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ROME - The news has long been splashing about on the web, but now it is official: Allegra Versace, the 20-year-old daughter of Donatella and heiress of half the Versace empire, has anorexia.
This week Donatella and her estranged partner, Paul Beck, the father of her two children, did what they could to contain the rumours, to shut off the latest gusher of Versace gossip before it blew out of control.
"Our daughter, Allegra, has been battling anorexia, a very serious disease, for many years," they said in a statement released in New York by a company spokesman.
"She is receiving the best medical care possible to help overcome this illness and is responding well."
After months in which the fashion industry has done everything in its power to deny any connection between the skeletal models on which its designers hang their works and eating disorders, anorexia has come home.
No one who has had anything to do with an anorexia sufferer could do anything other than wish the Versaces all the luck in the world. But to those who have only learnt of the illness at a distance, it may seem a bizarre, self-inflicted condition.
As the Versaces have discovered at first hand, there is nothing remotely trivial or laughable about anorexia.
Just ask the parents of Luisel Ramos, the 22-year-old Uruguayan model who died at a fashion show in August last year after suffering a fatal heart attack thought to be the result of anorexia. Or the family of Ana Carolina Reston Marcan, the Brazilian catwalk queen who died only three months later in a Sao Paulo hospital.
Obsessive fear of gaining weight is the dominant pathology; voluntary starvation, often aided by vomiting, purging and diet medicine, can continue for years, destroying the constitution and causing osteoporosis in up to 50 per cent of cases, as well as weakening of the heart and causing immune dysfunction.
In 10 per cent of cases the victim dies. Instead of seeing their child grow up, parents can find themselves locked into the nightmare of a deathbed vigil.
Allegra Versace has had far too much in her young life - too much money, too much fame, glamour, excess, attention, loss. Now something in her is thrusting the world away, shutting out all nourishment. Or maybe it's not that complicated. Maybe she just wanted to be as thin as a supermodel, and it got out of hand.
She was born in Milan in 1986 of the marriage between Donatella and Beck, one of Donatella's brother Gianni's favourite American models.
Little Allegra grew up in the midst of the fashion world's most extraordinary cast of characters.
The Versaces are identified with Milan, but Gianni and Donatella were born and raised in the far south of Italy, in Reggio Calabria, only moving north for their university studies.
Allegra's good fortune was that Gianni was besotted with her.
"My children were his children," Donatella told New York Magazine last year. "He was always with Allegra." Gianni called her "my little princess" and the affection was reciprocated. Her parents might have split, her young life was bobbing about on the crazy oceans of fashion, but at least she had Zio Gianni's love. But then in 1997, the founder of the firm was shot dead on the steps of his villa in Florida.
Yet Gianni was true to her in death as in life. Ignoring the more obvious claims of his sister, Donatella, and brother, Santo, both involved in running Versace, he chose instead to bequeath 50 per cent of it to Allegra, to inherit when she turned 18.
Donatella has protected Allegra from the media. On 30 June 2004, Allegra came of age and was photographed next to her mother. She had grown from a studious, solemn schoolgirl with her hair in bunches to an equally serious-looking teenager with heavy mascara round her eyes, gold loops in her ears and a black and gold Versace T-shirt.
She had nothing to say about the amazing change in her fortunes, nothing to say about the loss she felt towards her dead uncle, nothing about what she planned to do with the family firm. Allegra did not talk to the press.
Becoming the Versace heiress made no difference to that. With the knowledge we have now that she has been suffering from anorexia "for many years", it's obvious why. It's clear from the photograph that she was already in trouble then: the dreadfully thin legs and arms, the cruel sculpting of jaw and neckline, the disproportionately large head. Allegra was suffering from anorexia when she came into her fortune.
But at age 18 her appearance conformed with the look of the catwalk.
More recent pictures published on the internet show that the process has gone much further: her eyes sunk in their sockets, the flesh of the jaw eaten away. She looks "heartbreakingly shrunken" as Ariel Levy wrote in New York Magazine last year.
Perhaps, however, some good will come out of this. Ever since last September, when Madrid banned unhealthily thin models from the catwalk, the volume of chat about the connection between size zero models and eating disorders has been rising.
Letizia Moratti, the Mayor of Milan, said something should be done and was promptly shot down in flames by the head of Italy's national chamber of fashion, Mario Boselli, who said the Milan models displayed healthy, voluptuous, Mediterranean looks.
The Minister of Youth, Giovanna Melandri, persisted, however, and before Christmas the Government and the chamber signed a "manifesto" requiring models to present a doctor's certificate declaring them to be free from eating disorders before they would be allowed to model in Milan.
But models interviewed in Milan at the recent fashion week said no one had asked them about doctor's certificates. The models were as thin as ever.
Just this week in Rome a 27-year-old model identified only as Ilaria died of anorexia after an illness lasting 10 years. She weighed 35kg at her death - approximately what Allegra Versace weighs today.
It's high time the fashion world woke up.
- INDEPENDENT
