LA DOLCE VITA

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Reggio di Calabria, the southern Italian port city where Gianni Versace came of age, isn't the sort of place where enviably tasteful women nibble on lunch and devour the most recent issues of Vogue. A small city with a rich Greco-Roman heritage, it has become increasingly downtrodden during the past decades. Growing up there in the 1950s and '60s, Versace witnessed the miserable postwar poverty that filled the streets, but could find elegance in the turquoise Strait of Messina that lay just beyond them. His was a city where Calabrian Mafiosi thrived in all their cheap glamour and children once passed the hours in ancient ruins. Versace's family home neighbored the remains of a Greek temple.

If geography is destiny, then Reggio di Calabria was a fitting birthplace for the Italian designer who built a $1 billion fashion empire on the notion that there should be no barriers between the worlds of high culture and low, no dividing line between the aesthetics of refinement and ostentation. He finished off his splendidly cut couture gowns (costing $20,000-plus) with accoutrements of denim and plastic. During his abbreviated life Versace designed costumes for several operas produced at Milan's fabled La Scala, and outfitted the cast of Miami Vice. He took stately villas and compounds in Milan, Lake Como, Miami Beach and New York City and refurbished them into homes unimaginably ornate.

Versace drew from varied universes in his acquaintances too. His undepletable pool of celebrity friends included everyone from choreographer Maurice Bejart to Princess Diana (with whom he spoke once a week), from Madonna to Lisa Marie Presley. A number of years ago he happily accepted a lunch invitation from Mike Tyson, a longtime Versace fan. At his dinner parties he often liked to have fun with seating arrangements, once placing Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis next to a Milanese soccer goalie.

It was ultimately through his very visible links to the grand and the fallen, the fabulous and semifabulous, that Versace left his most significant cultural legacy. The first designer to use known magazine models at his runway shows in the early '80s and the first to shrewdly place celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone in the front rows of his audiences, Versace fused the cults of celebrity and style. The spectacles he created, replete with the blaring sounds of rockers like George Michael and clothes that were just as loud, earned the designer all the publicity they were meant to garner. As a result, he hastened the transformation of fashion from a rarefied interest of the elite into a object of bottomless mass-cultural fascination. Remember, there weren't always MTV style awards or accountants who can identify the faces in Harper's Bazaar or makeup artists with best-selling coffee-table books. "Versace," notes Vogue's European editor-at-large Hamish Bowles, "moved fashion into the public domain in the most strident way."

Gianni Versace began his career as a tailor and showman while a young boy in his mother's Reggio di Calabria dress salon. While his father Antonio made a living selling appliances, his mother Francesca helped support the family as a dressmaker for the city's small coterie of well-to-do women. Versace made puppets from the remnants he found on the floor of his mother's workroom. At nine he designed his first dress, a one-shoulder velvet gown. Skipping design school, he worked for his mother until he was 25 and in 1972 moved to Milan to design for a series of then prestigious Italian labels.

In 1978 he launched his first collections for men and women. By the early '90s he had added not only couture and lower-priced bridge lines to his ready-to-wear business but also leather goods, fragrances and home furnishings. Indeed, success came so quickly that he found it difficult over the years to escape rumors that he was Mob-funded--talk, however, that has never been substantiated. After London's Independent on Sunday made such claims in a 1994 article, Versace won a $150,000 libel-suit settlement and a public apology from the newspaper. Still, even after the alleged serial killer Andrew Cunanan was fingered as the prime suspect in Versace's murder, rumors persisted that the designer had been gunned down by the Mafia.

Versace's empire triumphed in part because the designer maintained an unwavering sense of what he was selling: a fantasy life of opulent sensuality. Versace's omnipresent advertising campaigns--and the series of mondo Versace picture books he produced--often paid cartoonish homage to classical mythology, featuring sculpted male models voguing as gods and women portraying invincible (and big-haired) warrior princesses.

In his clothes, Versace reveled in glaring colors, hallucinogenic prints and plunging necklines as his archrival, the great minimalist Giorgio Armani, seduced the world in neutrals. In his fall 1992 collection, Versace unveiled an array of leather bondage dresses. He never cared if his clothes were considered lewd. "There were no apologies for Versace's fashion," notes designer Marc Jacobs. "No apologies for something being too gold or too sexy or too overt. 'Too' was not a problem." What made Versace's look so distinctive was the sense that the clothes were poured over the body. "Fashion is so often about propriety and decorum," explains Richard Martin, director of the Costume Institute at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Versace is so important because he put sexuality first. Designers have always looked to the street; he looked to the streetwalker. He was transfiguring the prostitute as Toulouse-Lautrec did in the late 1880s."

His undying attraction to the seamier side of dressing up came first and foremost from his beloved younger sister, the perennially bronzed Donatella, whose unabashed love of leggings, miniskirts and stilettos inspired Versace all his life. The two were inseparable as kids--and as grownups, sometimes speaking on the phone a dozen times a day or more. Versace placed so much faith in his sister's Vegas-meets-Biarritz sensibility that in the early '90s, he gave Donatella (who shares a major stake in his company along with their brother Santo) complete creative control of his twentysomething-targeted Versus line.

It was Donatella who persuaded Versace to visit her in 1991 in her favorite new sunbathing spot, Miami Beach. On his way to Cuba with his longtime companion Antonio D'Amico, he obliged his sister with a stop at the Hotel Fontainebleau, where she was vacationing with her husband Paul Beck, a former Versace model, and the couple's two children, Allegra and Daniel. The designer hired a driver to show him around the area, and he wound up in the then not yet trendy section of South Beach. "I sat in a bar and started to look around at the people," he later told TIME. "I said to my friend, 'Why do we have to go to Cuba? It's fun here.' It was love at first sight."

In the next couple of years, he spent $6.6 million (and an estimated $32 million in renovations) on the two Ocean Drive buildings that were transformed into his Casa Casuarina residence, where his life last week came to an abrupt end. Versace's arrival brought a much hyped infusion of glamour to South Beach. Soon after he started spending time there, it was hard to stroll down Ocean Drive without stumbling upon a fashion shoot. Chic restaurants popped up, and so did more and more modeling agencies, as aspiring cover girls and boys started hanging around Versace, hoping to be discovered. (Every now and then he'd pick a face out of the crowd and dole out a contract.)

Versace relished the scene he helped create. "He wanted to be where the buzz was," says Bowles, a visitor to Casa Casuarina. "He loved the excitement." Versace saw Miami Beach, where he spent, on and off, a number of months a year, as a frothy pink-drink antidote to his life in Italy, where he divided his time between his three-story 17th century palazzo in Milan and a 17-room villa on Lake Como. "For reading Proust I have my house on Lake Como," he said in 1993. "Here, in Miami Beach, I don't want another monastery to live in. I want a place to read Truman Capote."

On whatever continent he found himself, Versace seemed to generate the kind of social whirl that in fact might have appealed to Capote. In South Beach, guests filtered in and out of Versace's media room, where the music video of the moment would be playing--often the work of a pop star in attendance. He didn't create his palatial showplaces to let them sit empty. He loved playing host and entertainer, lending the Lake Como villa to Bruce Springsteen and his former wife Julianne Phillips for their 1985 honeymoon, giving impromptu dinner parties for friends passing through Miami and often opening his South Beach doors for charity events.

Yet Versace in mid-life, it turns out, was a tempered bon vivant, a high-glitz homebody. After occasional major bashes, like the New Year's Eve soirees he threw for the past two years in South Beach (where guests included everyone from Calvin Klein to Rosie O'Donnell), he might decamp to a gay club called the Warsaw Ballroom with a small group of friends to watch male dancers perform. But he was known as a quiet purveyor of the scene, a man who avoided drugs and heavy drinking. "I once proposed that we go out," recalls his friend Janie Samet, a French fashion writer, "and he remarked, 'You can go to a restaurant if you want, but things are always better at home.'"

As much as he loved dining a casa with loved ones, the fun usually wrapped up early, says his friend of a dozen years, Italian publishing mogul Leonardo Mondadori, "Gianni was not one to gab until 2:30 in the morning. At 11 o'clock it was over, and everyone went home." When he was away from South Beach and his sister Donatella--the family's most energetic social animal--would hold court, Versace might call the staff to make sure there weren't too many guests milling about. Sometimes the butler would frantically motion everyone to quiet down.

All in all, Versace was considered by many to be, as Bowles put it, "an unbelievably thoughtful person." He would, adds Bowles, "always remember who people's kids were, always think to ask 'How's your mother, Ann?" Moreover, Versace was known as one of the rare fashion designers who actively encouraged up-and-comers. Along with Donatella, he showed his support for the young designer Jacobs by attending the crucial debut of the line he launched following his departure from Perry Ellis. When Versace spotted the work of Todd Oldham early in the young Texan's career, Versace called a handful of European fashion editors and asked them to check it out. "In our industry this is highly unheard of," says Oldham. "He saw my work and told people. I was really flabbergasted because he was such a design hero of mine."

Versace enjoyed sharing his love of art with friends. Before he died, he had completed renovating his fourth home, a town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side that was to serve as a museum for his mind-boggling collection of Picassos, Lichtensteins and Schnabels. Interview magazine editor Ingrid Sischy last saw Versace in Florence just a few weeks ago, at a hectic moment between the unveiling of his fall menswear line and his couture collection. But he dropped everything, she recalls, picked her up at her hotel one morning and took a small group to Ravenna for two days just to show them the city's Byzantine churches.

During the past couple of years, Versace had started to allow himself more such breaks from hard work. This fall he was scheduled to begin shooting a new Woody Allen movie in which he would have played himself. Versace survived a bout of rare ear cancer recently, and he was determined to spend more time in respite. As he told a friend not too long ago, "When you are cured of something like that, you feel you have been pardoned, granted clemency. It changes your view of life." Tragically, he had little time to live by his new vision.

--With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Milan, Cathy Booth/Miami Beach and Georgia Harbison/New York

With reporting by JORDAN BONFANTE/MILAN, CATHY BOOTH/ MIAMI BEACH AND GEORGIA HARBISON/NEW YORK