Gianni's World

Rising from his mother's shop to the pinnacle of fashion, Versace built a lavish empire with a mix of rock iconoclasm and Hollywood glitz. Inside the making of a legend.

NOTHING ABOUT Gianni Versace seemed right in the last few years. His collections - pencil skirts, fitted jackets - had become dangerously demure for the man who embodied frock-and-roll fashion. The designer himself didn't look healthy, either. He never seemed to rebound from a rare cancer in his left ear, which doctors treated in 1993. Some fashion vultures speculated that he had AIDS. Versace's billion-dollar company, which was expected to go public this year, had been put on an austerity budget. His brother, concerned about Versace's runaway personal spending, reportedly even took away his credit cards. But at his haute couture show in Paris this month, Versace found the fizz again. There were shimmering mesh dresses that harked back to his breakthrough metallic sheaths. He unpacked the '80s shoulder pads, too. The audience at the Ritz - Leonardo DiCaprio, Rupert Everett, Demi Moore in a strapless pink minidress - whooped when the designer took his bow. Versace basked, briefly. ""Oh, I'm already done with this,'' he told actress Rita Wilson after the show. ""I'm already excited about the next thing.''

He never got to the next thing. Eight days later, Versace, 50, was shot to death on the steps of his opulent Miami Beach, Fla., palazzo. Since his breakthrough in the early '80s, Versace had become an icon - the creator of an edgy chic that rolled Hollywood glamour, rock-and-roll iconoclasm and playfully exuberant fashion into one glitzy, sexually charged package. But Versace's universe could be treacherous, too, even for a man who appeared to keep his personal and business dealings within his close-knit family. There were, for example, never-proven rumblings about connections to the mafia. And Versace was an architect of a gay jet-set culture whose dark side may have done him in.

In the wake of his death, friends took pains to explain that while Versace lived and died at the epicenter of the fast gay world, he rarely ventured into its most dangerous depths. Though he had been a regular at New York's notorious Studio 54 during the rollicking 1970s, it was, they say, unlike the '90s Versace to haunt bars or sleep around. He didn't even want to go to his own New Year's Eve party a few years ago, which was thrown by friends at the Warsaw Ballroom, one of Miami's hottest gay clubs. But Versace's stature, his occasional forays into local nightspots, his private parties and his lavish consumption helped create the South Beach gay scene - a scene that apparently attracted Andrew Cunanan. When some of Versace's friends wanted to mourn the designer last week, they gathered at the same Warsaw Ballroom, where there was a moment of silence just before the Amateur Strip Contest.

Versace always knew what he would do with his life. His mother, Francesca, was a successful dressmaker in the southern Italian town of Reggio di Calabria (his father ran a methane-supply company), and Versace spent his childhood playing in her shop. Though he longed to study music, his mother put him to work apprenticing for her after high school. When he was only 23, a Milanese clothing manufacturer who heard about Versace's work called his mother's store and asked if he would come design up north. Versace took an all-night train and never looked back. In 1978 he put out his first ready-to-wear designs under his own name. At his death, Versace had 301 boutiques around the world, a net worth of about $900 million and loyal clients ranging from Princess Diana to Courtney Love.

Versace was one of the first to understand that cultivating a larger-than-life image mattered as much as the clothes he cut. In part, that insight came from his fascination with pop culture. He taught himself English by listening to pop songs - he loved music videos and TV gossip shows - so it seemed natural to use music and stars to attract attention to his work. He hired the most famous models - Jerry Hall, Iman and later Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss - and sent them down the runway in packs, strutting to blaring music by Eric Clapton, Elton John and the other rock stars he befriended. Combined with the sex appeal and lush sensibility that oozed from his Mediterranean upbringing, the over-the-top Versace look quickly spread from clothes to boutiques to housewares.