broke down in heaving sobs. Diana quickly turned to
embrace him. Flashes popped as the paparazzi snapped the photo
that would make the front pages of the next day’s newspapers around
the world.
As the men’s choir sang the last psalm, Don Mayo made his way
over to the Versace family. Donatella roused herself, giving the priest
a piteous look as she murmured her thanks. Santo bent on one knee to
kiss the elderly priest’s hand. Allegra began to cry again. A bevy of
Versace assistants sprang into action, shepherding the mourners,
many with tears streaming down their faces, into a sort of receiving
line in front of the family. A posse of six bodyguards stepped forward
to escort Diana out of the church, setting off an explosion of flash-
bulbs. The more minor luminaries followed. Valentino, his hair
slicked back in a frozen bouffant that framed his sun-baked face,
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
exited alone. A gaggle of supermodels, looking modestly pretty, with
20 little makeup and loose hair, stopped to speak with the family. Carla
Bruni, her eyes rimmed red and her hair parted simply in the middle
and hanging loose around her shoulders, lingered a moment with
Antonio, who clutched his arms across his chest to control himself.
Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, clad in a slim black trousers suit, her long
blond hair streaming down her back, mixed with the Aga Khan, Ru-
pert Everett, Carla Fendi, and Eva Herzigova, as the photographers
scrambled to get shots of the stream of VIPs.
As the celebrities drifted away and the photographers began to
pack away their gear, Donatella and Santo clung to each other and
made their way to the black chauffeured car waiting outside.

✥ V✥
With any death, the trying times truly begin after the funeral, when
the family struggles with the vacuum left by the absence of the loved
one and begins the painful task of constructing a new life. But in the
following months and years, the death of Gianni Versace would bring
his family to the brink of professional and personal ruin. Gianni had
provided the center of gravity for the entire clan, his genius the ani-
mating force that steadied their lives. His murder would send them
spinning out of orbit. Without him, the deep dysfunction that had re-
mained hidden for two decades bubbled over quickly, threatening to
overwhelm the entire Versace clan.
Even as they mourned their brother that hot July day in Milan’s
Duomo, Donatella and Santo knew the whole world was already
wondering whether they were up to the task of sustaining Gianni’s
legacy. Gianni had died at his peak; the Versace name had achieved
the status of icon, becoming shorthand for the exuberantly sexy style
that helped define the 1990s. More than any other designer, Gianni
Versace satisfied the public’s hunger for sex, fame, and money that
characterized the burgeoning global prosperity of that decade.
A restless son of a provincial seamstress, Gianni had achieved his
breakthrough by marrying the raw energy of the street to the finely
cut elegance of couture, plundering for inspiration everything from
Pop Art to ancient Greece. For him, clothes were meant to be fun,
fabulous, and fast. He chose as his muse the prostitute; he raised vul-

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 “They’ve Shot Gianni”
garity to an art form. Sometimes he stepped over the line, and his de-
tractors dubbed his vision “hooker’s haute couture.” His clothes never
evoked indifference. His S&M collection, with leather dog collars and
studded harnesslike bodices, offended even fashion sophisticates. But
his clothes sold and were worn. By the late 1990s, he had changed the
vocabulary of fashion.
Gianni also bridged the gap between fashion and celebrity,
melding two currents of pop culture and harnessing the growing
power of the media. A master at public relations, he conjured up
lush, flamboyant images that compelled the gaze: Elizabeth Hurley
in a black dress held precariously together with gold safety pins;
Madonna clad in a Versace bathing suit while painting the nails of a
poodle; Claudia Schiffer nude except for a carefully positioned Ver-
sace dinner plate. He turned fashion models into full-fledged stars.
His clothes and celebrity friends reflected his carefree ethos, a deter-
mination to devour everything life offered.
His designs, for all their sexual sport, their antic sampling of his-
tory and art, and their brass, appealed to a human need for freedom
that ran deeper than fashion—an urge bursting to the surface of soci-
ety in the sexualized, globalized, postreligious late twentieth century.
Gianni “was the great post-Freudian designer—one who had no
guilt whatsoever,” said Richard Martin, the curator of the Costume
Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.8 For Gianni, sex was a
celebration of life itself, and by the 1990s, Western society had
caught up with him. His blend of high and low culture, his fierce in-
dividuality, and his impatience with decorum and class strictures also
spoke to the new moneyed class that was springing up in Miami, Rio
de Janeiro, and Moscow, who loved his épater la bourgeoisie creed. At
the same time, his designs appealed to baby boomers’ daughters who
were coming of age and felt freer than ever to brandish their sexual-
ity and independence without fear of losing their power.
Yet Gianni’s death came just as the world itself was changing.
Such sexually loaded designs and images were beginning to run their
course, having lost the initial frisson of excitement and novelty. Fash-
ion was turning toward a more restrained, knowing style, and mini-
malist designers such as Miuccia Prada, with her prim, retro designs
and love of high-tech materials, were ascendant.
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 HOUSE OF VERSACE
Moreover, enormous changes in the global fashion business were
22 already emerging, forces that would challenge family-owned compa-
nies such as Versace. Globalization, the easy money of the 1990s, the
media’s mounting obsession with fashion and its celebrity clients—
changes wrought or harnessed in part by Versace himself—forever
altered the game for fashion companies. Successful luxury brands
needed a worldwide network of opulent stores, a constant stream of
new products, and thousands of pages of advertising a year just to
compete. Top fashion companies were now big corporations that had
the budgets and management depth to sustain and supply the sprawl-
ing machine that was the new worldwide business of selling style.
Gianni had fed and unleashed a beast that threatened, in turn, to
devour his surviving siblings. As long as Gianni was alive, Donatella
and Santo could count on the bedrock of his talent to hide the cracks
in the house’s glittering façade. Now, as Donatella stepped into Gi-
anni’s place as creative director and Santo had to make crucial busi-
ness decisions alone, his absence opened a Pandora’s box of troubles.
His death would throw a harsh spotlight on Donatella, the
flighty kid sister whose meager talents and self-destructive personal-
ity would, over the next decade, come close to sinking the company,
destroying her family, and killing the woman herself. Santo, the dili-
gent eldest sibling, would struggle to salvage two decades of hard
work. But it was Allegra, Donatella’s delicate eleven-year-old daugh-
ter, whose life would change the most. Just months before his death,
in one angry, resentful, rash decision, Gianni had unknowingly con-
demned his beloved niece—his principessa—to many years of woe.
The Versaces had risen far and fast from the rocky poverty of Cala-
bria, to conquer all of Italy and the world. The near-fall of their em-
pire, and its tentative salvation, would come even more quickly.

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 About the Author

A native of Boston, Deborah Ball has been a business journalist in Eu-

rope for more than fifteen years. For twelve years, she has been a re-
porter for the Wall Street Journal in Milan, London, and Zurich,
covering a wide variety of business, finance, and political topics. Be-
tween 1999 and 2002, she covered the European luxury-goods sector for
the Journal. Ms. Ball currently lives between Italy and Switzerland
with her husband, Fabrizio Mucci.

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