The Clothes Μaketh The Woman

Donatella Versace on confidence, resilience, and her powerful new collection: "I have to see the sparkle inside the world"

- RACHEL TASHJIAN

Watching Donatella Versace have her photograph taken is like watching the word fabulous emerge out of a seashell, Botticelli’s Venus-style. She reclines on a white leather sofa in her office in Milan— amid eight black-and-silver pillows covered in Versace scrolls, Medusas, and Greek-key meander vectors—and purrs for the lens. Pop music plays, and her longtime hairstylist stays nearby, while his hairbrush, like a paintbrush, hovers just outside the frame, ready to make the most minute adjustments to the most famous bleached locks in fashion history. She is diminutive, even in six-inch wedge boots. Her black pencil dress fits like, well, the paint on a pencil, and when she stands up to greet me, an assistant gives her a little cropped cardigan while her hairstylist lingers behind, stroking her blond hair with the brush as she shakes my hand.

Fabulous.

Ah, that we could all understand so fully what we bring to a room. For going on five decades now—she and her brothers, Gianni and Santo, started Versace in 1978—Donatella has always known how to give Donatella. Versace was a collaborator and muse to Gianni, whose clothes challenged the tasteful titans of European fashion with their melodrama. When Gianni was murdered in July of 1997 outside his Miami mansion, Versace took over as artistic director and shocked the fashion industry when her designs were just as poignantly flashy as her brother’s. (The brand was sold to Michael Kors’s Capri Holdings Limited in 2018. It has since been acquired by Tapestry in an August 2023 deal.)