Remembering Gianni Versace

A creative man who, in the name of beauty, created an aesthetic universe that, 25 years after his death, resists the passage of time and never ceases to enchant. Today, 25 years have passed and his memory remains as vivid as ever. It was on a sunny morning of 15 July 1997 in front of his beloved Casa Casuarina in Miami that Gianni Versace's fairytale was interrupted by the hand of a serial killer who, with two lethal blows, mortally wounded him and all fashion. "Not a day passes without me thinking of you," his sister revealed on the day after his birthday, giving voice to a thought that does not leave those who knew and loved him. Because beauty never dies and the memory of an artist, of his irresistible genius, with it. With his vision, Gianni Versace changed the aesthetics of an era, and not just the history of fashion. Like a diviner, he brought to light its truest essence and revolutionised its creative imagination, revealing it for what it is. Clothes, yes, but with a soul, made of culture, of dreams, of imagination. His creative power and unparalleled tailoring skills have enriched his lively personality, with his versatile intelligence and indefatigable passions (art, music, history), which has been able to give reason to a fantastic universe in which there was no room for shyness but for a unique riot of prints and colours that, after all these years, never ceases to seduce and inspire.

Eccentric and baroque, rock and unconventional, sensual and extraordinary: to remember Gianni Versace comme il faut, those words with which he accompanied the debut show of his brand in 1978 at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan are enough: "When people look at Versace they must feel terrified, petrified, just like when you look into the eyes of Medusa". And so it was. And it is natural to resort to myth to talk about a unique creative, capable of combining a luxurious classicism with an ancient flavour with a modern, open vision whose scenographic creations, spectacular theatrical costumes, innovative design even in menswear were imbued with references, born of unprecedented material alliances, animated by a profound vitality that had its roots in history and projected them into a contemporary world that smacks of legend. Gianni Versace's Magna Graecia was a sensational and unabashed Eden, in which his women were celebrated and the protagonists of an idea of beauty and love that started from the body and returned there, exalted and exasperated by aristocratic clothes whose soul was born in the past and from this, boldly, broke free.

Because Gianni Versace moulded a new collective imagination, studded with iconic moments and built around a pure and luminous, cultured and at the same time audacious idea of beauty. His clothes, a tribute to an eternal femininity in motion, were an appendage of his poetic and unbridled genius at the same time; his supermodels overturned the very idea of the catwalk, becoming epitomes of a historical era; princesses and rock stars did not escape his powerful hand for the whose only measure was his incredible ability to communicate his seamlessly deployed vision everywhere. His inspiration bulimically reinterpreted stimuli from music, art, cinema even the street to transform his cultured métissage into a style that, now as then, is exquisitely unique. And, of course, legendary. Giovanni Maria Versace, more simply called Gianni, was born in Reggio Calabria in 1946, in the heart of that Magna Grecia which, like an intrusive and precious nurse, was a constant presence throughout his life.

A life that was immersed in fashion from the very beginning, since his beloved mother Francesca was a skilled and open-minded dressmaker ('the true artist is the tailor' he would later declare) whose ancient gestures young Gianni, hidden by the heavy velvet curtain of her atelier, spied on and eagerly assimilated the ancient art of cutting and sewing, concretising it in the feminine silhouettes that dotted his school exercise books. Yes, because to the sterile hours on the school desks, the child preferred those spent among the fabrics piled up on the shelves of his mother's tailor's shop, letting himself be fascinated by those beautiful women, majestic and provocative in all their new-found freedom, who celebrated their Junoesque forms and were in their own way revolutionary in the shameless attitude with which they wore clothes. The clothes, indeed. Which from the pages of paper began to take shape in those first creations with which Gianni dressed his favourite model, his adored younger sister Donatella, who had always been an accomplice of his genius and perennial muse of his stylistic inspiration.

And so it happened that the then twelve-year-old Donatella walked the streets of Reggio Calabria wearing coloured miniskirts and high cuissards, shaking out her long, bleached hair, the perfect representation of a vision in which intuition and acumen sniffed out the changes and enclosed them, concretely, on the shelves of the Elle boutique, which her mother had placed alongside her atelier, of which Gianni was the star. In a season that increasingly embraced the democratic instances of fashion, transferring them into a pioneering prêt-à-porter that discovered, showed and above all highlighted the personality of those who chose it, the shop windows of Via Gulli saw the arrival of Genny's creations, of Walter Albini's Callaghan and above all of that Chloé designed by Karl Lagerfeld, a stylist whom Gianni Versace loved above all for his indefatigable taste for modernity. But Reggio Calabria was a narrow place for the young man, who moved to Milan in 1972, where he began to make a name for himself among insiders by designing some collections for those brands he had already hosted and loved in his shop.

Genny, but also Florentine Flowers, De Parisini, Callaghan, Alma and Complice, for whom he had designed the first collection under his own name of leather clothes (1975). In what was to all intents and purposes establishing itself as the new fashion capital, a crunchy crossroads of design, industry and the press, where the new social classes, bourgeois and wealthy, were directing trends and benefiting from them in an overbearing way, Gianni Versace was ready to explode his stylistic code devoted to a cultured, carnal and sensual Dionysianism but, at the same time, subjected to textbook tailoring, whose artistic Dna was brought to paroxysm without inhibitions, unbound by any modesty. The young man was unprejudiced in the invention of colours and shapes, in the combination of different textures, in the ability to dare, letting his fervent imagination be the absolute mistress. In 1978, together with his brother Santo (who had an accountant's office in Reggio Calabria and who joined him in the Lombard capital), he set up the Versace maison, debuting with a memorable fashion show at Palazzo della Permanente.  

And the Medusa brand, chosen as the symbol of the fashion house because it proudly emphasised the family's southern origins and, at the same time, echoed the mythological seductive character of the Gorgon who left no escape to those who looked at her, began to impose itself on fashion. The Versace brothers, who, after graduating in languages in Florence, had also been joined by Donatella, who was in charge of public relations, were ready to conquer the world by blows of inebriated experimentation and that absolute cult of feminine beauty, betting on a strong and boisterous image that, in the prodromes of the Eighties, was ready to burst forth. Right from the start, the brand's language was characterised as a direct emanation of the vitality and stylistic energy of Gianni Versace, whose imprint devoted to spectacularity syncretically blended contemporary elements, such as pop art, and ancient fascinations, baroque reminiscences and psychedelic and futuristic traces.

His profound knowledge of materials allowed the designer to create an ultra-modern style for the time in garments that were destined to become iconic, such as those in metallic knitwear made using a technological fabric, oroton, whose weight and fluidity he manipulated to create extremely light and sensual dresses, skilfully draped, that soon became his hallmark and were adored by the divas Gianni loved, one of whom was Patty Pravo, who enchanted Sanremo in 1984. Yes, women. The designer, who had a penchant for femininity, relied for his advertising campaigns on the lenses of those photographers who were equally capable of celebrating their charm and soul.

If Richard Avedon was the first, in 1979, and remained his favourite, with whom he inaugurated an association that will go down in history for years, Helmut Newton, Herbs Ritts, Bruce Weber and Steven Meisel exalted to the point of almost mythologising the extraordinary creativity of Gianni Versace. His spirit, always so receptive and curious in seeking new sources of inspiration, gave life to a continuous contamination in which every boundary was obsolete and every limit shifted by virtue of that hunger to create, to try, to give shape to the magnificence that, in his opinion, came exquisitely from the land where he was born, where everything shouted beauty and history was a powerful filter for looking at tomorrow. His imagery was an immersive melting pot celebrated season after season by collections whose strong aesthetics enchanted with psychedelic prints and ironic homages to pop art, captivating bondage declinations and theatrical stimuli, references to Magna Graecia and neo-baroque virtuosity. And then colour, always colour, in a chromatic apotheosis that told of society and was told by it, in which clothing was vassal to a visual communication rich in content perceived with immediacy.

There was also room for a revised and corrected version of the minimalism of the Nineties, in which black was reinterpreted in a post-punk key, with macro safety pins that closed killer cuts, provocative necklines and vertiginous slits, like the pin dress worn by a then unknown Elizabeth Hurley who, by virtue of that dress, lost the label of "girlfriend of" (Hugh Grant, for the record) to simply become a star. Everything had its place, everything was supported by a sartorial perfection in which the female body was the manifesto that screamed transgression and freedom, power and authority. Versace's women were real women, and on the catwalk they abandoned the role of mannequin to let themselves be overwhelmed by eroticism and passion: they were Cindy, Naomi, Linda, Christy, Claudia, Carla and Karen, an army of supermodels identified only by their first names that Gianni transformed into icons, protagonists of both his catwalks and his campaigns, extraordinary ambassadors of a golden age of fashion of which the designer was the King Midas.

His brand was the object of desire of that decade, thanks also to those celebrities who catalysed the tastes of ordinary mortals such as Elton John, Madonna, Sting, Prince and Courtney Love and whom Donatella had had the acumen to involve in order to amplify the communicative power of the maison, securing a return in image that led the Versace brand to a strong link with the star system. And with the crown, we might add, considering how Gianni Versace's sensuality-laden style accompanied Lady D's rebirth after her divorce from Prince Charles, literally dressing her for a new life.

Medusa's power, however, was not limited to the catwalk. In that cauldron of interests from which Gianni Versace drew to feed his genius, pride of place was given to the theatre, the love of which went back to his father Antonio who had first taken him to see 'Un ballo in maschera' and by which the young Gianni was so fascinated that he replicated the atmosphere and, above all, the costumes in the colourful puppets with which he entertained his brothers. His childish play became reality when, in 1982, he agreed to design the costumes for Richard Strauss's opera 'Josephlegende' during the ballet season at La Scala. It was then the turn of the stage clothes for Gustav Mahler's 'Lieb und Leid' (1983), for Gaetano Donizetti's 'Don Pasquale' (1984) and for Maurice Béjart's 'Dyonisos' at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, as well as for an opera inspired by the story of Evita Péron (1988), which gave him one of the many awards of his career.

His theatrical creations, inspired by those of Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Elsa Schiaparelli, exalted the dramatic nature of the events staged, but at the same time supported the movements of the body to give life to a dynamic and emotional narrative in which once again the beauty of the form, understood as envelope, was an extraordinary atout. For me, theatre is liberation, said the designer who over time had opened his maison to the exploration of new scenarios, between the young Versus line, entrusted to his sister Donatella (1989), the Atelier project (1989) with which he signed a series of haute couture garments, Versace signature in which the Medusa appeared on perfumes and accessories and the Versace home collection (1993) dedicated to the home. "I am a profoundly superficial person," Gianni Versace niched, paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche as if to justify his brilliant (and natural) ability to transform passions into trends by contaminating genres and arts in an irresistible way. "I like to read and watch, but then use these stimuli freely to turn them into fashion". A fashion that resists the passage of time, that seduces, enchants and conquers even today 25 years after his death, and that will never cease to do so. (reproduction reserved)