Renaissance Women

After the dark years in the wake of her brother’s murder, Donatella Versace has emerged into the night again, with a series of powerfully inspiring collections and a fresh creative approach. In an exclusive interview, fashion’s great survivor reveals how the tragedies of her past have shaped her newfound sense of purpose and strength.

- Justine Picardie

One of the great paradoxes of the fashion industry is that Donatella Versace, the most instantly recognizable female icon in the business—as famed for her Rapunzel platinum-blonde hair and deep mahogany tan as she is for her high-octane designs—is also the most unknowable and mysterious. Or so she has seemed to me, ever since I first interviewed her, in the winter of 2003, in a period she has subsequently referred to as her ‘dark years’. Ominous shadows appeared to shroud Donatella in the wake of her brother Gianni’s murder in Miami in 1997; and when I next met her, in the Versace headquarters on Via Gesil in Milan six years later, she was still lost in mourning, though also responsible for the continuing creative success of the company that Gianni had founded in 1978. At the time, the heavy cloud of her sorrow enveloped our encounter; when I asked her to describe Gianni, she said, simply: “He was my protector, my friend, my everything...” And she looked like a woman haunted; a fragile black-clad figure from a Gothic fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm.

The best description of Donatella in that unhappy era comes from her friend Rupert Everett, whose memoir describes the scene at her New Year’s Eve party in 1999, at the Versace mansion in Miami (on the steps of which Gianni had been gunned down; legend has it that a dead white dove was found beside him). She moved among [her guests] with the politeness and precision of a hardened sleepwalker... To them she was the brash party diva. People didn’t see the depth or the sadness, though sometimes she offered it, humbly and with dignity, in a conversation, but it was always overlooked. She had built an image for herself that had become a prison. Nobody could see through the peroxide wall...’