Gianni Versace
A designer who made the vulgar beautiful
The Italian designer Gianni Versace would have turned 75 on December 2nd.
© Angelo Deligio / Mondadori via Getty Images
The designer Gianni Versace would have turned 75 on December 2nd, 2021 – a look back at a life full of colors, shapes and fantasy.
His mother’s tailoring studio was his playground, later it would become his workplace: Giovanni Maria “Gianni” Versace tied the first threads of his design career at a young age and spun them further into fabrics from which fashion dreams were born. They burst for many on July 15, 1997, when the Italian was shot by call boy Andrew Cunanan in front of his villa in Miami. He was only 50 years old. On December 2nd, 2021, the “master of the neo-baroque” would have been 75 years old. A tribute to the man who made the vulgar beautiful.
You can make what you want of the Versace designs. For some, the designs are too shrill, too loud, too obscene. Others celebrate the signature geometric shapes and bold colors that Gianni Versace loved so much. He created a stark contrast to the purist Giorgio Armani (87), who stands for ascetic elegance and strict restraint in Italian fashion. His suits gave Richard Gere (72) coolness in “A Man for Certain Hours” and reflected the ambition of Leonardo DiCaprio (46) in “Wolf of Wall Street”. Versace’s designs aren’t cool, they’re hot, not ambitious, but arrogant – that’s what defines them. Gianni Versace once said: “Why not look bold? Why not sexy? Why not vulgar? Conventions can be cracked like oysters.”
Versace goes unusual ways with fashion made of metal
Versace did this by bringing together what didn’t belong together: silk and jute, leather and crepe de chine, denim and brocade, chain mail and latex. In 1982 he developed the metal mesh Oroton, which consists of interlinked metal disks. Models wearing creations made from this material looked like modern statues with sex appeal.
It is not his clothes, but the women who are in them, sexy: “If I could design sexy clothes, I would be a rich man,” he explained. The best example of this is actress Elizabeth Hurley (56), who wore the famous “safety pin dress” at the premiere of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” (1994). This creation by Gianni Versace made her famous almost overnight. “Gianni made this dress for a woman who is very confident and not afraid to break the rules. Liz embodied all of this in an extraordinary way,” explains Sister Donatella “Harper’s Bazaar” Looking back, why her brother’s creation caused such a stir back then. By the way, Hurley’s son Damian (19) recreated the famous dress several years later. Instead of a dress, the iconic needles adorned a jacket, as he showed on Instagram.
The fall of Versace after Gianni’s death
Almost 30 years later, the Nadel-Dress Vogue boss Anna Wintour (72) would probably only elicit a twitch in the corner of her mouth. Back then, however, the unconventional Versace design brought a breath of fresh air to the catwalks of Paris, London, Milan and New York. But with the tragic death of Gianni, the barometer in the Versace fashion house turned on storm. Sister Donatella, creative director to this day, stumbled in the management of the group. Boutiques were closed, the haute couture shows canceled, the designs mocked. It wasn’t enough to combine bright colors, load the fabrics with tons of rhinestones and put everything over Naomi Campbell (51).
In the end, with the tragic death of Gianni Versace, a piece of creativity, courage and glamor was lost and could only be brought back to a limited extent by the “Versace girl” Donatella. One can only hope that the master is right: “Fashion dies every day and is then reborn.”