Donatella Versace, sister of the late Gianni Versace, is the creative director of Versace.

The company, based in Milan, is fully owned by the Versace family: Allegra Beck Versace, Donatella’s daughter, owns 50 percent; Santo Versace, Donatella’s brother, owns 30 percent; and Donatella owns 20 percent. Like all other independent family fashion companies, it is being forced to rethink its strategy as demand for luxury goods suffers.  The company said in May 2009 that first-quarter revenue had fallen 13 percent from a year earlier, though it still had managed “a positive net result.”

Giancarlo di Risio, chief executive of Gianni Versace since 2004, is expected to hand in his resignation at a board meeting in Milan on June 5, 2009, after having reportedly clashed with Donatella Versace. Versace, under strain from declining sales, has been buffeted for weeks by reports suggesting that Mr. di Risio was on the way out.

Ms. Versace began working with her brother Gianni in the mid-1970s. Her brother was shot to death on July 15, 1997, outside his Miami home, and she has been designer of the Versace label for more than a decade.

Mr. Versace, the designer of ornately decorated and sometimes outrageously revealing gowns, was a driving force in the glamorizing of fashion during the era of supermodels and celebrity designers. Ms. Versace largely ditched her brother’s trademark baroque prints. “I had to get away from that,” she told The New York Times in 2008. “If I do prints, everyone will compare me to Gianni.”

Working with intense, solid swaths of color, she has concocted a new sex-symbol vocabulary with a bracing, modern edge. She has even borrowed a swatch from Giorgio Armani, creating some rather salacious looks in, of all things, beige.

“Don’t call it beige,” she corrected. “Blond.”

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