The Great Fashion Designers (39 page)

Known as the couturier to courtesans, the king of high-class hooker style, ‘the first post-Freudian designer', Versace designed as effectively for theatre and opera as for rock stage, club scene and grand, grand occasion. He almost single-handedly created the supermodels—who would walk down his runway five abreast, arm in arm, and whose legendary status reflected back to enhance the glamour of their creator—and changed the direction of fashion, pushing it towards a high-octane eroticism that earned him a fervent following among the demi-monds of rock stars and expensive groupies and the equally fervent disapproval of many fashion commentators. Judy Rumbold, writing in
The Guardian
in 1993 and describing the collection Versace showed in March 1991, sounded weary:

It was the usual benign smutfest, featuring trademark vertiginous heels, high hair and prohibitively priced tartwear for the rich and famous. The finale, however, was a little bit different. Accompanied by something loud and earnest by George Michael, Versace sent several thousand pounds' worth of liberally oiled Euroflesh—Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista—down the catwalk wearing babydoll mini-dresses in pink, orange and lime. But they weren't just showing off the clothes; here was modelling way beyond the call of duty. Amid much rock-chick posturing and ostentatious miming, there were frenzied whoops and catcalls from a front row boasting the sort of celebrity turn-out that would
have done Harvey Goldsmith proud. Clearly this wasn't just about frocks. This was showmanship, theatre, but most importantly for Versace, the oldest swinger in Milan, it was near as damn it rock n' roll.

While other designers had dressed the stars of Hollywood, Ciné Citta and the music industry, Versace actively sought the connection, not only importing references to the rock scene and its flamboyant, excess-driven, decadent lifestyle but also doing hard-nosed contra deals whereby the celebrities wore the clothes he gave them and turned up to his parties and shop openings in return for the clothes and, in many cases, a generous fee. Rebecca Arnold wrote in 2001:

For his customers, flaunted wealth snubbed its nose at good taste. His advertising was equally extravagant, parading an array of supermodels in various stages of undress, caught in a sundrenched world of Italian villas, furnished with the designer's home-style range of silk cushions, throws and fine china, all embellished with the splendours of classical and Renaissance motifs. His gilt Medusa head logo had gained status during the 1980s, made famous by the rock stars and celebrities who wore the clothes, blurring the lines between the fashion and entertainment industries still further, as each gained credibility from the association. His work provided a fantasy version of decadent excess, which spread from his hugely successful (and widely pirated) designer denim line, to the couture range he developed.

Rumbold's 1993 article was pegged to the opening of the most expensively shopfitted (£11 million) store in the history of London, Versace's many-floored Old Bond Street emporium, which housed all the collections from denim to couture. The shop itself, for which Siena marble in ten different colours, gold leaf by the kilo, craftsmen by the score and a team of fresco painters from La Scala were all flown in and specially accommodated, was breathtakingly expressive of Versace baroque. The morning after the opening party (which Versace attended clad in one of his swimming-pool blue scarf-print silk shirts and tight black jeans), Brenda Polan reported in
The Daily Mail
, ‘While the rock stars and well-kept girlfriends fingered the clothes, the commercial establishment and society rent-a-guest crew as well as the press, gawped uneasily at the rococo décor. Behind me, a voice redolent of Eton and the City murmured, “It's the prettiest laundrette in London.” ‘

Given Versace's origins in Reggio Calabria, the extraordinary speed with which his label was established, his enormous wealth and opulent lifestyle and some of the characters he was seen to hang out with, it is not surprising that rumours of Mafia connections dogged him. After he was assassinated on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion in 1997, the rumour circulated that a dead pigeon had been left beside the body, a well-known symbol, insisted the conspiracy theorists, for a Mafia execution of someone believed to have betrayed the organisation. In the end the police decided the murder was the work of a lone psychotic obsessive, Andrew Cunanan.

Reflecting a decade after his death, Cathy Horyn wrote in
The New York Times
in July 2007, ‘A lot has been lost in the decade since Versace's death in Miami beach—a great talent, most visibly. Try to imagine your wardrobe without the jolt of a print, the vitality of a stiletto, the glamorous bric-a-brac of chains and doodads. This was Versace's doing. His influence melted and spread far beyond the sexual heat of his runway.'

The origin of that sexual heat is not hard to find. He was happy to tell any interviewer. He told Brenda Polan interviewing him for
The Guardian
in 1981, ‘When I was a small boy and my mother would take us to church we had to pass the street of the prostitutes and my mother would say, “Cover your eyes. Do not look at these women. Never look at them.” But, of course, I would look and to me they were so beautiful, so glamorous. They were forbidden. They were attractive. So, of course, they stay in mind. Until now.'

Gianni Versace was one of the most skilled designers in the history of fashion, because he learned the intricacies of structure before he learned to sketch. Even more than Azzedine Alaia, Versace could cut and stitch garments from many pieces so they would reshape the body while remaining
light and comfortable. He could construct skimpy dresses that blatantly revealed more than they concealed yet stayed in place—like the safety-pin dress Elizabeth Hurley wore to the premiere of
Four Weddings and a Funeral
in 1994. His work with glove-soft leather has never really been equalled, and his development of gilded fabrics and a unique patented metal ‘chain-mail', Oroton, allowed him to sculpt garments that satisfied both a fetishist's fantasy and an art lover's pleasure in the most beautiful of baroque decoration. The cerulean blue satin sheath decorated with glass beads and gold studs in curlicues that Diana, Princess of Wales wore to be photographed by Patrick Demarchelier cleverly expressed her latter-day personality: part lady, part saint, part vamp. Garments that embodied within them such conflicting references came easily to him. He was steeped in art history, borrowing motifs from Minoan ceramics, Graeco-Roman imagery (his private collection was museum quality), from statues and coins and the lush and florid decorative style of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the gilded Art Deco. He understood equally well street style and popular culture—particularly rock culture—and the subcultures of sexual deviance with their props of leather and metal, rubber and shiny PVC, straps and studs, buckles and shackles, corsetry, cross-lacing and safety pins.

Richard Martin, who curated the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1997 exhibition just after the designer's death, situated him within a history of fashion which, before it adopted bourgeois values of property and propriety, focused on sensuality. He was the epoch-defining designer of the late 1980s and early 1990s because he restored to high fashion its erotic purpose. Martin wrote, ‘Gianni Versace reorganised the etiquette of apparel. He did not aspire to decorum. Rather, he accorded fashion with desire, substituting the lust of fashion and body concupiscence for the cause of correct behaviour and social calibration.'

Many twentieth-century designers—from Yves Saint Laurent to Jean Paul Gaultier, from Vivienne Westwood to John Galliano—have found vibrant references from street culture and oppositional or marginalised subcultures, but Gianni Versace fixated on and celebrated characters only sketchily referenced by the others, the prostitute and the rent boy. What so many female fashion writers found tedious in Versace's oeuvre was not only his relentless drive to make women look like whores, but the all-pervading and far from subtle homoeroticism which particularly dominated most of the publicity photographs (taken by the premier photographers of the day) and the glossy picture books that issued regularly from the house of Versace.

Yet Versace was not alone in his preoccupation with the sex worker, the fallen woman, the magdalen. She was a heroine of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti, great Italian film directors of Versace's formative years, the years during which an impoverished Italy reconstructed itself. ‘No one,' wrote Martin, ‘had taken the prostitute into fashion as Versace did. In a feat worthy of literature, Versace seized the streetwalker's bravado and conspicuous wardrobe, along with her blatant, brandished sexuality, and introduced them into high fashion. But Versace did not … simply convey the prostitute to the salon and the runway. He did what fashion can do when it finds inspiration on the street. He represented her as glamour, accepting the extreme flirtatiousness of her short skirts, the seduction of shiny cloth and cognate materials, and understanding the motive of sex, but rendering each hyperbolic and expressive, not merely a portrayal of what had existed in the wardrobe of the street … In making his deliberate choice to exalt the streetwalker, Versace risked the opprobrium of the bourgeoisie. As a designer and as a human being, Versace never sought the middle road or the middle class. Rather, he forged a unity between the independent of spirit and will, the rich, the young and the intrepid.'

Although some of the homoerotic images to issue from Versace's private darkroom were often discomfortingly parodic and vulgar, his insistence on showcasing the male as sexual commodity has been seen by some commentators as liberating for both genders. The supermodels on Versace's catwalk so often referenced drag queens ‘doing' Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Tina Turner or Madonna and posed interesting questions about femininity and identity. A generation of young women claimed to be ‘post-feminists' and ‘in control' of their provocative and sluttish sexuality. Rebecca Arnold wrote, ‘Fashion had been growing more playful in its appropriation of references to gay culture since
the 1980s. As fashion shows became more grandiose, more theatrical, they drew upon the tenets of camp, revelling in the freedom to exaggerate and dramatise femininity in a manner that was self-conscious in its postmodernity. The role of fashion as entertainment, reinforced by Versace with his flamboyant shows … had brought overstatement and parody to the industry.' And to the culture.

After Versace's death, his sister Donatella took over as creative director. He bequeathed his share of the company to her daughter, Allegra.

Further reading:
The best, most analytical book is Richard Martin's
Gianni Versace
(1997), which accompanied the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The long-lasting image of Jean Paul Gaultier as a perpetual enfant terrible of French fashion took many years to lay to rest. But now the great iconoclast of modern French fashion has become part of the establishment he once shunned. Who would have guessed back in the 1980s that the eclectic mould-breaker of Parisian fashion would become creative director of the house of Hermès, a byword in understated luxury?

This is not to disparage Gaultier's achievements, for many great arch provocateurs before him have, over time, become accepted by the mainstream—a sign of their influence. Gaultier's openness about sex and homosexuality was considered shocking to many in the 1980s but was part of mainstream popular culture by the noughties. And Hermès recognised that behind the many playful and provocative designs, such as the celebrated corsets for the pop star Madonna, was a rigorous technician with great tailoring skills. At heart, Gaultier has also remained indisputably French and Parisian, despite his love of London street style and international travels. He was a dominant force in designer fashion through the 1980s; the tickets for his shows were the most coveted in Paris. But his critics said he was a designer for fashion victims, who pinched most of his ideas by wandering round Camden Market in London. His clothes made all the headlines but were considered unwearable—skirts for men, conical bras for women. Pastiche fashion, the critics said.

But by the early 1990s, his status as a pioneering designer who mixed up styles and embraced cross-cultural diversity was being recognised. Likewise, his experiments with sportswear, stretch fabrics and underwear used as outerwear were influencing all levels of the fashion market. To Gaultier's delight, there was also a new appreciation of the talents he had picked up in his early days in the design studios of Paris: his exquisite tailored jackets, the delicacy of his colour sense and the immaculate finish of his clothes. Gaultier has mellowed in his later years, although his collection of autumn/winter 2008, which attracted much negative comment for its surfeit of exotic animal skins, showed that he has not lost the ability to be controversial. He has probably taken more risks, both creatively and personally, than any other designer in history—and sometimes paid the price. Arguably his greatest career mistake was to become a television presenter on the British TV show
Eurotrash
, a satirical romp through the wilder extremes of contemporary European popular culture. Although the show was an undoubted hit and authentically reflected Gaultier's eclectic creative inspirations, it almost certainly deprived him of the opportunity to take up the reins at Christian Dior. LVMH boss Bernard Arnault was not amused.