“Very Versace,” by Hamish Bowles and photographed by Irving Penn,with hair by Orlando Pita for John Frieda Salon; makeup, Kevyn Aucoin; and manicure, Bernadette Thompson, was originally published in the November 1997 issue of Vogue.
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Gianni Versace traded in dreams, dreams that transported us into worlds of beauty, sex, luxury, power, daring. He had some dreams of his own, as well. Ed Filipowski, a partner in the public-relations and special-events firm KCD, worked closet with Versace for a decade and remembers that the designer’s often-expressed dreams were “to have a show at the Met and the cover of Time magazine and that he would love for the aliens to land at Lake Como … wearing Versace, of course!” His first Time cover, an image of Claudia Schiffer in an unexpectedly prim suit (“SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL—FASHION RETURNS TO THE CLASSICS”), appeared in 1995. And on December 8, after a gala evening, a second dream will be realized when “Gianni Versace,” celebrating his life’s work, opens at the Costume Institute of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition was conceived by Richard Martin, the curator of the Costume Institute, after Versace’s murder in July. Martin was overwhelmed by the outpouring of grief and interest in the designer. “I decided that it would be very good for the museum to educate the public about his work. I didn’t know that it would work. This is a very conservative institution, and to have a show in 1997 generated by an event that happened in 1997 is exceptional. However, I’m really convinced that people will have many of the same reactions they had when they saw the Dior show last year—seeing a master who had some real convictions about what fashion should be….”
From the very beginning of his career, Versace was enthusiastic about having his work seen in museums, and he assiduously pursued the idea. His first one-man show, in Verona, was held as early as 1983. Major exhibitions followed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, Paris’s Musée de la Mode et Costume, and in Munich, Milan, and Kobe, as well as smaller exhibits in The Hague, Monaco, Berlin, Genoa, Rome, and Chicago. And in 1992, New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology presented “Gianni Versace Signatures,” an astonishingly exuberant and comprehensive show. At the time, the institute’s curator was Richard Martin, working with co-curator Harold Koda. As Martin explains, “We yielded curatorial control…. Nobody does space for theater like Versace. For him, ‘All the world’s a stage!’ ” Versace’s ballet and opera costumes were memorably presented in a red-velvet-draped room, seen from a balcony. “Truly theater,” Martin remembers.