48 Hours With Donatella Versace

Outside Versace’s headquarters on Via Gesu in Milan on a Thursday in June, two days before the label’s spring/summer 2018 men’s wear show, a beefy handler walks Donatella Versace’s Jack Russell Terrier, Audrey, out the door. Through the entrance, the other side of a plate-glass door, a sunny courtyard is littered with a clutch of green wrought-iron tables and chairs — a bit like Versace is throwing a summer barbecue in her backyard. It’s actually the set-up for that forthcoming runway show. It’s so domestic, so normal, that you could forget that Casa Versace is actually Palazzo Versace, an 18th-century edifice whose impressive, Medusa-studded facade stretches from the five-star Four Seasons hotel to the end of the block. It’s also easy to forget that it’s home not to any singular person, but to a multimillion dollar fashion empire. (Donatella Versace, the doyenne of the label, doesn’t actually reside there, but she does have a fabulously appointed apartment a floor below the studios, for entertaining.) Donatella Versace turned 62 a month ago. She looks 20 years younger, has the energy of a 16-year-old and is generally fabulous. She’s especially engaging and fabulous when she’s in a great mood, which she seems to be right now. “I am very relaxed,” she purrs. She’s in the inner sanctum of Versace — the aforementioned apartment, all molasses-colored marble and polished wood — reclining on a velvet sofa in front of a pietra dura table, sipping from a crystal tumbler etched with Versaceish baroque motifs. “I started to put the collection together on Tuesday. You know I’m like a machine; They tell me to do this by this day, I do it!” she laughs. Read more at The New York Times.