Fashion family saga that takes on the gossips

House of Versace
The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival
By Deborah Ball
Crown Publishing, $26

To outsiders, the fashion world can seem like a fictional creation. Reports of its denizens’ doings are so unbelievable, they must be works of the imagination.

That is why – Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames aside – fashion novels so often fail to convince. Their authors can never quite bring themselves to go as far as the truth would demand, because they are convinced readers will never buy the plotline. The Devil Wears Prada, for example, was a much better movie than book, mostly because the actress Meryl Streep is not afraid of extremes.

All of this makes fashion a gift to non-fiction. Most of the time, the clothes showcased on the runways, baroque as they may seem, are nothing compared with the stories behind them. This is particularly true of Versace, the fashion label launched in 1978 by a triumvirate of siblings from Calabria, in the very south of Italy: Gianni, the designer; his older brother Santo, the chief executive; and their little sister Donatella, the muse.

Versace was spectacularly successful early on, when its embrace of colour and riotous pattern, as well as its skill at walking the line between elegance and vulgarity, made it the sartorial voice of 1980s celebrity culture. But Gianni’s murder in 1997 by a stalker brought everything to a crashing halt.

Although the brand has gone on, with Donatella as creative director and her 23-year-old daughter, Allegra, as the main shareholder, the tale is soap-operatic in its highs and lows: sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, not to mention celebrities, Picassos, death and diamonds – they are all there. It is little wonder that since Gianni’s death reams of newsprint and glossy coffee-table books have been given over to the subject.

The latest entrant to the field is House of Versace, by Deborah Ball, a Wall Street Journal reporter who covered luxury goods in the late 1990s. Although the “untold story” promised by the subtitle seems a stretch, the author’s argument for it is simple: this is the first Versace biography written with the co-operation of both Santo and Donatella. The possibility of fresh information is tantalising.

After all, rumours have swirled round Versace-the-company since its debut. As Ball points out, there was gossip that the Versaces, who were born into postwar deprivation, were backed by the Italian mafia.

How else, people asked, to explain the siblings’ ability to fund a business that “grew by double-digits” for the first 10 years, ultimately selling in 300 boutiques globally and 4,000 department stores 20 years after its inception? Gianni’s murder only exacerbated the issue, prompting more gossip about possible enemies and his sexuality; later came murmurs about Donatella’s drug use and that Allegra was anorexic.

The book largely functions as a riposte to such whispers. Ball states that Santo has denied any connection with organised crime and that she has seen the accounts (courtesy of Santo) and is satisfied that the family’s statements about being fully self-funded are justified. She also details Donatella’s substance problems, including Donatella’s description of her stint in rehab and her daughter’s health issues.

This opportunity to present their side of the story was, presumably, the family’s motivation in speaking to Ball. Portraits of the surviving siblings are notably sympathetic, with Donatella coming off as a classic Italian mama, albeit a super-glamorous one, and Santo as a hard-working family man. Both seem merely victims of a terrible situation. Yet the result is to make the book a very specific family saga, and to limit its potential as a prism for understanding the fashion industry.

The house of Versace became global almost at the same time as the modern luxury industry. It was when Bernard Arnault bought the company that owned Dior in 1985, starting what would become the largest luxury group in the world, LVMH. And yet Ball refers to the larger business of style primarily in terms of its effects on the siblings themselves: Santo’s flirtation with the idea of joining Prada to create a major Italian conglomerate to rival LVMH; Donatella’s substance abuse-driven lack of fiscal responsibility at a time when fashion suddenly became accountable to shareholders.

Ultimately, Ball wastes the opportunity to make a bigger point about Versace as the last example of a certain kind of luxury company, just as she fails to extrapolate from the clearly dysfunctional relationship of the siblings to tell the bigger story of why Italian fashion was transformed from a collection of family-run companies to professionally managed entities.

As a result, the material of the book is meaty, but the message is as lightweight as one of Versace’s signature chiffon mini-dresses.

Vanessa Friedman is the FT’s fashion editor