Donatella’s Versace
With a hairstylist on guard with a brush and a makeup artist standing sentinel with a powder puff, fashion diva Donatella Versace thrusts her left hip toward the camera. “My best side,” she says in a smoky voice, hooking her thumbs on the waistband of a pair of pants just a shade more tangerine than her tan.
Posing in front of a bougainvillea bush outside her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the designer is commanding every click of this photo shoot. “Standing, no sitting,” she says, grabbing at an invisible roll at her tummy.
An admitted control freak, Versace has been at the helm of an Italian fashion house with annual sales close to $500 million since her older brother Gianni was murdered in Miami five years ago this July. Now, she seems finally to have emerged from his shadow.
Riding high on a series of hit collections, dressing Jennifer Lopez for the recent Academy Awards and playing Pygmalion to Chelsea Clinton, she’s turning her attention to expanding the Versace brand. Still, she doesn’t pretend to be her brother.
“There is no comparison. Gianni was a genius. I’m ... a sister,” she says sweetly on Tuesday, two days before she is to present her fall collection at a benefit for the Children’s Action Network and Westside Children’s Center. “Whatever I learned, I learned from him.”
Gianni may have coined Versace’s over-the-top, glitzy sex goddess look in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is Donatella who has brought it down to earth for the 21st century.
In contrast to the excesses of her brother’s era--chain-mail gowns and gilded Byzantine images of Madonna and child on clothes--Donatella’s style is more restrained, less sex object and more self-confident.
Not that she hasn’t pulled a red-carpet trick or two. The navel-gazing green palm-leaf print dress Lopez wore to the Grammys in 2000 was all Donatella.
But in her new fall collection, inspired by 1960s psychedelia, the designer tempered the cleavage and slits with refined coats and low-slung trousers for the cash-flush. (Versace’s 10 lines range from haute couture to the lower-priced Versace Jeans. Pieces from the ready-to-wear collection, which range in price from $400 for a swimsuit cover-up to $13,000 for a gown, are sold at the Beverly Hills Versace boutique and Neiman Marcus.)
“Gianni worked in another time,” she says inside her bungalow, the flame of a tuberose candle sputtering quietly on the table in front of her. “He made people’s careers with dresses with safety pins down the side. Today, we want to be less impressive when we walk around. We don’t need to reveal our bodies with safety pins.”
Her brother is always present. She keeps a photo of him by her bed when she travels, takes lunch in his art-filled office at the company’s Milan headquarters and thinks of him the minute the lights go up after every runway show.
“I think, ‘Do you like this, yes or no?’” she says, taking a sip of water from a straw so as not to smudge the pale pink lacquer on her lips. “I think he was upset for a few things we did, but with Gianni and me it was always like that. There were always confrontations. People say I was his muse, but I was really his disturber. I was the only one who would tell him the truth.”
If there is one thing Versace can’t stand, it’s yes men. She insists that her 15-person design team is full of people who aren’t afraid to disagree with the boss. “I don’t want them to have my philosophy,” she says, pushing a strand of arrow-straight, miraculously blond hair behind her shoulder. “I tell them, ‘I’m hiring you because you like Yohji Yamamoto.’ He’s an artist, but I’m not there [yet].”
She oversees all of the collections including the lower-priced Versus, where she got her start in 1993 designing under her brother’s tutelage.
Fashion was different then, she says. “Used to be, the theme of a collection was a trip to India or Morocco, but now the inspiration is the real world, the cities, the people, the attitudes, the streets.”
Sitting forward on a plush sofa, the designer is dripping with jewels. On her right hand she wears a 1940s gold cuff with a tourmaline the size of a half-dollar and a ring with a yellow sapphire, both gifts from Gianni. On her left hand is a knuckle-cracking diamond, a gift for Donatella from Donatella.
Versace, whose birth date is the subject of some controversy (variously listed as 1955, 1958 and 1959), is an inveterate traveler. The house in Milan is for work and family. The renaissance Villa Fontanelle on the shores of Lake Como, outside of Milan, is for relaxing and partying. (Last fall, Donatella feted Lopez and hubby Cris Judd there, and the couple stayed on for much of their honeymoon.)
She finds inspiration in London, where she recently cheered on her pal Madonna in the play “Up for Grabs”; in New York, where she keeps her brother’s upper East Side apartment; and in L.A., where she soaks in the colors of the city.
She visits several times a year and shoots nearly all of her advertising campaigns here. Diversions include dinner at Ivy at the Shore in Santa Monica and cruising Venice Beach to watch surfers.
“I like the way they put fashion together,” she says, lighting a Marlboro with a canary yellow rhinestone-studded lighter with the company’s Medusa emblem. “I mean, they are not scientists, but it takes passion. New York people think about how to be chic and safe. Here they dare, and that I like.”
Everywhere she goes, her bodyguards aren’t far behind. Where antique art influenced Gianni, she is constantly seeking out cutting-edge artists and musicians for ideas or to sit in the front row at her shows. (Both Moby and Robbie Williams were early Versace discoveries.)
She doesn’t wear clothes by other designers except for Azzedine Alaia, who is known for draping the body in second-skin, stretch jersey. “The best fabric in the world,” she says. Still, she likes to stop into Fred Segal and Maxfield when she’s in town, or she might pick up something from Chrome Hearts on Robertson Boulevard, where the rocker-chic aesthetic works perfectly with her wardrobe.
There are also lots of social calls to famous friends Kate Capshaw, Rita Wilson and Melanie Griffith, who is host of a benefit where Versace is presenting her runway show.
Running with the jet set takes discipline. To keep herself up as the quintessential tanned, taut and blond Versace queen, she works out five days a week on a StairMaster and lifts free weights. She doesn’t diet but places a premium on the presentation of her food. “Even if it’s just an apple, I like it to be presented a certain way on the plate,” she says.
Of course there are late nights, which “I regret in the morning,” says Versace who, like her brother, is famous for entertaining the rich and thin.
Not just a diva, she’s also a mom. You won’t find her slaving away over Shake ‘n Bake in the kitchen, but when she’s in Milan, she leaves work in time to have dinner with her kids, Allegra, 15, and Daniel, 11. (Versace was married to the American-born Paul Beck, a former model who oversaw the company’s ad campaigns.)
“Daniel wants to be a rock star--not a musician, a rock star,” she says grinning with pride.
Allegra, who has been known to steal mommy’s Manolos, is a budding actress who plans to attend a theater program in New York City this summer.
“I told her, ‘You are going to be rejected. You’re going to go to casting, and you have to be ready to be rejected.’ I told her the truth,” Versace says, shrugging. “But she likes the challenge.”
Although she would never force her children into the family business, they never miss a runway show. “After the show is over, I’m terrified--not of the press, of them--that they’ll say, ‘Mommy, you look so old!’”
Runway shows with stellar front rows are Versace’s forte. (At her last couture show in Paris, Gwyneth Paltrow was wedged between Chelsea Clinton and Madonna.) But the fashion business hinges on more than a celebrity following.
In a climate where luxury conglomerates Gucci Group and LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton make a large portion of their profits from accessories, Versace isn’t the house one looks to for the season’s hot bag or shoe.
While company sales rose last year, profits dropped because of increased investments in advertising and store remodeling. So, Versace and her older brother, chief executive officer Santo, are launching a two-year plan to gain tighter control over the house’s image, with the help of outside investors.
Plans include buying back some licensing and franchising deals, boosting accessories and home collections and opening new, free-standing accessories stores.
Versace dismisses rumors that she wants to take the company public or to sell a majority stake. “It’s not about the money,” she says. “It’s about establishing Versace as a luxury brand.”
