FRANCESCA VERSACE: She's cut out for it

“Having this name can work for or against you,” says Francesca Versace of the hegemonic fashion dynasty from which she hails. No doubt this is true. But it takes a special act of determination for an up-and-coming designer to drop a family name such as this from her debut collection. The young Versace’s need for people to love her clothes before her name screams from the label she has chosen - Francesca V.

Francesca, 25, daughter of the less flamboyant and more business-minded Versace, Santo, wore £300 designer jeans as a child and ran around with the young, privileged elite in Italy, including Barbara Berlusconi, the daughter of Silvio. But despite the rich-kid upbringing, grandiosity does not seem to feature in her make-up. At the age of 12 she was selling her handmade bracelets on a beach for 5,000 lira (a couple of pounds). When she was rejected for a place to study fashion at Central St Martins College, London, she was devastated but resisted the temptation to dash for familiar ground and work for Versace. Instead, she studied pattern cutting for a year and then reapplied.

Janet Lance Hughes, a college tutor, remembered Francesca showing her sketchbooks at the interview “with an anxious little face looking for the expression on mine.

If she had been a petulant character I might have thought I couldn’t be bothered with this.” She got a place.

Still, it’s not every fledgeling designer who gets her first collection shown at Paris Fashion Week as she will next month. That name is inevitably flinging open doors for her and commentators say that after a difficult few years the future of the company may rest in the new-blood’s hands.

Ten years after her uncle, Gianni Versace, was murdered, she still wears the cross that he gave her. Her interviews are peppered with references to her father who is director of the company and owns 30 per cent of it. (Her aunt, Donatella, owns 20 per cent and Donatella’s daughter, Allegra, 18, 50 per cent).

It is thanks to Santo that German became her first language. He believed that “if you can speak German you can easily learn the other languages”, so he sent his daughter to a German kindergarten in Milan and employed a German nanny. As well as Italian, she also speaks French and English.

In London Francesca hangs out with “a very Euro and Boujis set”, says one of her friends. But everyone who knows her agrees that she takes her designing very seriously and she received unstinting praise from fashion critics for the “professionalism” of her graduation show.

It is said that she has ruled out joining Versace for at least five years. She was once asked if she worried that a future Francesca line could compete with Versace? “No, I wouldn’t worry,” she said, before adding, with a laugh: “But maybe they should.”

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