Gianni Versace: The Icon Story continues...

Gianni Versace is among the most famous fashion creators of ХХ century. His art fascinates with its baroque scope and unusual life of the colors and of the patterns. As a powerful reformer of the style, he transformed the concepts of the people for elegance and helped to men to break their appearance and to emancipate it by the canons of the strictness, boredom and monotony.

Terry Edgins throws additional alight on the relationship of Gianni Versace with the celebrities:”In the spirit of Armani, Versace courted the flashiest stars – Sylvester Stallone, Tina Turner and Elizabeth Hurley. But Versace also so often got in touch with the people with bad reputation, as Mike Tyson that very often was wearing “Versace” at public places. 

 

 

Gianni Versace him self boasted once at one reporter that the rapper Tupac Shakur “was wearing Versace” in the day when he entered in the prison and in the day, when he was discharged.” The connoisseurs of the fashion loved to say that the wives of the rich people were wearing “Armani”, until their mistresses preferred “Versace”.

EROTICISM OVER EVERYTHING?
The beauty of the naked or of the half-dressed body, its seducing relief, the hinted or the directly offered eroticism – all this organically interweaves in the disposition of the designer to be at the same time provocative and seductive. For him the beauty is created to be seen as by the men, as by the women. When two women comment one handsome man (half-naked at the beach or effectively dressed in the street or in the bar) they use expressions and epithets, much more different from the words of two men who discuss the beauty and the elegance of one woman.

 

But is there are boundaries between the seducement and the vulgarity, between the sex and the porno? At such kind of questions Gianni Versace answers categorically and together with this philosophically: ”The boundaries and the parameters change with huge speed. Madonna that shows sex, until she is singing, was unthinkable in the 40s.

 

And from other side, one of the best and one of the most ancient books, where the sex and the seduction are explained and illustrated with big simplicity, is namely Kama Sutra.” To enter deeper in the concept of the designer for the eroticism is good to make sense of his opinion of the artistic and sexual phenomenon Sharon Stone. For her, Versace thinks that she possesses beauty that goes beyond the success of one movie. Making analogy with the myth of Kim Basinger and the movie “9 ½ weeks”, he notes that the eroticisms, enlarged on the cinema screen, is able to make all the people dreaming.

Gianni Versace expresses his attitude to the beautiful and provoking naked woman’s body and through the selection of top models for his fashion-shows as the sexy Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Yasmeen Ghauri, Kate Moss, Nadia Auerman etc, as also the extravagant Christen McMenamy that in 1996 poses in front of the objective of Juergen Teller naked with inscription “Versace” in the style of the “heroin chic” of the middle of the 90s.

 

Just her substandard character and even not so proportional features and physical harmony, and special features of the character and of the biography (she is over 30, she drinks, she smokes and she lives an irregular life) and her image of “bad girl” attract the interest of the fashion creator. It is no chance that Gianni Versace chooses her for advertising face of his collection autumn-winter 1995-1996.

 

But somehow or other the opinion of the designer for the eroticism and for the sex-appeal couldn’t be understood, if we don’t enter deep into his enthusiastic attitude to the ancient Greek and ancient Roman cultures and the confessed in them cult to the beautiful and well-shaped naked body – symbol of life, health, love and success. Versace didn’t put ever the eroticism over everything, but concerning his works of art it can be affirmed convincingly that the eroticism is present in everything, that without it and without it life-asserting symbolism is unthinkable the style “Versace”.

Tribute to everything Gianni Versace, from videos, editorials, ad campaigns, quotes, and images from my personal archives spanning 16 years. I will try to catalogue Mr. Versace's images from my favorite collections during the last 7 years of his life. Gianni Versace was a man who changed my life and introduced me to the world of fashion, art, supermodels, photography, and music. He will never be forgotten... enjoy!