Versace's Rock 'n' Roll Place

BEN BRANTLEY

It's the villa where mainstream rock meets high fashion. BEN BRANTLEY reports from the lakeside house wire Milan-based style emperor Gianni Versace has welcomed Prince, Clapton, Sting, and the Boss himself

Asked politely how he liked thelake, Prince replied,

"Which lake?"

It was the day after the Springsteen concert in Turin, and Gianni Versace was, as he observed offhandedly over his morning mango, "in all the papers. '' Piled on the dining-room table of the designer's neoclassical villa on Lake Como, the Italian dailies were full of the Boss's four-hour performance, speculations on his extramarital romance with backup singer Patti Scialfa, and multiple references to, of all people, Versace himself, the Milan-based creator of the metalmesh dress and not the first name you'd link with a blue-collar rocker from New Jersey.

"They got everything wrong as usual," said Versace, sounding pleased. Versace had not, in fact, arrived with a coterie of mannequins, as La Repubblica had it, or attended the recent Mi. chael Jackson concert (Corriere della ™ Sera), and the mystery girl in bicycle pants at his side (La Stampa) was his press rep. But it was certainly true that he had donated the six hundred Versace T-shirts, in colors acid enough to stand out in a crowd of 65,000, for the Springsteen crew and security staff. (When a blank-eyed young man lunged onto the stage to embrace Bruce, three emblazoned orange BACKS-VERSACE, VERSACE, VERSACE—hustled him away.) Also true that Versace stood backstage next to the amplifiers for the first half of the concert (not the second—his ears hurt), where he wriggled his shoulders like a shy sophomore on the edge of the prom floor. And true that during intermission he met briefly with Springsteen, who three years before had honeymooned with his now estranged wife, Julianne Phillips, at the house on Lake Como.

"But, oh, that house, man," said Bruce Springsteen.

"Marvelous, such energy,'' Versace mumbled courteously to the pair of buoysize biceps that is Bruce Springsteen in a muscle shirt. Versace's younger sister (and company vice president), Donatella, who'd visited Springsteen in New Jersey in 1985, touched the singer's upper arm. "Big muscles," murmured the small bronzed blonde in black stretch clothes. Her American husband, Paul Beck (first assistant, Versace's men's wear), took a quick series of snapshots of the incongruous couple: the conquering American, gleaming from his intermission shower, an athletic torso topped by impossibly white teeth and adrenaline-sparked eyes, beside the darkly garbed designer with the squared brow and the foreshortened, somber face of a Mantegna saint.

Springsteen said he would not, after all, be visiting Como during this tour. "But, oh, that house, man..." he said. "I keep telling people about that house... "

To the Italian media, forty-one-year-old Gianni Versace—whose company wholesale figures approached $350 million in 1987—is way —up in pop heaven, flying wing-to-wing with the gods of the road tours. An opinionated maverick from the South who has violated every canon of classic Northern Italian chic during a twenty-year career, Versace has achieved a new visibility on the backs of today's flashier cultural icons.

Over the centuries, Lake Como has attracted such vacationers as Virgil, Shelley, Napoleon, and Churchill. Pliny and Stendhal celebrated its enrapturing views. Now, thanks to Versace, not only Springsteen, but Prince, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, George Michael, Sting, and Don Johnson have kicked back at Como, among the Empire antiques and marble torsos of Versace's country house. Many of their performing peers religiously shop his boutiques (114 around the world), wear his swallow-tailed evening suits in concert, and occasionally pose in the designer's clothes for Versace-distributed photographs. The Versace office computers store the measurements of Springsteen (for whom the company recently ran up fourteen special sleeveless T-shirts), Elton John (who has the more flamboyant ensembles from the women's line made in his size), Phil Collins, David Bowie, and Eric Clapton (who now calls the factory directly to have leather strips sewn onto his jacket shoulders so his guitar strap won't wear through the fabric). Versace's top American outlet, his boutique on L.A.'s Rodeo Drive, did more than a half-million-dollar retail turnover in June alone, and on a single weekend Rod Stewart, Elton John, and Barry Manilow were all buying. And last winter, said Versace, Don Johnson called to ask about his doing, yes, the clothes for Johnson's potential wedding to Barbra Streisand.

"I keep telling people.."

These are all felicitous associations for a designer who is currently planning a chain of boutiques for his youth-oriented line, Update, and whose experimental excesses are sometimes made fun of by a fashion press that tends to prefer the cool understatement of Giorgio Armani. "Sometimes the press— the bad press—doesn't understand when you are a gifted designer," sighed Versace. However, for a Fortune 500 rock king sliding into middle age, his clothes are a perfect uniform. With their boulder shoulders, insinuatingly fitted hips, and lush fabrics, Versace suits suggest an exaggerated corporate cockiness, success worn with swagger. "His stuff has what I call in film a presence," says director Bob Giraldi.

Giraldi, who helped propel the designer into pop orbit when he dressed Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney in Versace in their "Say, Say, Say" video in 1983, says the clothes represent what's succeeded "the Liberace school of rock performing." As music video segued from Liberace to Versace, Don Johnson was regularly wearing the look on Miami Vice. By 1985 Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, was calling to ask if the singer could meet the designer when he came to Italy that summer. Paul Beck suggested Springsteen and his bride might like some time alone in Como. Soon a stay at the Villa Fontanelle, built in 1776 by an eccentric nudist architect from England, went platinum as an industry status symbol. Beck said he gets two or three calls a month from would-be guests in the music and film industry. Even the reclusive Michael Jackson's people sent out feelers about his coming with an entourage of twenty-eight—a suggestion the Versaces felt was impractical. Anyway, noted Donatella, "he didn't want to meet Michael Jackson."

Over lunch Versace, Donatella, Beck, and Antonio D'Amico, Versace's companion and assistant on theatrical projects, were discussing the relative merits of assorted superstars as performers and houseguests. When Prince's name was mentioned, Ballan, Versace's gentle-tempered Indian majordomo, winced. Prince was a majordomo's nightmare. He slept late into the afternoon, and returned from the clubs at five A.M. demanding I steak dinners, a habit which prompted Ballan to install a microwave. "I had the feeling," said Paul Beck, ''he had no idea it was a private home." The diminutive Minnesotan kept his lake' view room perpetually shuttered, and when he left the house, it was to enter a dark-windowed limousine. There was an uncomfortably silent dinner with the [ Versaces toward the end of his stay, at which Donatella asked him politely how he liked the lake. He replied, ''Which lake?"

The ultimate power rests in the hands of three people,

all named Versace.

' George Michael, who was at the villa in June, is remembered more fondly. ''A very, very fresh boy, very sweet," said Versace, though he added that Michael could use guidance on his dancing (''too pinup"). Versace told him to consult the European doyen of contemporary choreography, Maurice Bejart, for whose company the designer does costumes.

Actually, Versace telephoned B6jart | that same post-Springsteen morning af[I ter surfeiting himself on rock reviews | and announcing to the breakfast table, I ''I say next season only opera, only I classical." Versace likes to stress that 1 his activities outside the atelier range I well beyond stadium stages. He regularI ly creates opera costumes for La Scala, I working with such directors as Bob l Wilson and Antonello Madau Diaz. Vil\ la Fontanelle guests have included the likes of Ionesco as well as Don Johnson. Versace has participated in sixteen museum exhibitions, with a one-man L show at the Castello Sforzesco in Mi[ lan—the first there devoted to the work of a single fashion designer—planned for March (during the women's ready-towear collections). He supervises his ad campaigns—shot by Avedon, Penn, Bruce Weber, and Helmut Newton, among others—with reverent solicitude and regards them as photographic works of art.

"You know, there is not only one Versace," he said soberly as we puttered in a motorized Lucia gondola across the lake loved by Pliny and spumed by Prince. He was wearing a Versace shirt printed all over with the signatures of Picasso, Chagall, and Kandinsky. "Maybe we are three; I feel I am five. There is a Versace who is very conservative, there is a Versace who is very crazy, there is a Versace who is very rock, there is a Versace who is very theater. I haven't decided yet which I choose to be."

Although Versace takes his fashion very seriously—and prides himself on such technological innovations as sewing with lasers—he is happy to find these other outlets for his rampant creativity, especially since market conservatism sometimes checks such offerings for women as his impeccably rendered looks combining pants on one leg and a miniskirt on the other. "Now I'm more in control of myself," said Versace. "But I like the time when I was crazy.... That's what I don't understand about the press. They like it when I'm in control."

Versace's favorite word of commendation is "modem," and he has never doubted that he is one of the few truly modem designers today. Valentino, Lacroix, Armani all belong, he thinks, "to another age." Armani—his archrival in Milan's fashion pantheon—is, said Versace, his exact opposite, in work and in life. "He is sad, I am happy. I am in a beautiful house, he likes all white." Versace added he never suffers over his own work. "For me, to do fashion is like drinking water."

Versace disapproves of designers whose "homosexuality makes them dress women like men." Of his own sexuality, he admits, "One of my current dreams is to be sleeping with a Greek sculpture—sometimes Apollo, sometimes Venus, but always something beautiful." This whim could certainly be indulged if he chose. His Como house, his Milan apartment (in the Rizzoli palazzo, over his design offices), and his assorted other real estate on the Monopoly board of Milan's fashion district are dotted with classical statuary. Versace can buy pretty much what he wants these days. His volume— which includes royalties from uncredited lines he designs, such as the hugely successful Genny—saw a 30 percent increase last year, and there is talk of floating the company on the Italian stock market. Last March, Versace bought back his perfume from the Yves Saint Laurent corporation. He is planning new launches, plus a revitalization of the existing fragrances, which suffered, perhaps, in alien hands.

The Versaces want direct control of all aspects of their business, and get it more than most designers. They own the factory which does 35 percent of their production, and their chain of Versace boutiques (partly owned by them, partly franchised) accounts for over 50 percent of international sales. This means the company doesn't have to deal with stores which mark down prices too early, or won't buy the collections as the Versaces want them to be bought. Their distribution in the U.S.—which represents just 12 percent of all sales—includes only two major department-store chains, Nordstrom's and Neiman Marcus.

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The ultimate power in this empire rests in the hands of three people, all named Versace—Gianni (head of the Finanziaria Versace holding corporation and all related companies), thirty-three-year-old Donatella (vice president), and their brother, Santo, forty-three, the president and methodical business mind behind the organization. Both joined Gianni in 1978, when the designer started his own company after six years of freelancing in Milan, and business today is strictly family. (Last winter, the Versaces bought out the single percentage of stock belonging to their departing managing director, Claudio Luti.) Ask a Versace employee a question and he'll stipulate anonymity. "It's a family business," said one, "and I'm not in the family."

The sibling bonds were forged in Reggio Calabria, an industrial seaside town at the toe of Italy, near Sicily. Their father, a businessman who continues to live there, is described by his children as a remote, poetic man; their mother, a local couturifcre and dress-shop owner, was a classically dominant southern matriarch. Ten years after her death, she is still an active presence in her children's lives. "She knew every little detail about me—sexual, mental," said Versace. "She was like a girlfriend. ... She was so strong, I don't think she ever died."

So clothes-enamored that at the age of two he would sit in his mother's closet to finger her silk dresses, Versace was an oddity in postwar, provincial Calabria. He hated school—it took two escorts to get him there in the morning, and he was periodically sent home for his insistence on wearing only black, which he describes as "the family color." The siblings agree that Santo, though only two years Gianni's senior, is the true father of the family, a child bom with an adult sense of responsibility. Donatella, bom in 1955, was much more Gianni's playmate. By the time she was eleven, her teenage brother was teaching her to sneak their father's car keys so they could hit the discos together. He was also dictating her wardrobe: black ciré miniskirts, leather blousons, and high boots. The relationship was, Santo remembers, the despair of their mother.

The family pattern around Gianni has shifted slightly over the years. Donatella said she increasingly tries "to be the figure of my mother in the family." "I see my mother again in Donatella," agreed Versace, "the personality, the power, the force." With brother and sister as father and mother, he can play the perpetual child—farouche, outspoken, creative. "I am still," he said, "the same baby."

A more recent addition to the family sanctum is Paul Beck, the thirty-threeyear-old American with a degree in environmental biology who came to Milan as a model in 1979. When he went to Versace on a go-see, Donatella advised her brother not to use him. "I hated him," she said. But Versace didn't: he hired Beck for his first men's ad campaign, fitted a collection on him, and had soon moved him into the company to manage the men's line. In the meantime, Donatella had reversed her aversion and married Beck in 1983. Their child, Allegra, was bom two years ago. "In private life," said Donatella, "Santo and his wife and two children are one family, and me and Paul and Gianni and our baby are one family.... She's not just our baby, she's also his." True to family tradition, she dresses Allegra all in black.

Donatella's and Paul's offices in the Milan headquarters are right next to Gianni's, and, of course, they have their own room in Como, just down the corridor from his and near Santo's. Versace said he is happiest in Como, which offers asylum from a city he finds less and less appealing. "For living, Milan is gray, gray, gray—and Armani beige," he said. "It's a fast city, and respects only people with power.... I like to be by myself, to be out of the crowd."

Still, during the weekend I spent at Como, the house seemed dense with very worldly associations, which Versace didn't appear to mind much. When he leafed through a magazine, it was filled with people who'd been at the house, such as Springsteen and Michael, or contained an interview with Mike Tyson, who wanted to come to Italy to eat pasta and buy Versace. Even the movies Versace had rented for the weekend all seemed to feature some association with the designer. "You know Rupert?" asked Versace as Rupert Everett's name flashed across the Hearts of Fire credits. "Such a sweetie. He comes here often. He adores Como."

Just before I left, Versace was watching an Italian film he swore he'd never seen before called Ti Presento Un'Amica (I Want You to Meet My Friend), and the incestuousness of its Versace connections was incredible. It was about a fashion journalist, played by an actress Versace usually dresses; it began with backstage footage from a Genny collection, designed by Gianni Versace; it featured an actress who is the niece of another Milanese designer; and it ended with more documentary footage shot on Rome's Spanish Steps, where all the big-name Italian designers were gathered for a special fashion show. "This is too much!" hooted Versace with delighted dismay. "Look! It's me with Armani. Now I really am a star."