In this FRONTPAGE story, Liana Satenstein sat with the platinum blonde legend to discuss the arc and endurance of her brand, social media, and the powersuit.
Donatella Versace calls me “sexy.” We are more than 4,000 miles apart. She’s in Milan and I’m in Brooklyn, marooned in the sterile limbo of video conferencing; visible from the neck up, a white wall in the background. In honor of our call, I’m wearing a vintage Versace top splattered with nuclear blues and greens. It’s a V-neck, which would be great if I had cleavage, but I don’t. Sexy? Me? Where is she getting this?
I follow up with a self-deprecating joke. “Hopefully I’m smart, too!”
Donatella doesn’t flinch. She responds earnestly and genuinely, “You are sexy and smart. This is what I say.”
And maybe Donatella is on to something. Now that she’s said it, I do actually kind of feel megawatt sensual today, which makes me feel… you got it: smart.
Donatella clearly also feels sexy and smart. The historically obsessive designer who never leaves an eyelid unsmoked is the master of presentation. She doesn’t do a Zoom call like everyone else — badly lit, chin jutting into the camera — but the big-screen Versace way. On the call, her whole office is visible. It vaguely reminds me of where I used to get laser hair removal, on 39th Street and 6th Avenue; discount hair removal offices are always trying to recreate an air of new-money opulence that comes with being hairless. And why not? It’s fun.
Donatella, the don of Italian design and international glam, is elegantly positioned at her office table with her arms crossed. She’s wearing a black sweater from the Fall/Winter 2022 collection that’s covered in three-dimensional spikes. “We used to do this in the ’90s with leather,” she says. “So I’m doing it with knitwear.” Within the Versace universe, this top could almost be called minimalist, except that the Versace version of minimalism manages to also be incredibly maximalist, by way of its silhouette. The designer, Donatella assures me, is one of the only in the world who can make such a severe conical effect with knitwear. She says, “We need unique people like this,” and then hits me with: “Minimalists have minimal ideas. I think they go together. If you are minimalist, you have minimal ideas in your brain, so I’m maximalist.”
Between the obsidian black of the sweater, the white of the room, and her epic bleached-blonde hair (her brother Gianni started peroxiding it for her at 11 and a half), I feel like I’m in some slick Gattaca-meets-Versace-verse. Ms. Versace is powerful and in control. “I usually wear black and I wear heels. First, because I’m short, and second because you can’t hide your femininity,” she says, adding, “You can’t be afraid of our femininity to be heard.” (Today, she confesses, she’s wearing flat boots.) Despite her abridged shoe height, Donatella is the best advertisement for Versace’s towering heels and tight black pants (her signature) because, well, she is Versace. Donatella is the sexy and smart one!
Sexy and smart. Those are the two words Donatella repeats throughout our interview. They resonate with me. There’s a reason why I feel like Cindy and Naomi in this shirt that I can’t even fill out. Versace, both vintage and new, has a look-at-me factor that begets confidence. With Versace, there is no “clothes make the woman”; nor does the man make the clothes. A cinch of the waist here, a skirt that hits right above the knee artfully there, and the wearer metamorphosizes into a Versace goddess, thanks to pieces in tune with the body and its power.
Donatella’s warmth coupled with her power is why so many people, and in particular, women, have gravitated toward her since the very beginning. Who doesn’t like a woman who knows her worth but doesn’t talk your ear off about it? Donatella gets the job done. She’s a shower not a teller. Let’s not forget how she came to be the face of the brand: It was 1997, and after her beloved brother Gianni Versace was tragically murdered — shot by a crazed serial killer at his Miami mansion — Donatella was installed as the head of the brand. There were countless industry murmurings: Could the house survive sans Gianni? Donatella almost canceled the spring ’98 collection but pushed on instead. “Can you imagine me going into the boardroom with only men sitting at the table?” she says. “I had to think better than them, not like them.”
A longtime face of Versace, Dua Lipa agrees. “The strength and resilience she brings has made the brand what it is today,” she tells Highsnobiety over email. “One that stays true to its heritage while embracing evolution, not fear.”
In almost every major Versace profile from the late ’90s and early ’00s, writers note that the designer’s luxuriously manicured appearance and bleached Samson hair functions as armor for the very shy person beneath it. “Donatella is actually rather a shy woman who has put herself out there as the embodiment of the most theatrical and exaggerated side of the Versace label while taking refuge behind that familiar blonde mane,” writes Julia Reed in a March 2002 profile for Vogue. The armor was necessary during Donatella’s battle with a cocaine addiction, which she went to rehab for, and all the other hardships and sadnessess made painfully public by the press. And it worked. Donatella successfully took over the brand, becoming the face of it and creating a second-coming for Versace — a feat that has resonated across generations. “I have a deep love and respect for Donatella,” adds Lipa. “She has put so much of herself into Versace, and I think you understand that when you wear the clothes.”
Donatella was never simply a muse but a gamechanger and a confidant within the house of Versace. She took initiative. “It’s not that [Gianni] had me in mind, I imposed myself. Many times he wished I wasn’t there! Because he was challenging me to be good. Actually everybody was trying to challenge me to be powerful,” she says. “He loved challenging [women]. Gianni respected women so much. He had so much respect for women. I loved him! Even if he had a lot of powerful women around him, he believed in the power of women, the power of ideas.”
These days, Donatella is making Versace a bit more accessible. She is designing for a whole new era of women, giving each babe their own dose of high-octane ’90s supermodel appeal synonymous with the brand, but in that on-your-terms 2023 way. “I would like the woman who wears Versace to feel more confident, to be sure of herself,” she says. “I try to give the girls some confidence, to be sure of their ideas: ‘I’m a woman, I stand for this, and I don’t change for anybody.’ So this is what I try to convey.”
This is the ultimate allure of this Italian house and the genius of Donatella: A woman’s woman who designs for us to look incredible and powerful, with big shoulders and whittled waists. “When I wear Versace, regardless of how I’m feeling before getting dressed, I’m transformed into this powerful, confident woman,” Lipa says. “I think that energy all stems from Donatella.”
Hopefully, I can do Ms. Versace justice. I’m not taking over the world, but later in the night I’ll leverage some Versace power to attend a fashion wedding. I’ll wear a blazer dress with a highlighter yellow lapel by her late brother Gianni that makes me look like a cross between a dictator and ravishing sexpot. In it, I feel like I can bleed (any) ex-husband dry in court. (I’m really having a Versace day!) The suit is reminiscent of Versace’s Fall/Winter 2023 collection, for which Donatella dug into the archives and came back with rounded shoulders and the structured busts of the Spring/Summer 1995 collection, when her brother was at the helm. Wearing a suit from that collection, Donatella agrees, “You’d win in court.”
While Donatella says she’ll send me a suit from the season, I have to confess that I already do feel almighty in my own vintage Versace piece. It’s a powerful look and makes me feel as though I’m in the leggy cult of the Donatella megawatt glamazons. She has the loyal Gianni-era supermodels on speed dial: Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Helena Christensen, and Carla Bruni. Then there are the celebrities who adore her: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, Chris Lee, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, among others.
She’s managed to capture the red-hot celebrities in every generation. There was J.Lo, who wore the iconic Versace green chiffon to the 2000 Grammys, a garment that was searched so much that it prompted Google Images to be created shortly after in 2001. There was Madonna, who modeled for Gianni and later Donatella — and comforted Donatella at the Versace mansion after her brother’s death. Why does Donatella have such a magnetic pull? Any designer of any house can pony up the moolah for celebrity love, but Donatella’s celebrity draw feels genuine. And, probably because it is. She is warm and personable. (She did call me “sexy” — how much more flattering can you get?)
This warmth trickles through her Instagram (@donatella_versace) and TikTok (simply @Versace), where she leaves comments that she drafts herself and connects to the latest generation of fashion-hungry fans. “Goddess, I love you,” she writes to Lipa on a post of herself in a Versace campaign. Another go-to is “donatella VERSACE💜” — a phrase that’s become a legendary micro meme on TikTok and Instagram, and is used as terminal punctuation: donatella VERSACE💜(period).
Donatella is also loyal and keeps her girls close, working with them repeatedly over the years. There’s Madonna, who appeared in her Spring/Summer 2015 campaign. And just a few years ago, Lopez famously walked in the Spring/Summer 2020 show in a recreation of that palm print Internet-breaking Grammys dress. Gaga has dressed for Donatella… many times.
Most recently, the designer collaborated with Lipa, who has appeared in the Italian house’s campaigns and walked the runway. In May, Lipa presented the pre-fall collection at Cannes during the star-packed film festival titled “La Vacanza,” which she co-designed with Ms. Versace. Often, a designer collaboration can seem like a vacant money grab, sans the soul of the celebrity and offering only their name, but this Versace collection felt like Dua and Donatella to the core. (Imagine the pop star in a tight baby-pink towel dress emblazoned with the Versace logo or a saucy little canvas mule, complete with butterflies — a nod to the Versace ’95 collection.)
Speaking of “La Vacanza,” a glittering necklace from the collection ended up on Taylor Swift for her tour. (In addition to the necklace, Swift wore a bedazzled bodysuit with tassel fringes by Atelier Versace.) Yes, Swift, the guitar industry crooner, became a Versace woman. Sure, Emily Ratajkowski, Dua Lipa, and Irina Shayk — women who ooze the smolder of Versace from their DNA. But Swift? Yes. Donatella transformed her into a femme fatale.
There is also the curious case of Anne Hathaway as the face of the Versace Icons campaign. In a trim, reworked Atelier Versace corset with a two-Medusas medallion at the strap, Donatella morphed the gamine Hollywood darling into a vixen. And she did it again for this year’s Met Gala, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” where she dressed Hathaway in a cream tweed gown that got the searing bombshell treatment, fastened with a slithering stack of gilded safety pins that cut up the torso. Hathaway looked, well, really hot. And not only that: She looked absolutely powerful.
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Another Donatella charm is that she has long been in on the joke of her own deity-like authority and obsessiveness with the brand. She embraces the private jet glam of Versace wholeheartedly and with humor. Who can forget when Maya Rudolph played Donatella on SNL with waist-length bleach-blonde hair, skiing in Switzerland, smoking and surrounded by chiseled men? And at the VH1 Vogue Fashion Awards in ’02, Rudolph appeared in her chain-smoking Donatella character but this time joined by the real Donatella onstage, where they shared a laugh.
More recently, in January of 2023, Donatella appeared on the Versace campaign star Ratajkowski’s podcast “High Low with EmRata.” The duo made an Instagram video announcing the episode in which Ratajkowski introduces her as “Donatella Versace.” Donatella jokingly corrects her: It’s “the Donatella Versace.” And when Doja Cat pronounces the brand’s name during a Tiktok interview, Versace stops her. “Sorry, it’s Versa-cheh, not Versa-chee.”
The ultimate power of Donatella is the combination of her ideas and her execution. It’s an old-school, old-world maestro flex in which the goal is to simply do the job as if there were no other option. She cites her mother as an inspiration, a seamstress who went on to create her own business. “My mother, she was a very, very powerful woman on her own. She worked so hard. She did her own business and with no help from anybody,” says Donatella. “That’s my example: looking at my mother.” Donatella is designing for this era of women who do the same — who work hard — and who deserve a piece that broadcasts her power the way her suits accentuate the shoulders and tuck in at the waist. Perhaps this is why, for Donatella, the suit is the sexiest look there is. “I think today what I want to convey with the suit is power. Wear a suit and go get what you want. You are gonna get it. Be powerful.”
Of course, there’s the suit and then there’s the Versace suit. “You always need the sexiest part… that is the waist. You need to feel the difference.”
Before we part, I ask Donatella — the transformer of mere humans into sumptuous red carpet sirens or suited-and-booted negotiators in the boardroom — what she keeps in her bag. “Lip gloss,” she says. “Not a mirror, just a lip gloss and a brush.”
Not a mirror?
“No mirror. You look once in the morning, that’s it!”
What’s more powerful than that?
