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Gianni Versace began his career as a tailor and showman while a young boy in his mother's Reggio di Calabria dress salon. While his father Antonio made a living selling appliances, his mother Francesca helped support the family as a dressmaker for the city's small coterie of well-to-do women. Versace made puppets from the remnants he found on the floor of his mother's workroom. At nine he designed his first dress, a one-shoulder velvet gown. Skipping design school, he worked for his mother until he was 25 and in 1972 moved to Milan to design for a series of then prestigious Italian labels.
In 1978 he launched his first collections for men and women. By the early '90s he had added not only couture and lower-priced bridge lines to his ready-to-wear business but also leather goods, fragrances and home furnishings. Indeed, success came so quickly that he found it difficult over the years to escape rumors that he was Mob-funded--talk, however, that has never been substantiated. After London's Independent on Sunday made such claims in a 1994 article, Versace won a $150,000 libel-suit settlement and a public apology from the newspaper. Still, even after the alleged serial killer Andrew Cunanan was fingered as the prime suspect in Versace's murder, rumors persisted that the designer had been gunned down by the Mafia.
Versace's empire triumphed in part because the designer maintained an unwavering sense of what he was selling: a fantasy life of opulent sensuality. Versace's omnipresent advertising campaigns--and the series of mondo Versace picture books he produced--often paid cartoonish homage to classical mythology, featuring sculpted male models voguing as gods and women portraying invincible (and big-haired) warrior princesses.
In his clothes, Versace reveled in glaring colors, hallucinogenic prints and plunging necklines as his archrival, the great minimalist Giorgio Armani, seduced the world in neutrals. In his fall 1992 collection, Versace unveiled an array of leather bondage dresses. He never cared if his clothes were considered lewd. "There were no apologies for Versace's fashion," notes designer Marc Jacobs. "No apologies for something being too gold or too sexy or too overt. 'Too' was not a problem." What made Versace's look so distinctive was the sense that the clothes were poured over the body. "Fashion is so often about propriety and decorum," explains Richard Martin, director of the Costume Institute at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Versace is so important because he put sexuality first. Designers have always looked to the street; he looked to the streetwalker. He was transfiguring the prostitute as Toulouse-Lautrec did in the late 1880s."
His undying attraction to the seamier side of dressing up came first and foremost from his beloved younger sister, the perennially bronzed Donatella, whose unabashed love of leggings, miniskirts and stilettos inspired Versace all his life. The two were inseparable as kids--and as grownups, sometimes speaking on the phone a dozen times a day or more. Versace placed so much faith in his sister's Vegas-meets-Biarritz sensibility that in the early '90s, he gave Donatella (who shares a major stake in his company along with their brother Santo) complete creative control of his twentysomething-targeted Versus line.