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GIANNI VERSACE December 11, 1997 - March 22, 1998 Contents GALLERY 1: LANDMARKS (#2 -•#20) p. 3 GALLERY 2: ART (#21 -•#30) p. 8 GALLERY 3: HISTORY (#31 -•#51) p. 11 GALLERY 4: MATERIALS (#52 -• #63) p. 17 GALLERY 5: THE DREAM (#64 -• #72) p. 21 CASEI: ROCK & ROLL (#73-• #75) p. 23 CASE 2: MEN (#76-•#80) p. 24 "The time that we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it ..." Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Gianni Versace (1946-1997) was one of the great fashion designers of the twentieth century. Boisterously ambitious for his art of fashion, Versace placed his traditional skills in dressmaking in service of a new, elevated vision of fashion. First a creator of practical and luxurious sportswear in the 1970s and early 1980s, Versace realized a unique ideal in the 1980s. Like many fashion designers, Versace looked to the "street" where fashion has long prized the juxtapositions of popular styling, vulgar inspiration, and stylish promenade. Versace chose as his exemplum the prostitute as Toulouse-Lautrec had likewise prized the unlikely virtues and ambivalent freedoms of the prostitute in the 1880s and 1890s. In this ideal, Versace identified a strong, sensuous woman of unabashed, unashamed sexuality. Moreover, this proud woman was ready to assume the distinct highlight of runway, media, and celebrity inescapable to late twentieth-century culture. Most importantly, Versace sought the spectacular. Eschewing a middle-class decorum, he risked offense to instate a contemporary glamour within media's view and a popular purview. A man of lusty popular-culture tastes yet of serious and avid reading, Versace often cited Proust. Versace lived in no cork-lined room and was fervently and passionately involved in the world and unfailingly sanguine, but he admired and practiced reflection. He loved The Metropolitan Museum of Art and spent many hours in The Costume Institute. His work warrants our respect and inspection. Landmarks "When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, ... the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us ... [of] the vast structure of recollection." Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Remembering Versace's landmark works, we are prone to remember the models, celebrities, and gfittering circumstances that attributed fame to individual garments. It is the function of a museum to display, assess, and interpret artifacts under analytical and disengage circumstances. Thus, we see the Versace landmarks today without added star power. The revelation is that these garments stand with distinction on their own, touched by their own spectacular history, but constituting fashion history by their intrinsic merits alone. For example, the 1994 black dress with safety-pins popularly known as the "Elizabeth Hurley dress" that Hurley wore to the London premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral is here disembodied and no longer subject to celebrity. In the museum's vitrine, this dress functions beyond paparazzi and fame. It is revealed as Versace's transfiguration of Chanel's 1920s little black dress, initially a revolution but indurated in social propriety and aesthetic minimalism, here triumphant not in decorum, but in desire. The tasteful tabula rasa of modern style is supplanted by Versace's voluptuous primacy of the body and given corporeal and fashion narrative by the attention-getting bridgings in glittery pins and bare flesh. Divested of celebrity and moment, Versace's landmark fashion endures as symbols and manifestations of our time. 2. Evening ensemble, spring-summer 1996 A/Ai Xif& $3 Zebra-printed synthetic stretch mesh, yellow-and-black leopard-printed silk Courtesy Gianni Versace Archives Amazing and sensuous combinations are characteristic of Versace. Polite matching was a trifle to Versace. He preferred the surprise, even the initial dissonance, of unexpected and frenetic combinations. His disposition to pose the controversial rather than the polite and conventional is at the heart of every design decision, even including the uproarious pattern mix. 3. Animal-print ensemble, spring-summer 1992 Yellow-and-black printed silk with gold-tone metal accessories Courtesy Gianni Versace Archives Never too much, never too rich, and perhaps, even never too thin-Versace added the category of willful excess and extravagance to fashion's ability to evoke desire. Rich printing, varied materials, and wild coordinations are part of the Versace aesthetic. He preferred decadence and immoderation to any standard of good taste. He also invoked, as many designers do, the spirit of Diana Vreeland, in the whirlwind of animal prints, flamboyance, and high style. 4. Evening gown, ca. 1992 Brown, white, and gold leopard-printed and baroque-pattern-printed silk microfaille with beaded shoulder straps Courtesy Gianni Versace Archives To dress in little more than a scarf is not merely akin to Salome's dance; it is also in tune with the simplifying ambition of much modern fashion. A fancy, even flashy, scarf is diagonally disposed to become the basis of this dress, already possessing the gold overlay and border, animal print, and dynamic required to make a dress as Versace made dresses, by the age-old process of draping. 5. Day ensemble, fall-winter 1991-92 H M %&LZZ Black silk twill printed with gold baroque motifs Courtesy Gianni Versace Archives The gold classicism and gold baroque that became signatures for Versace recur again and again. Symbols of the comfort and opulence that Versace wanted to project, they migrate from scarves and accessories into the clothing and back again. In the 1990s, they also inhabit Versace interiors and tableware designs, perhaps the surest token of the designer. This day ensemble is able to convey the essence of the designer simply by the talisman of these baroque elements. 8. Evening dress, spring-summer 1994 Yellow-and-orange crimped synthetic jersey Gift of Gianni Versace, 1996 (1996.202.3) Crimped jersey sets in the wrinkles that imply a first order of disarray. Versace reified the process by using grandiose punk safety-pins as if they are a part of the draping process. Thus, he set the dress out as if it were the most rudimentary process of the draping imagination, using studio discards for material. Elsewhere, the safety-pins offer their curious dialogue between the faux-elegant and the practical, but here their role is to render the gist of draping on the mannequin. 11. Evening gown, fall-winter 1991-92 White silk crepe and ribbed silk with rhinestone grommets and shoulder- straps Gift of Gianni Versace, 1993 (1993.52.3) Amidst the flurry of 1990s fashion stimulated by newly supple and externalized corsetry, Versace boldly extended the line of the corset into a gown. In so doing, he did not resort to the body exaggerations of supported bust or narrowed waist of other practitioners of the 1990s corset. Instead, he allowed the line to be sinuously modern. In a sense, Versace was doing what many other designers were doing at the same time, but he was steadfast to his ideal of the sensuous, body-revealing dress, not employing the caricatural body of many who explored body shaping. 17. Evening gown, fall-winter 1995-96 Nacreous polyvinyl chloride and clear vinyl Courtesy Gianni Versace Archives A Versace gown finesses industrial-weight vinyl into a crystalline silhouette evocative of nineteenth-century silhouette, but realized as a Crystal Palace of modern material. To manipulate the cumbersome vinyl with the handwork of the couture is a self- imposed challenge to merge new technology and old technique indicative of Versace's work in couture. In this example, he merges the sweeping Second Empire silhouettes of the Empress Eugenie with the practical blue stitchings and pockets (switched from back to front) of blue jeans allowing us to realize the new function of the ballgown in the epoch of blue jeans. 18. Studded ensemble, fall-winter 1991-92 Black leather and silk crepe with silver and gold-tone metal studs Courtesy Gianni Versace Archives Studding, a practical reinforcement, became design for Versace. A fret along the hem and patterns on sleeves and front represent Versace's talent for turning the rugged sportswear motif into a decorative one, treating the studding as if it were a form of printing. The triumph of the ensemble-and a surprise in fashion history-is that Versace made new ornamentation from the obdurate and practical device of the studs. A corresponding detail only confirms that there is a visual delight found where we expected only physical reinforcement. If the effect is more Greek than Byzantine, the idea owes something to the cognate Byzantine pieces in the same collection, in which mosaic tesserae are implicated into metal on fabric and leather. Here, classicism and ornament are discovered in the same principle of small metal details being read as design. 8 2 (So „_, ...„._, ,___«•«. inumpn <fc^ i _J bt* LI $«•«- I 0 \SS,act Su >r HM » HM — 6. Evening gown and shorts ensemble, spring-summer 1994 f*t M %2 t» _\($ Purple, orange and yellow crimped synthetic jersey Gift of Gianni Versace, 1996 (1996.202.1 a-c) Although best known for his evening wear, Versace never lost the faith with sportswear that he established in the 1970s. Conversant with Italian sportswear traditions, including Irene Galitzine and Simonetta, and the American tradition of easy dressing, often inflected by the East, Versace could firmly place shorts and slacks in the midst of high style. 7. Evening gown, spring-summer 1994 Orange and purple synthetic jersey Gift of Gianni Versace, 1996 (1996.202.4) Versace confronted two histories, one monumental and one quite recent. The sari represents the grand tradition of wrapping in Indian dress. It is vitiated by the ruptures and their closure with the gargantuan safety pins that allude to Versace's caricatural reference to punk, itself a recent and ephemeral British style.