The Politics of Italian Fashion: Versace as 'New Money'

While the fashion house was based in Milan, none of the Versaces had particularly liked the city.

They had come from Italy’s deep south, a languid, backward, mafia-ridden region that was the antithesis of the ascetic, hardworking north, where meridionali, or southerners, were regarded with suspicion and prejudice.

Gianni had always found Milan a sad city, with its brown and gray palette and pinched, conservative people.

Like many southerners who moved north in search of opportunity, Gianni respected the Milanese’s Calvinist work ethic, but he nonetheless escaped the city every Thursday evening to spend the weekends on Lake Como.

Donatella, with her bleached blond hair and loud clothing, felt that the snobby Milanese looked down on her.

Santo also appreciated the opportunity Milan offered him but resented the antisouthern sentiment so common in the city.

Indeed, Milan’s old-line families had never entirely welcomed the Versaces, with their rough manners, southern accents, and flashy lifestyles. From the time of the postwar economic boom, many Milanese harbored a deep antipathy for southerners like the Versaces, regarding them as corrupt wastrels who lived off the industriousness of the north.

By the time of Gianni’s death, this sentiment had found a powerful outlet in the Northern League, a new political party that advocated outright secession from the rest of Italy.

To blue-blood Milanese, Gianni’s designs, so popular with the nouveau riche that had emerged with the Milan stock market booms of the 1980s and 1990s, were vulgar and in poor taste.

Giorgio Armani, with his cerebral suits, northern heritage, and more discreet homosexuality, was far more acceptable.

So, too, was Miuccia Prada, who came from an upstanding Milanese family that had made leather traveling trunks for the city’s upper crust since before the war.

But the city’s haute bourgeoisie, with their double-barreled names and their preference for the restrained elegance of French couture, couldn’t fathom the popularity of Gianni’s clothes.

Who would dare buy those outfits? All that money the company made, they whispered, could only have come from the mafia.

'House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival' by Deborah Ball https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00362XLH8