Donatella Versace on celebrity, creativity and refusing to conform

To interview Donatella Versace any way other than in the tanned flesh is to be woefully deprived of three-quarters of her impact, which is resolutely modern in that it is entirely experiential: the whiplash of peroxide-blonde hair, the wide Cheshire Cat smile, the higher-than-high heels, the gobstopper-size diamond screwed onto a perfectly manicured finger.

That’s the image both Donatella and the Versace label hold in the popular imagination: hyper-feminine, sexy, rich – to be pronounced, Donatella-style, as ‘reach’, as in ‘reaching for the stars’. After all, that is what Donatella has done with Versace’s autumn/winter 2023 collection, jettisoning Milan to show, for the first time, in Los Angeles just before the 95th Academy Awards ceremony.

"It’s exciting. It’s a very good challenge," says Donatella, sitting behind a conference table at the label’s glossy headquarters in a Milanese development so new it’s still under construction. The building is situated in a piazza named after Luigi Einaudi, Italy’s prime minister for seven years until 1955 – the year, incidentally, that Donatella was born. On screens in the foyer, Versace’s latest campaign videos are projected big, as lushly coloured, suitably cinematic backdrops to figures darting in tailored black. Today, those include Donatella herself, business-ready in a sharp black suit, flares kicking out over her habitual platform heels, a button winking with that Medusa face at her tiny, Barbie-proportioned waist. The flaxen hair is flawless – molten Oscar-statuette gold.

She is, however, nervous. "I’m always nervous," she says of her biannual catwalk presentations, a highlight of the Milan schedule. "But at fashion week, everybody else shows, so you are one of them. There, [in LA], it’s going to be only me. All the attention– if people pay attention – is on this show. I feel I cannot fail. I have to do this perfect." So why show in Los Angeles? Why not stay in her familiar stomping-ground? "I like to push myself to try different things," she says. "And this is a totally different thing."

Her "comfort zone", she tells me, is here in Milan, where her elder brother Gianni Versace first launched his career as a freelance designer in 1972. He showed his debut own-name collection and opened his first boutique in 1978 – also the year his baby sister Donatella completed her own studies (languages at the University of Florence) and joined him. By 1986, Versace was sufficiently successful to acquire a flamboyantly decorated, 45,000-square-foot baroque palazzo on Via Gesù once owned by the Rizzoli publishing dynasty. When the Versaces bought the place, it came with a set of cast-bronze renaissance Medusas on the door that Gianni famously borrowed as the brand’s now instantly recognisable insignia. After his murder in 1997, Donatella took the house’s reins, polished the Medusa and expanded the business exponentially. Times were rocky, as Versace’s more-is-more aesthetic fell out of fashion, but Donatella fought, and came out on top. "I feel the responsibility to Gianni," she says. He’d be proud. In 2018, the Versace family sold a majority stake of the label to the US conglomerate Capri, at a valuation of $2.1 billion (£1.64 billion), while last year, the brand passed the magic figure of $1 billion in annual sales.

As for this year’s La La Land debut, Versace might not have shown in Hollywood before, but it is home-away-from-home turf. "I’ve got friends there, yes," Donatella allows, in the understatement of the century. Versace’s ties to celebrity are sufficiently well-documented to need little explanation. It was this house, after all, that made stars of the supermodels back in the early 1990s, paying them astronomical figures and giving their faces and names the kind of currency then only enjoyed by movie or rock stars. Then there have been the brand’s many glittering advertising campaigns, launched under Gianni and continuing after Donatella took leadership. The faces of those campaigns, all loyal friends and near-family of Versace, have included Madonna, Elton John, Sylvester Stallone, Demi Moore, Prince and Lady Gaga. The latter immortalised Donatella in a song she wrote in 2013: "She’s so rich and so blonde. She’s so fab, it’s beyond." It’s an accurate summary, but also reductive.

For decades, Donatella Versace has been dismissed: while working alongside Gianni, the press often labelled her a ‘muse’– understandable, given she was the embodiment of the Versace woman, but unfair in its implication that she spent her time lying around on chaises longues looking fabulous and fiddling with her jewellery while ‘inspiring’ her brother. When I ask her about the biggest misconceptions people have of her, she replies, in an instant: "That, when Gianni was alive, I didn’t work. That I was just around, in my high heels, blonde hair, just someone to look at. That I didn’t have any specific role. I heard that so many times."

‘Muse’ is a term she understandably chafes at, curling her lip slightly at the word. How would she describe her job, back then? "I was torturing Gianni!" she howls, then smiles, recalling how she initially took control of the house’s accessories. By the mid-Nineties, she was also designing one of Versace’s diffusion lines, Istante. Today, her accessories from back then do swift business with vintage retailers – safety-pin-festooned backpacks, gloves and knee-high boots, baroque handbags in vibrant silk prints with handles dangling cabochon jewels like boiled sweets. And, of course, her heels. "I started to do high heels. He said, 'No, they cannot walk in these, just do a little bit lower.' No! 'Gianni, you are extreme. These shoes have to be extreme.' Just to make a point about that empowered woman. Gianni didn’t need me to be pushed forward, but I was the one pushing. 'Let’s do more, let’s do more.'"

Donatella loves ‘more’, and the extreme. (Believe it or not, she is only about five-foot-four, although those aforementioned platforms hike her up easily six inches.) The autumn/winter 2023 line, of which she gives me a preview, is extreme to the max: there is plenty of ferocious tailoring, alongside bubbly ballgowns in cloqué silks, fabric gathered and swathed around supple, flesh-coloured corsets. The same fabrics, ornate and multi-dimensional, are cut into billowing shirts for men that recall the brand’s explosive success in the early Nineties; for women, the bust and hips are emphasised with twists and tucks of fabric to invent va-va-voom curves. It’s all created by draping fabric on the stand using methods normally reserved for Atelier Versace, the brand’s handcrafted couture line, worn by a multitude of celebrities for premieres, and the wealthiest 0.01 percenters for their somewhat-fabulous everyday lives. "It’s a moment in fashion that we’ve been doing, all of us – taking from street style and making it more luxury," says Donatella. She pauses. "It’s time to go back to couture. A dress that makes you look better and feel more empowered. To not blend in with the rest of the world."

If this is a return to couture, it is also a return to quintessential Versace – a label established with the idea of standing out in your clothes. "Gianni was criticised in the beginning, especially by Italian journalists who thought he was dressing only super-sexy women," says Donatella. "You had to be boring and invisible to be chic, and that was not Gianni." She pauses. "I told him, 'Listen. We want to be women, we want to be seen and we want to show we are not afraid of what they think about us. Who cares?'"

Donatella certainly doesn’t – her collections, especially in recent years, have become more confident, less concerned with kowtowing to established trends or tastes than staking Versace’s claim to attention in the crowded international fashion landscape. They’ve been filled with colour, bold print, sculpted clothes that embrace a wide variety of women’s body types. And, yes, the hyper-high heels – Versace’s platforms, based on Donatella’s own choice of footwear, sparked a trend all of their own. She has also begun referencing the label’s past, both Gianni’s greatest hits and, increasingly, her own, devoting a collection to the jungle-print dress famously worn by Jennifer Lopez for the Grammys in 2000, which became most popular Google search query in history and prompted the invention of Google Images. In the autumn/winter 2023 show, there are references to Gianni’s final 1997 Atelier collection, while early 2000s advertising campaigns Donatella herself masterminded alongside Steven Meisel are pinned to the moodboard.

The famous Versace dress moment recreated on the spring/summer 2020 catwalk at Milan Fashion Week

"There’s no bad taste and good taste," states Donatella. "I like powerful clothes – power in the sense that they can give a woman confidence and make her not afraid to show femininity. And that time [when Gianni was designing, in the 1990s], it was very bourgeois. You had to go with a suit, it had to be grey or whatever, and to be elegant and chic. And flat shoes, which is OK for me." She shrugs, grudgingly. It’s obviously not that ‘OK’. "It was a man’s society. We were not liberated; we were more conservative. But women were not sexy any more. I tried to do that, to push [Gianni] to do that. To celebrate the woman’s body, and not be afraid to show real personality."

Donatella is certainly not afraid of revealing something of herself to the world. She has almost 10 million followers on social media, and gets mobbed when she goes out on the street. Yet she rolls her eyes when I suggest she’s a celebrity. "It’s uncomfortable for me sometimes," she says. "And it’s not important for me, fame. It’s important for me to have a platform to talk to the young generation, because they are always in my mind, what all the world is going through: the LGBTQ+ movement, people being very racist, still today, which is unthinkable in this world. And it’s not just talking about that; one needs to do something about that." Under her aegis, Versace is working with the Council of Fashion Designers of America on a scholarship and mentoring programme to help young LGBTQ+ students and creatives enter the fashion industry, alongside supporting an initiative with the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Donatella sees her work with these charities as a connection to the legacy of Gianni, who was unashamed to express himself and spoke openly about who he chose to love at a time when many gay designers were forced to linger in the closet.

For Donatella, Versace isn’t a brand name – it’s her family name. Any talk of her tenure as creative director of the label is tinged with sadness; she isn’t counting the years of her role, but rather the years since her brother died. Yet, Gianni was more than just Donatella’s beloved sibling; working alongside him was, she admits, her "fashion school". "Because, of course, Gianni knew more than me about cutting and tailoring, how to construct a dress," she says. "But I was the one who didn’t want to conform to the rest of fashion. To make a woman sexy– it wasn’t a bad thing." It’s fair to say, definitively, that Donatella Versace was more than a muse – if you’re looking for a label, I’d suggest powerhouse.