Versace’s wealthy niece haunted by family intrigue, death
Ka-ching.
It’s been 23 years since Versace veered into camp infamy courtesy of Elizabeth Berkley, as Nomi, in the cult trash film Showgirls (“Nice dress,” her boyfriend says to her, in a now-famous scene, to which she blinks back, “Thanks. It’s a Ver-sayce.”), and some 18 years since J.Lo wowed in a barely-there green Versace gown at the Grammys (a moment that — fact! — actually led to the invention of Google Image, because of the monumental online interest in those early days of the aughts).
This week, another milestone lay in the cards for the emphatically Italian brand. A wedding of sorts. To have and to hold: the stunning fashion-world news that American conglomerate-inthe-making Michael Kors is buying Versace for approximately $2.12 billion U.S., a value said to be worth 2.5 times the brand’s current revenue, and also reported to be a primarily cash deal.
It’s another wild juncture in the family-owned brand’s soapy and gothic story — from its fanning of the “su- permodels” phenomenon during the 1990s, to the broad-daylight 1997 slaying of its founder in Miami, as essayed most recently in the Ryan Murphy serial drama, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story.
What occurred to me, first and foremost, after I heard of the sale? That Allegra Versace had just made a cool $1 billion. At a mere 11 years old, the mysterious niece of the late Gianni — and the daughter of his sister, the permatanned, husky-voiced Donatella — Allegra was famously left 50 per cent of Versace, as per uncle’s wishes way back when. She has long loomed like a mute sparrow, or like that perennial princess in the tower: a living embodiment of the “Poor Little Rich Girl” genre of wealthy heiresses, a term first cracked for Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton at the beginning of the last century.
So enigmatic has Allegra been — notwithstanding a battle with anorexia that made the papers a few years ago, and being worth a reported $800 million before this latest acquisition — that when that aforementioned series about Versace premiered on FX, the niece was exactly nowhere to be found.
“Ryan (Murphy) shot a scene with Allegra,” a source told Page Six shortly before its premiere, but at the request of her mother, Donatella, she was scrubbed out of the script.
“If Allegra sees her own photos or sees herself on TV, she loses her mind. She’s got body dysmorphic disorder,” shared a former employee of the fashion brand’s Milan headquarters.
I crossed paths with her once, about a decade ago, at an all-out, over-the-toptop party in New York, to commemorate a fast-fashion collaboration between H&M and Versace. Staying close to her mother at the event, in a glamorama version of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” Donatella certainly seemed to be upholding this thesis when I was granted an audience with her the next day. It was, yes, Allegra who pushed her to get into bed with H&M.
“Let’s do it, let’s do it!” Donatella recalled her daughter saying, going on to tell us that Allegra personified the new-generation customer.
Sitting there at the time, continents away from the southern Italian town of Reggio Calabria where the House of Versace began (and where her late brother famously and fatefully dyed her blond at just 11 years old), Donatella added that her new collaboration was “a family project,” as it’s always been with Versace — which makes this Michael Kors incursion an end of an era indeed.
Discussing her latent anorexia, Allegra once explained, “I was lost in other thoughts, and couldn’t confront reality, with my eyes shielded from everything. Above all, I wanted one thing — to be no one, to not be recognized, not be hunted down.”
“Hunted.” A loaded word coming from a member of this particular clan, impossible as it is to disentangle the 20th century fin de siècle decadence associated with the Medusa-flanked image of Versace as it is to lose the memory of Gianni, gunned down on the steps of his Ocean Drive mansion in 1997.
Indeed, when Allegra made a rare public appearance at the Met Gala in 2016 — appearing alongside her mother and Lady Gaga — she told La Repubblica: “Unlike my mother, I hate celebrity.”
“I don’t tell people my last name,” the now-31-year-old has also previously admitted. A dual citizen of both Italy and the U.S, she more often goes by her father’s name — Paul Beck, the exhusband of Donatella — than she does Versace.
Coddled for most of her life, when she was at UCLA for a stint — acting, French and art history — her mother famously forbade her from getting behind her own wheels, giving her a driver instead.
“Why should she have to park?” balked Donatella when the subject was raised in a joint interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “Who wants to deal with that?” Echoes, no doubt, of a childhood lavished on both Allegra and her younger brother, Daniel (now a musician).
“She was the best-dressed little girl in Milan,” Donatella told Bazaar, with Allegra conceding, “My mom dressed me in silk to go to elementary school. In kindergarten, they sent me home because I couldn’t do fingerpainting in my dress.”
Clearly, she was her uncle’s favourite — something that has reverberated all her life.
Having sold the two places she inherited from Gianni — an Upper East Side townhouse and a manse on Italy’s Lake Como — she’s said to split her time between the family home in Milan and an apartment in Soho, according to the New York Post.
As for romance or even friendships, the one-time employee added, “I’ve never seen her with a man — or a woman. She’s either alone or only with members of her family.”
Richer than she ever probably imagined — especially after this week — she remains in the shadow of a murder. This is a girl who, when Gianni died, responded with a great deal of guilt, even telling her family then that she should have been with him.
As reported by The Guardian, “When the will was read, revealing her huge inheritance, (Allegra) asked, aghast, ‘Why did Uncle Gianni choose me?’”