Donatella left home for university in Florence, but was soon back by Gianni’s side, and remained there throughout his 90s glory days – supermodels singing George Michael’s Freedom on the catwalk in 1991, Liz Hurley in that safety pin dress in 1994, Madonna shot by Steven Meisel and Mario Testino in 1995 – while Santo ran the business. It was the best time of my life,” she says. He dressed me up in cool clothes, took me out to discos and clubs from when I was 11. Her brothers, Santo and Gianni, were 10 and eight when she was born, but her bond with Gianni defied the age difference. Her mother, a dressmaker, would let her baby daughter play in the basket of fabric in the middle of the room as she worked. The Donatella Versace story began on, when she was born in Reggio Calabria. (Allegra’s brother Daniel inherited Gianni’s art collection, which is now worth a good deal more than the £37m it was valued at then.) The Versace family still owns 80% of the business, with most shares in the name of Donatella’s daughter Allegra, who is now 31. A British CEO, Jonathan Akeroyd, was hired from Alexander McQueen last year. My brother was the king, and my whole world had crashed around me.” But two decades after the murder of her brother placed Gianni’s sister and muse unexpectedly at the head of the Versace table, she helms a business that, since creaking close to bankruptcy in 2004, has been nursed back to health. “When my brother was murdered, I had the eyes of the whole world on me and 99% of them thought I wasn’t going to make it.
#Versace medusa skin#
Her skin had reached that point of mahogany where the glow seems to dim. Her hair then was twice as long and twice as thick, with a heavy fringe that obscured half her face. The Donatella who sits opposite me today in her light-filled office is a very different looking woman from the Donatella I first interviewed a decade ago. This is why the Versace brand still has potency, 40 years after Gianni Versace opened a first boutique on Via della Spiga, a half mile from where his sister and I are sitting now. I am 5ft 2in – me and Bruno Mars, the same – so I wear high heels all the time, to be tall.” Donatella knows it is not trends that drive the fashion industry, but the eternal obsessions of women as they look in the mirror: looking better, getting noticed, feeling good.
So I bleach my hair blond, I wear high heels. I ask her where her aesthetic came from and she says, “I was not born fantastically beautiful, but I always wanted to be impressive. But she brings it up herself, when the photographs have been shot and she and I are sitting on plump sofas in her elegant all-white office. Perhaps, then, it is sexist to focus on how she looks. At 62, Donatella Versace is artistic director and vice-president of a company with an annual revenue of £592m.
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