Donatella Versace: 'My fashion's fearless. I’m not. I’m very insecure'

When I meet Donatella Versace in a suite at London's Dorchester Hotel she's wearing a minidress printed with vintage Vogue covers. The cut and fabric are contemporary, but the print, she explains, is "from the Gianni archive" – one garment from a new collection celebrating the life and work of her brother. It is 20 years since Gianni Versace was shot dead at the gate of his mansion in Miami by a gay hustler who had already murdered four people and was apparently driven to kill Versace – whom he had never met – by a toxic resentment of his wealth and success.

Gianni and Donatella Versace on a New York runway in 1996, the year before Gianni was shot.

For the 19 years that Gianni ran the company, Donatella was her brother's most constant companion – both muse and provocateur. But as she points out, she has now been Versace's creative director for longer than Gianni was. A milestone, and a mixed blessing. "Well, it was better for me before," she says. "He was in front, I was behind. Then I could say whatever I want; I can be pushing, I can scream. Now I have to be careful, there's only me." She gives a husky laugh.

Donatella Versace is diminutive – just 157 centimetres tall, and a slave to high heels – and as wiry as a pipe cleaner, her toned arms and legs the fruits of her daily 45-minute workout in her home gym, listening to punk rock: "I think it's good for your mind."

Deep-black eyes, framed by layers of eyeliner, peer out from a curtain of peroxide-blonde hair. She speaks in a strangulated English, mangling vowels and meanings, which has you leaning forward to follow the thread of her conversation and examine even more closely the glaringly obvious surgical enhancement.

She is accompanied by her English PR man, who remains standing to one side, as if at attention, throughout the interview. Her company's head of international communications, a slim-hipped young man with a shaven head named Valerio, takes a seat beside her.

Donatella is in London to attend the opening of a new Versace store, and to receive the Fashion Icon award from the British Fashion Council. It celebrates her role in maintaining the Versace brand's "creativity and innovation, glamour and power" – an acknowledgement, she says, that makes her "vairy 'appy", and would have made Gianni "vairy proud".

He was her elder brother by nine years, growing up in the town of Reggio di Calabria in southern Italy, where their father sold household appliances and their mother ran her own dress shop.

Gianni dressed Donatella, cosseted her – and corrupted her, spiriting her out of the house when her mother's back was turned to spend time with him and his friends. She drove her mother mad, she laughs. "But Gianni made me drive her mad. I was going out with him at night, disco and things – I was 11 years old, 12 years old. My mother was, 'Why do you do this? Don't listen to him.' I said, 'Why not?' "

By the time Donatella went to the University of Florence to study Spanish and English, Gianni was already a successful designer, and her future was cast. "I finished university and just ran to work with him. Actually, I didn't have a choice. He said, 'You come, and you don't move any more.' "

She became her brother's right-hand woman, his female alter ego. More than a muse, she says, she was "a disturber. I was always pushing him – do more, don't listen, be yourself. He trusted me. He knew I wouldn't tell him something just to please him. I never did. I did the opposite. And he liked that."

Gianni Versace's designs, with their splashy baroque prints in migrainous colours and figure-hugging cuts, were brash to the point of vulgarity, overtly sexy, eye-poppingly expensive and beautifully tailored. As the Vogue editor and writer Joan Juliet Buck once put it, "One only had to try on a Versace dress to find that one's tits went up, and one's ass went out, and one's waist went in." Their go-to-hell flamboyance epitomised the bling-laden, celebrity-obsessed, conspicuous-consumption age that was the 1990s. Nobody embodied the Versace style more than Donatella herself – a life of operatic excess, champagne, cocaine, expensive jewellery, private jets. When she stayed at the Ritz in Paris, as she often did, she would fly in her own florist from Milan, deeming the hotel's inadequate.

If Versace created the brand, it was Donatella who built it. "Branding," as she once said, "is what I do." It was Donatella who schmoozed and corralled the celebrities – Madonna, Demi Moore, Courtney Love – who became walking billboards for the brand. And it was Donatella who cultivated the soon-to-be supermodels who would become inseparably associated with Versace – Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford – by persuading them to step on to the catwalk, lavishing them with first-class flights and sky-rocketing fees that raised their price across the industry. When another supermodel, Linda Evangelista, boasted, "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day," it was Donatella Versace she had to thank.

Last September, at Milan Fashion Week, unveiling the Versace Tribute Collection to mark the 20th anniversary of Gianni's death, Donatella reassembled the "icons" – Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Carla Bruni and Helena Christensen – for the finale.

Donatella Versace leads Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen down the catwalk at Milan Fashion Week last September.Credit: Getty Images

When Gianni died, there was no obligation for her to pick up the mantle of artistic director of the company. She was married to model Paul Beck and the mother of two young children. She could have done anything.

"Yes, but it was the only life I knew. And when I realised all these people in the company were looking at me, like, 'What are you going to do now?' I felt I couldn't let them down, people who gave their soul and all their strength to work for Gianni, night and day. I was very attached to them, and they were very attached to Gianni and to me. I wasn't going to let them down."

People, she says, got the impression that she was strong. "They think, 'She knows what she's doing.'"

But she wasn't, and she didn't. "I think I hid myself behind this mask, first because I was in pain for so long for the way Gianni died. He was my brother. My children were very close to him. And all of a sudden my world, this big castle, was crashing. I couldn't show my pain or my insecurity, because if I did then I couldn't go ahead. Everybody else in the company would be like, 'We're not going to make it.' So I decided to wear this mask. I say, 'We're going to make it, we're strong, don't worry.' Inside I was very insecure and struggled for a long time.

"I looked at Gianni for years and I didn't realise how hard it is to be in front, and to listen to all the criticism that comes to you. But when he died, I realised this." Were there lots of sleepless and tear-filled nights?

"Lots of sleepless nights: 'What am I doing? Am I doing the right thing?' And it went on for so many years. The first question I was always asked in interviews was, 'How do you think Gianni would feel today, looking at you?' So many people asked that. That was a question I could not answer. Who knows?

"Sometimes I had nightmares. I am ready to do a show and Gianni comes and says, 'This is horrible! Take it away!' Aagh! In the middle of the night!

"I went through hell. I realise you can't achieve things or make people around you better or feel secure if you don't go through hell first. You need to experience that kind of insecurity. Gianni was such a genius – and who am I? This is what people were thinking.

"I think 80 per cent of people in the fashion world thought I couldn't do it. That was my feeling. And in a way they were right. Gianni was a genius. He broke all the rules. He was fearless. I always pushed him, too. It's easier to push somebody than to be somebody. I'm not like Gianni. I'm not a genius. I'm a more practical woman who lives in the real world and tries to understand everyday life. I had to prove them all wrong, and that's hell. To have that feeling."

Donatella in Milan in 1997, at the unveiling of her first collection following the death of brother Gianni.Credit: AP

Less than three months after Gianni's death, Donatella received a standing ovation at the end of her first show, in Milan. But the fashion world is fickle. Nine months later she mounted her first couture show, at the Ritz Paris, building her runway over the hotel's swimming pool, as her brother had done every season. It was a car crash. The New York Times wrote that the show "exposed the gulf that lay between Ms Versace's aesthetic and her brother's", suggesting the clothes betrayed "a hint of madness".

Sales fell away, while Donatella's extravagance continued unabated. As rivals Gucci, Prada and Armani consolidated into corporate behemoths, rolling out flagship stores and dominating the burgeoning global market, Versace began to look outmoded. Its profits plummeted and, in 2004, the company almost went under. So too did its figurehead and artistic director.

Donatella's cocaine habit was making her behaviour erratic and unstable. According to Deborah Ball, the author of House of Versace, a 2010 tell-all about the rise, fall, and rise again of the Versace empire, she rarely turned up at meetings before noon, insulating herself within a tight circle of assistants who behaved more like enablers and openly snorting cocaine in front of staff.

She was also turning into a camp joke. In 2002, she featured in the notorious worst-dressed list compiled by the fashion commentator Richard Blackwell, along with Princess Anne and Kelly Osbourne. Her pneumatic lips, peroxide hair, inebriation and extravagance were lampooned mercilessly by the actor Maya Rudolph on Saturday Night Live. (To her credit, Donatella sometimes joined in, appearing as herself in Zoolander, a film sending up the fashion industry.)

Donatella with ex-husband Paul Beck and their children Daniel and Allegra in 2017.

In June 2004, an intimate 18th birthday dinner for her daughter Allegra at the Palazzo Versace in Milan was interrupted by the arrival of close friend Elton John, who, unbeknown to Donatella, had arranged for her to be admitted to a rehabilitation clinic in Arizona. She was taken that night by private plane and emerged after 2½ months, reborn.

Any discussion of this is off the agenda. It's old news. "But I feel in a good place for a few years now, more sure of myself, and more sure of the business."

In 2004, shortly after her return from rehab, Giancarlo Di Risio, who had previously run Fendi, took over as Versace's chief executive. He imposed order on the company's haphazard management style and swingeing cuts on the payroll. He shed loss-making stores and lines and focused on intensifying its presence in the luxury market, concentrating on the wealthy individuals who are impervious to the fluctuations of the global marketplace. He extended the Versace brand by customising the interiors of Lamborghini sports cars and private jets, and opened luxury Versace-branded hotels on the Gold Coast and in Dubai, and apartment blocks in China and India.

In 2016, Jonathan Akeroyd, who had run Alexander McQueen after McQueen's 2010 death, nursing the company through a turbulent period, became Versace's chief executive. The Versace family now owns 80 per cent of the company Gianni founded, having sold the remainder to a private equity firm in 2014.

Following Gianni's death, and in the role of creative director, Donatella shifted Versace away from the hypercharged, revealing designs in garish, vividly coloured prints, that had been Gianni's signature, towards a more minimalist and sober look.

"After Gianni's passing, I need to look around at what was happening in society," she says. "It was not the same world, absolutely. And I realised what Versace was missing, and that was day clothes. We were very concentrated on doing cocktail, evening clothes. So why don't I try to make a woman go to the office wearing Versace? She didn't need to be so loud, but she could be empowered through her clothes, because if you feel good, comfortable in yourself, more secure, that's a good way to help you have better job, to be better paid, to be more equal."

So how, I ask, would she sum up her philosophy of fashion in just one word.

"One word?" She looks momentarily stumped.

Her English PR man fills the silence: "Brave!" "Iconic!" says Valerio.

"Empowering women," Donatella says. "That's two words. Let me say, fearless. My fashion's fearless. I'm not fearless. I'm very insecure – not in general in my life, but when I have a collection, of course I question myself over and over and over again."

Empowerment is a word she uses a lot. "Absolutely. That's my passion."

And clothes are empowerment?

"If you buy something, put it on, you want to look better and feel better. That's a kind of empowerment." It is also an expression of – or a means to – sexuality, a quality her brother's designs exuded.

She shakes her head. "I'm not like that. Sexuality is something not important to me for clothes. It's more about being sensual, more about an attitude, and less about the clothes."

Models wear Versace’s Tribute Collection, printed with Vogue magazine covers and portraits of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.Credit: Getty Images

Her new Tribute Collection is a riot of slinky lines in the splashy prints created by her brother between 1991 and 1997 – leopard skin, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean portraits, the Vogue covers. It was on display at the December opening of a new Versace store in London: two floors of glistening marble and glass; leggy models dressed in the new line, fashion editors, social influencers and a smattering of prized Versace customers, dressed head-to-toe in the brand. Donatella was holding court upstairs, fenced in behind a wall of minders and bodyguards.

The collection, she says, is a tribute to her brother's genius, for a new generation. "Millennials don't know the history of Gianni; they don't even know what he did in the '90s. So I get the feeling that it was the right time to do it, because in a way fashion has become so uniform. Everybody was doing more or less the same thing."

As someone who does not write about fashion, I say, it sometimes strikes me as a sort of witchcraft. She looks startled. "You're saying I'm a witch?" Not exactly. But you have the power to dictate trends, determine what people wear. You say something is fabulous and by a strange, alchemical consensus, everybody agrees. How does that happen?

"Charisma?" She laughs.

You have charisma?

"They tell me I have. But actually today it's difficult to do that. It was much easier in Gianni's time, before the internet. Now everything starts from the market, looking at young people in the street. It's not like a designer can decide, this is how I dress and everybody has to dress like me – it's not that any more.

"You gather information, and you go through it and take it out in the way you think it should be."

The fashion business now, she continues, is more than just a matter of appearances; it is, she says, more intellectual. "Before it was clothes, clothes, clothes. Now it's not only about clothes, there is more discussion. Why these clothes? What are they saying about our society?

"In the fashion business, in my life, you have to have a goal, and the goal is not only about the clothes, it's about women. I am an activist – women have been treated different from men, with less opportunity, paid less. I'm not against men, but now we have this conversation about women and power, and that is exciting for me."

Had she ever felt disadvantaged because she was a woman? "Absolutely. Not now, but in the past I did. I sit in a boardroom where important decisions are being made and there are only men wearing ties and me. I'm blonde, with make-up and clothes like this, so sometimes when I said something the first reaction was, "What's she talking about?" Eventually I had the courage to push for my ideas, and now everybody respects me."

Donatella and Beck divorced in 2000. Does she have anybody in her life now? "Maybe," she laughs. "I don't like to talk about my personal life."

But it is a part of you. "Well, my ex-husband was not the last person, let's say …"

Would she like to marry again, or see herself with a life partner? "No. Because what is a married life today? You know, men are expecting certain things from a woman – to come back at night and the wife is there, ready for them. It's still like that. Men's mentality is like that."

"No offence," Valerio chips in.

"No offence, but it's still like that – the woman should be there when you come back, ready to listen. It's the same with all men. But who's going to listen to me?"

Not all men are like that, I say, adding that I'm not. "You're not like that? So maybe I should marry you! I'm very independent. I like to travel. I don't need a husband or companion – I don't like to live with anybody. I'm happy and fulfilled with my private life."

Raised a Catholic, Donatella has met the last three popes at the Vatican. "I was invited. But it's not like I have a conversation, like me and you. The one two Popes ago, John Paul II, he was a rock star."

She prays often, she says, "but not in a conventional way. Sometimes I find myself praying when I really need something, but that's not right. I should be more attentive. This is not a world I like right now." She pauses. "I think people in fashion who have a voice, should use that voice and help. Designing clothes is not enough."

Extract of a story first published in the Telegraph Magazine (UK).

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