A Retrospective: Gianni Versace (1946-1997)

[lavieenrose]

I can't believe he's been gone for 10 years.

 

[Joseph26]

^ woot good call Joseph!!!

And yes you've got me there, I am something of a vintage fashion magazine addict!

I've got a ton of old mags in the cellar, and a ton to scan in, and (eventually) a ton to sell on ebay!

what about you?

well, I'm not a collector just a great lover of 80's and early 90's fashion photography, especially if it's photographed by my fav photographers, Avedon, Newton, Ritts, Penn and Newton B) I also admire Gianni Versace a lot, his fashion shows, his ad campaigns, he was a genius.

and now I'm a fan of your posts

 

[Mr. Fabulous]

10 years, wow.

 

[model_mom]

more about the ballet...


Ballet tribute for Gianni Versace

Versace (left) collaborated on several ballets with Maurice Bejart

A specially-written ballet is due to be performed in Milan to mark the 10th anniversary of fashion designer Gianni Versace's death.
Thanks Gianni, With Love has been put together by French choreographer Maurice Bejart, for whom Versace designed many stage costumes.
About 1,500 guests, including Versace's favourite models, are due to attend the show at the La Scala opera house.
The designer was murdered outside his Miami mansion on 15 July, 1997.
His sister and muse Donatella, who took over the Versace fashion empire, has created several costumes for the ballet.
"It is the most beautiful gift I could do for him," she said.
"He was a genius and a simple exhibition of his designs would have been banal.

Maurice Bejart and Donatella Versace are in Milan for the show

"Fashion wasn't enough for him, he also loved art, music, history and dance."
'True artisan'
Bejart, 80, worked with Versace on a dozen ballets from 1984 until the designer's tragic death.
Shortly after his death, he described his friend as a "true artisan" and compared him to the "great creators of the Renaissance - always on a quest for novelty and beauty".
Bejart's two-part tribute, known as Grazie Gianni con Amore in Italian, will pay homage to the shows he designed with Versace, including Barocco Bel Canto and La Mort Subite (Sudden Death).
Guests expected for the gala performance include supermodel Claudia Schiffer, designer Karl Lagerfeld and actress Liz Hurley, who became famous for wearing a Versace-designed black dress held together with safety pins.
Fashion empire

Versace was shot dead outside his Miami mansion (pictured)

Gianni Versace was born on 2 December 1946 in the industrial town of Reggio di Calabria in southern Italy.
He started designing clothes at the age of 22, and built his fashion empire from a studio in the centre of Milan.
His 1982 collection introduced metallic garments that would become his trademark, and his elaborate stage costumes for Elton John in the late 1980s helped cement his reputation. The designer was gunned down outside his Miami Beach home by Andrew Cunanan in 1997. Cunanan was later found dead. Other events scheduled to mark the anniversary of Versace's death include an exhibition of his sketches of theatre costumes on the streets of Milan and the establishment of a scholarship at the European Institute of Design.

 

[kahlilg]

Gianni Versace was born on 2 December

Omg that's my bday too! First Britney Spears, then Nelly Furtado...
But yeah I miss him a lot. Donatella has done nothing compared to Gianni, in my honest opinion.

 

[Joseph26]

Donatella has done nothing compared to Gianni, in my honest opinion.

I agree

 

[MissMagAddict]

Remembering Gianni




Image Source | Scanned by MMA | Fashion-Mini July 2007

 

[Mélange]

^ thanks for the lovely tribute mma

 

[Mélange]

and now I'm a fan of your posts

flattery will get you EVERYWHERE Joseph!

 

[Mélange]

Gianni and his "Amazonen"
Vogue Deutsch July 1992
ph. Roxanne Lowit
scanned by me



[please click to enlarge]

 

[Joseph26]

Remembering Gianni

Image Source | Scanned by MMA | Fashion-Mini July 2007

wow, that's an amazing tribute, endless thanks MMA I couldn't give you karma

what does "spread reputation" mean? could anyone explain me?

 

[Mélange]

^ yeah I got a "spread reputation" message too!

 

[Joseph26]

Gianni and his "Amazonen"
Vogue Deutsch July 1992
ph. Roxanne Lowit
scanned by me [please click to enlarge]

lovely pic Melange , the quality is amazing! congratulations to your scanner and/or your habilities

 

[MissMagAddict]

^You're welcome guysI'm pleased you liked the scansspread reputation means you have to give karma to other people before you can give it to me again

 

[Mélange]

I just found this on the BBC site:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6899636.stm


Ballet tribute for Gianni Versace


A specially written ballet has been performed in Milan to mark the 10th anniversary of fashion designer Gianni Versace's death.

Thanks Gianni, With Love was put together by French choreographer Maurice Bejart, for whom Versace designed many stage costumes.

About 1,500 guests, including Versace's favourite models, attended the show at the La Scala opera house.

The designer was murdered outside his Miami mansion on 15 July, 1997.

His sister and muse Donatella, who took over the Versace fashion empire, created several costumes for the ballet.

"It is the most beautiful gift I could do for him," she said.

"He was a genius and a simple exhibition of his designs would have been banal.

Maurice Bejart and Donatella Versace were in Milan for the show
"Fashion wasn't enough for him, he also loved art, music, history and dance."

Bejart, 80, worked with Versace on a dozen ballets from 1984 until the designer's tragic death.

Shortly after his death, he described his friend as a "true artisan" and compared him to the "great creators of the Renaissance - always on a quest for novelty and beauty".

Bejart's two-part tribute, known as Grazie Gianni con Amore in Italian, paid homage to the shows he designed with Versace, including Barocco Bel Canto and La Mort Subite (Sudden Death).

Guests at the gala performance included supermodel Claudia Schiffer, designer Karl Lagerfeld and actress Liz Hurley, who became famous for wearing a Versace-designed black dress held together with safety pins.

Gianni Versace was born on 2 December 1946 in the industrial town of Reggio di Calabria in southern Italy.

He started designing clothes at the age of 22, and built his fashion empire from a studio in the centre of Milan.

His 1982 collection introduced metallic garments that would become his trademark, and his elaborate stage costumes for Elton John in the late 1980s helped cement his reputation.

The designer was gunned down outside his Miami Beach home by Andrew Cunanan in 1997. Cunanan was later found dead.

Other events scheduled to mark the anniversary of Versace's death include an exhibition of his sketches of theatre costumes on the streets of Milan and the establishment of a scholarship at the European Institute of Design.

 

[DosViolines]

Remembering Gianni

Thanks for the scans MMA

 

[DosViolines]

nytimes

July 19, 2007
The Murder on Ocean Drive

Michel Arnaud/Corbis
Naomi Campbell, left, Gianni Versace, center and Christy Turlington in 1994.

By CATHY HORYN

THERE are a lot of things that never make it into memorials, and maybe they were never important to begin with. Like seeing the director and fugitive Roman Polanski sitting beside a beautiful dark-haired woman at a Gianni Versace show in Milan. This was around 1990 or 1989, and the reviews of Versace’s collections were filled with a tone of moral indignation at the idea of supermodels in bondage dresses, when, honestly, everyone in that grim city should have said, “Why not.”

I tapped on Mr. Polanski’s shoulder. I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to speak to the director of “Chinatown,” but I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I made some patently self-evident remark about the show and then, looking at the woman, said something like “you and your girlfriend ...”

Mr. Polanski’s face went cold. “She’s my wife,” he said, and turned away.

So. You can say that it doesn’t matter that I didn’t recognize the actress Emmanuelle Seigner, or that he shouldn’t have been so touchy, but since the memory also involves Gianni Versace, it seems to me that this conclusion may be beside the point. 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.

Yet all the minutiae that go into making up an account of a person’s life — what if that is lost? Versace introduced us to a personal and vaguely disrespectable world of rock divas and legends, and it is all that ephemera that now floats in my head.

Well, what does matter? If it’s the latest brand-building effort or a celebrity with her purchased adoration, then we are in trouble.

Reading accounts of his life and death that have appeared on this 10th anniversary — he was murdered July 15, 1997 — I am struck by how much at a remove they are from the subject and the events of that terrible and strange week. The facts are all there, neat as buttons, but the perspectives are those of outsiders. And it’s not the fault of the Versaces.

A year before the murder, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, where I worked at the time, asked me to write a profile of Versace’s sister, Donatella. Despite rumors of a sibling rift, I don’t think anyone considered Donatella, then 42, a serious rival. The Versaces were spending a fortune — $6 million for a Miami Beach property, Casa Casuarina, $7 million for a New York town house filled with Picassos and Rauschenbergs — and Donatella, with her blaze of diamonds and yellow hair, was another way to illuminate their lifestyle.

The article ran in the June 1997 issue, one of several magazines that Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan, who was obsessed with celebrity, bought around the time he arrived in Miami. On the morning of the murder, Maureen Orth, a senior writer at Vanity Fair, was in the fact-checking stages of a 10,000-word article about Mr. Cunanan, who was already suspected in four murders in Minnesota, Illinois and New Jersey. She immediately had a hunch it was Mr. Cunanan who shot the designer on the steps of his home as he returned from the nearby News Cafe on Ocean Drive, and said so to Mr. Carter.

I was on Nantucket, where the phone was ringing with calls from news organizations — CNN, the BBC — seeking information about possible tensions within the Versace family. The murder had thrown a weird light on a world people knew very little about. By midafternoon, Mr. Carter decided that Ms. Orth and I should go to Miami. If the killer was Mr. Cunanan, the story would be hers.

I first met Donatella in June 1996 in Milan, in the 21-room apartment where she lived with her husband, Paul Beck, and their young children, Allegra and Daniel. That night, though, it was just the two of us for dinner. She took me into her dressing room, throwing open the closet doors. This is for bags, this is for shoes. I thought she seemed as nervous as a cat.

But in August, when we met again at the house in Miami, she was at ease — and fun. I brought my son, Jacob, who is Allegra’s age, and they swam in the turquoise pool, where Donatella, for one of Madonna’s birthdays, had floated a huge cake. She took me around the Spanish-style house, pointing out Gianni’s private rooms, which overlooked Ocean Drive, and the room where Jack Nicholson had once stayed. We had lunch in the marble dining room. Elton John phoned.

Yet, as extravagant as everything was, what impressed me most was how protected Donatella was by the screen of her brother’s fame and talent. She was completely free to dazzle, a living Medusa. I won’t say she was innocent — the Versaces were never innocent. But she possessed a fragility and a candor that helped to mediate the more implausible parts of her existence.

Later, we all went out to the beach, Donatella in a chartreuse bikini and a big canary diamond. Around 1 p.m., a man from the house wheeled a cooler across the sand. It was loaded with freshly grilled hamburgers and chicken sandwiches.

On the day after the murder, I stood in the throng of news people gathered opposite the house — a surreal experience. The story was Ms. Orth’s; Mr. Cunanan had been identified as the killer and was at large. You felt that a kind of lunacy enter those already lunatic streets, clogged with tourists and gym queens and now reporters, all moving toward 1116 Ocean Drive. I remember at 6:30 a.m on the third day of the manhunt, Ms. Orth and I walked from the Raleigh Hotel down to the Versace mansion. A crowd was already gathering in the muggy heat.

Several times I phoned the house, reaching Ed Filipowski, a publicist who worked for the Versaces. But the family wasn’t saying anything. Ms. Orth and I pursued leads. They were all pretty seedy: a north-beach gay hustler bar called the Boardwalk, where Mr. Cunanan had been seen before the murder, and the $36-a-day hotel where he had stayed when he got to Miami. This was the side of the strip that Mr. Cunanan revealed, before he killed himself on July 23.

The murder exposed the financial vulnerability of the Versace family. Eventually, assets had to be sold: the Miami and New York houses, much of the artwork. Donatella and Mr. Beck divorced. The company, after struggling, appears to be fiscally sound.

Ten years on, I asked Mr. Filipowski what stands out in his mind from that week. He and his partner, Julie Mannion, were inside the house the whole time, and Ms. Mannion had stayed with Versace’s body in the morgue, at his sister’s request, until she and her brother Santo could arrive from Italy.

Mr. Filipowski thought for a moment and said: “How personal and private they kept everything — that’s what I remember. With everything that was going on outside. It was: ‘Our brother is dead.’ ”

Robert Sullivan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
SHATTERED CALM Bystanders swarming the Miami Beach house of Gianni Versace after his death.

B.D.V./Corbis
STAR GALAXY Gianni Versace, who altered the presentation of fashion, with Donatella and his supermodels at their couture show in 1995.

Pierre Vauthey/Corbis Sygma
Mr. Versace was one of the first designers to recognize the value of the supermodel, including Linda Evangelista, in ’92.

Mitchell Gerber/Corbis

Naomi Campbell in ’95.

The Advertising Archives
His advertising campaigns were shot by high-profile photographers.

The Advertising Archives
A 1990s advertisement.

 

[DosViolines]

nytimes

July 16, 1997

Gianni Versace, 50, the Designer Who Infused Fashion With Life and Art

By AMY M. SPINDLER

Gianni Versace, the man who brought rock, art, sexuality and brilliant color into contemporary fashion, was shot to death yesterday outside his home in Miami Beach. He was 50.

It is difficult to imagine another designer whose death would drain more life from the industry, an industry now driven by contemporary culture because Mr. Versace made it that way. He leaves behind an $807 million business, with 130 boutiques worldwide, with work ranging from $30,000 dresses to $50 jeans to china with his Medusa logo on it.

''I think it's the responsibility of a designer to try to break rules and barriers,'' he once said. ''I'm a little like Marco Polo, going around and mixing cultures.''

When Mr. Versace began his career in 1972, serious designer fashion was a dusty place, its wealthy clients removed from what was happening on the street, in modern art, in film. Mr. Versace found his inspiration there, force-feeding even the most recalcitrant client his eclectic knowledge of the real world. The distinctiveness of his powerful prints, their roots in the historic past became the archetype for modern fashion: a movable signature that defines the wearer as co-conspirator with a designer mind.

''You look at his work as a whole, and there is a through line of the Versace energy and spirit,'' said Ingrid Sischy, the editor of Interview magazine and a close friend. ''It's all him. But then on top of it is a diary of the things that have been going on in the world, in the pop culture.'' His legacy, she said, would be ''a rare, particularly in our age, synthesis of craft, classicism and the pop culture.''

A Career That Started In His Mother's Studio

Born in the town of Reggio Calabria on the toe of Italy, he grew up watching his mother, Franca, work as a dressmaker with 45 seamstresses in her studio. Mr. Versace once recalled that the couture workroom was his playground as a child, and that just before his mother ''started cutting, she would always cross herself.''

He worked with his mother after he graduated from high school. ''Designing came to me,'' he once said. ''I didn't have to move.'' But he did move, in 1972, to Milan, where he was hired by several Italian fashion industrialists to create collections.

''When you are born in a place such as Calabria and there is beauty all around a Roman bath, a Greek remain, you cannot help but be influenced by the classical past,'' he once said. Those themes, the Italian Baroque, Grecian motifs and Estruscan symbols, were woven into his collections, as were the themes of today: celebrity, rock, pop art, metal, plastic, even bondage, with notorious dresses he completed with straps of leather.

His name became synonymous for many with vulgarity because of the way those Baroque themes translated into flashy fashion, typified by the embrace of his clothes as an object of aspiration in the movie ''Showgirls''.

''He was the first to realize the value of the celebrity in the front row, and the value of the supermodel, and put fashion on an international media platform,'' said Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and a friend. ''He relished media attention and masterminded it, and everybody followed in his footsteps.''

As much as Mr. Versace invented in fashion itself, he altered the presentation of the art completely. The first designer to tap into the publicity machine that the fashion show of today has become, he filled his front row with celebrity faces, who were then photographed in high-profile advertising campaigns shot by Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton. Madonna, Jon Bon Jovi, the Artist (formerly known as Prince), Elton John and, most recently, Patricia Arquette have all posed to sell Versace. That advertising was often erotic, rejected by conservative publications for showing more nudity than fashion. He commissioned music for his shows from performers like the Artist (formerly known as Prince), who sang about ''The Versace Experience,'' and he distributed limited edition compact disks to his audience.

Giving Celebrities Shelter From the Storm

Mr. Versace was so intrigued by whatever was going on in the world that he embraced many celebrities at the height of any controversy, providing a safe house for those with a battered image -- Mike Tyson, the Princess of Wales, Soon Yi Previn and Woody Allen. Mr. Allen had asked Mr. Versace to be in his next film.

''I think he had a natural movie star personality, because he had such a large and generous presence,'' Mr. Allen said yesterday.

What those celebrities received in return was an Italian family. Mr. Versace's showplace homes on Lake Como, in Milan, on Miami Beach and in Manhattan were more than anything places where he would entertain friends.

''We talked about family,'' Mr. Bon Jovi said. ''Family was important. He was the most warm, caring, sensitive family man.''

Mr. Versace's brother, Santo, and his sister, Donatella, helped him start his own house in 1978. Today, Ms. Versace is creative director of the house and designs the Versus collection; Santo is the president of the company, and Paul Beck, Ms. Versace's husband, is the director of Versace's men's wear. Gianni Versace's companion of 11 years, Antonio D'Amico, designs Versace Sport for the house.

The Versace family -- including his nieces and nephews, Francesca and Antonio, from his brother's marriage to Cristina, and Allegra and Daniel, Donatella's children -- are often in the front row of shows, giving the events, held in his palazzo on Via Gesu in Milan, the feel of an invitation to a wedding.

''When I saw him the happiest and not thinking about the next collection was when he was with the children,'' Ms. Wintour said. ''It's what he was building this empire for. It meant the most to him. It was when you saw him at ease.''

Mr. Versace said the structure of his business was based on family structure, as in the Italian Renaissance. ''You can trust them,'' he had said of his family. ''You can fight with them and be back in love. We can fight at 6 o'clock and have a nice dinner at 8.''

While so many designers become famous and cloister themselves away, Mr. Versace had a voracious appetite for knowledge, and when he learned something, he shared it with his audience through his work, be it the three-dimensional mobiles of Alexander Calder that he translated into couture dresses, the Byzantine mosaics he used as prints, or the hard leather punk look.

''The most amazing thing about him is he was so fearless about the new,'' Sandra Brant, the publisher of Interview, said. ''The other thing that was incredible was that he always wanted to give a nudge to the world to be more open.''

It wasn't uncommon to see 50 books stacked on a single table at one of his houses. He employed a full-time librarian, who organized the five libraries he kept.

When he would arrive in New York, where he had a town house on 64th Street, he would call Ms. Sischy and Ms. Brant to go to galleries, museums or art studios. He was more than a collector of art, Ms. Sischy said; he was a blotter for art, absorbing it, contemplating it and sometimes bringing the colors or ideas into his collections.

At a dinner last year, he was seated with Madonna, Elton John and Tupac Shakur. ''But the person he left with at 2 in the morning was Philip Taaffe, because he wanted to go to the studio,'' Ms. Sischy recalled. ''He wasn't running off with Madonna to a late-night cabaret. He had a lot of options that night. But what he wanted to do was look at this artist's studio.''

Turned Toward Couture After Shows in Museums

His intense curiosity about the new was what kept his collections fresh and innovative. There are many designers who never fail when designing fashion. Mr. Versace made his failures part of his success. To follow his progress was to see a designer in evolution. He was a rich, successful man when he decided to design couture for the first time in January 1989, already the subject of more than 20 museum exhibitions. He had designed costumes for La Scala, Maurice Bejart, Robert Wilson, William Forsythe, Twyla Tharp and the San Francisco Opera.

Only love of his craft could make a designer undertake such a risk as couture, when he had no need of the publicity and the risk might never yield rewards. Yet, time and again he absorbed criticism, and improved his collections strikingly. Those who had written him off early on for his cartoonlike style were forced to concede that he had molded himself into one of the most important couturiers of his generation in only seven years.

Yet, the seriousness with which he approached his art never weighed down the results. Mr. Versace was intent on making his clothes, and his presentations, fun, memorable, exciting. Despite the work that went into his collections, he never wanted to make viewing them work. He saw himself as a man with four mind-sets: conservative, crazy, rock and theater. The way he succumbed to those impulses, or let them fight it out on the runway, was the drama of his work.

''Gianni and I were like brothers,'' Elton John said. ''We were very similar. We had the same taste. He taught me about art, and I taught him about music. He was someone on my level of thinking. We were continually trying to improve our creativity. You never left him without being stimulated about some aspect of fashion or art or life. There was no fear with Gianni. Sometimes he was right, and sometimes he was wrong. Every artist is like that.''

Mr. John's companion, David Furnish, said that Mr. Versace continually sent faxes to his friends, ''letting you know he was looking and listening,'' even flying to New York to attend the premiere of Mr. Furnish's documentary about Mr. John, ''Tantrums and Tiaras.''

''He came as a gesture of support,'' Mr. Furnish said. ''If I had to sum Gianni up in one word, it's passion. I never met someone with such a passion for life, and beauty, and living. He enjoyed life, devoured it, and gave it all back to the world. He is someone who was doing what he was born to do and he got so much pleasure from it.''

It is the life and passion imbued in his work that has made his violent death so surreal to those in the industry. Despite a battle with a rare cancer of the inner ear in 1993, despite the sort of visibility and fame that modern culture has shown to bring vulnerability, Mr. Versace never seemed vulnerable. Surrounded by his family and a regular retinue of celebrities and friends, he seemed protected, if only by the sense that modern fashion could not go on without him.

After his cancer was diagnosed, he said: ''There were a lot of tests and scans and treatments that were hard. But as I said, I'm very optimistic. I never fall down. I always fight.'' Mr. Versace lived his entire life with an eye to his legacy. He commissioned works from Julian Schnabel and Roy Lichtenstein, among others, which incorporated his image, or images of his family, into the work.

''He had an innate sense that he would have a place in history,'' Ms. Sischy said. ''The way he functioned he never got buried in pettiness. People that don't get buried in pettiness, people that push for the big picture are people who know they're going for something bigger than the present.''

He once spoke about why he produced so much: a home-decorating collection and two each of couture, men's-wear and women's ready-to-wear collections a year.

''You know I talk through my work, and I want to talk more,'' he said. ''At the beginning of my career, it was very hard to go up. Now, it's very hard to stay on top. You have to stay there, and I want to stay there so badly. I'm still standing.''

 

[DosViolines]

nytimes

Dancers pay tribute to the late fashion designer in a ballet called 'Grazi Gianni Con Amore' that was held at La Scala in Milan. (Stefano Guindani/SGP)

Dancing gala celebrates life of Gianni Versace

By Suzy Menkes

Monday, July 16, 2007

MILAN: It was Maurice Béjart's master class. But the dancers leaping, crouching, strutting and arching taut bodies in their flamboyant costumes were also under the watchful eye of Gianni Versace - whose giant image served as a backdrop.

"Grazie Gianni Con Amore" (Thank you Gianni with love) was a dance tribute held at La Scala in Milan on Sunday to mark 10 years since the Italian designer was murdered in Miami on July 15, 1997. Conceived as a celebration of Versace's life, the fragments of modern dance were a fitting homage to the late designer's dynamic and audacious approach to design.

"An artisan of spectacle," said Béjart, 80, to sum up costumes graphic, colorful, exotic and erotic that Versace conceived for the 12 ballets they worked on together. That roster began in 1984 with "Dionysos" and its Homeric male dancers, with bare torsos above draped scarlet pants. It ended with the "Barocco-Bel Canto" ballet in the Boboli gardens in Florence in 1997. That was, in its violent, murderous plot, a shivery premonition of Versace's fate later that same month.

The model Naomi Campbell, who was on stage at the Florentine event, was overcome with emotion as the dance tribute ended, while the American music legend Quincy Jones said he could never forget lunching with Versace in Milan that summer and hearing all his plans and projects that came to such a brutal end nine days later.

Donatella Versace, who with her brother Santo was invited by the City of Milan and its mayor Letizia Moratti to mark the 10-year anniversary, wanted an event that was not a fashion retrospective but one that captured the artistic energy of Gianni and his wide-ranging interests.

"I feel so emotional; I keep having to change my makeup," said Donatella Versace before the event, adding that the rehearsals had brought back so many memories of working together with Gianni and Béjart on the ballets.

"It was the chemistry both of them had, playing off each other," explained Paul Beck, Donatella's former husband. While their son Daniel was too young to have participated in the performance art, his sister Allegra remembered vividly her uncle taking her to La Scala to watch a rehearsal and putting her on stage behind the dancers to do her ballet practice.

It was a night of reminiscences, as Milan's fashion world turned out in homage to the man some - like Rosita Missoni and Carla Fendi - remembered as a shy young lad in the 1970s joining his mother on buying trips for her boutique in Reggio di Calabria. Gildo Zegna recalled working on menswear for 20 years with the "meticulous and visionary" designer, who even persuaded the Zegna factory to work on the weekend to create in two days the latest flamboyant outfit for Elton John.

For Claudia Schiffer, glamorous in a body-hugging red dress, Gianni Versace was the "maker of the supermodel."

"With all the advertising, photographed by [Richard] Avedon, Gianni knew how to make a big impact," said Schiffer, recalling a sinuous dress "in blue tones" that the designer had created for her as a presenter at the Academy Awards.

"It was very glamorous and very sexy," Schiffer said.

In a lighthearted moment in Béjart's commentary, the elderly choreographer, leaning heavily on a red practice bar, showed how his Lausanne ballet troupe had integrated an impossibly tight column of a pink dress by passing the encased figure, upturned to show lime-green under-frills and coral shoes, between two athletic dancers.

The strength of the evening was that it was never at any point a fashion retrospective - unless you count the broad-shouldered blazers, graphically marked in black and white or the vivaciously patterned silk blouses that gave a tinge of the 1980s to "Le Presbytère" ballet.

"It is so good to see clothes moving on the body - catwalk shows should be banned," said Rupert Everett, who was referring to the joyous explosion of athletic bodies in the dynamic of dance.

A decade is a long time in fashion, but even those for whom Gianni Versace's work is historic appreciated his style. Jessica Alba, in the middle of a European promotion for her movie "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer," wore a Donatella Versace dress in glacial blue with crystal sparkles, although they were out-twinkled by her Bulgari diamond necklace.

Riccardo Tischi, the Italian-born designer of Givenchy, was only 22 when his fashion hero passed away, but he said that "I grew up proud of Gianni - it was his moment of rock 'n' roll and it felt very Italian." The model Maria Carla Bosconi, 26, had the same feeling, recalling her excitement and awe at age 16 over her first modeling spectacular - a Versace show on Rome's Spanish steps that was canceled after the tragic events.

For the next generation, a scholarship in Gianni Versace's name is being set up at the European Institute of Design. The mayor also announced that a street in Milan's future renewal district will be named for Gianni Versace. Currently, the city's central streets have posters of the designer's costume drawings for ballet and theater.

For the Versace family, the last decade has been devoted to building a future without the founder and both Donatella and Santo said that the La Scala evening was not meant to be devoted only to the past. In fact, striking costumes - body suits in blue, red, green, lime and purple with matching sparkling hoods - were designed by Donatella, who took over the creative reins from her late brother.

Karl Lagerfeld said that he does not appreciate the wave of anniversaries that has broken over fashion this summer, from Dior's 60th birthday to Valentino's 45-year fest, but that he had come to the Versace event because he had known him from early in his career and had been closer to him than any other designer.

"And he would be proud of his sister," said Lagerfeld. "She kept the image and did a good job over the last 10 years."

Stefano Guindani/SGP
Dancers pay tribute to the late fashion designer Gianni Versace in a ballet called 'Grazi Gianni con Amore' that was held at La Scala in Milan.

Stefano Guindani/SGP
Colorful costumes designed by Donatella Versace for the ballet.

Stefano Guindani/SGP
Donatella and Santo Versace

 

[Mélange]

the interesting posts

merci beaucoup DosViolines