May 2, 2018 |
Back in the 1970s I was living in Rome and working with a couturier called Pino Lancetti. Now dead, he was considered one of the very best of the dwindling number of Roman couturiers still working, and I learnt everything about the cutting of clothes from him. But even then, ready-to-wear was a force in Italian fashion and it was clear that couture had, pro temp, had its day.
What interested me about this dual Italian fashion scene was that much of the new creative vitality of ready-to-wear came not only from established individual designers heading up their own labels, such as Missoni, Krizia and Fendi, but also the peripatetic stylists who worked by the season for ready-to-wear labels in a mutually advantageous contract, whereby they provided the ideas and the manufacturer did the rest. These stylists played a very valuable role in establishing the chain of fashion for ready-to-wear. The company paid them well and their names became part of the cool Italian scene. Gianni Versace was one of the most prolific and influential in his work for labels such as Genny, Callaghan and Alma during the 1970s and it was no surprise, in 1978, when Gianni’s elder brother, Santo, inaugurated the family company under Gianni’s name.
And Gianni was very much ready for it. He had a great deal of ambition. It had started back in Reggio Calabria, in southern Italy, where his mother was a well-known and respected dressmaker. Gianni was born in December 1946, a bleak and difficult time for all of Europe, as nations began the long haul to pull together their war-ruined cities. In Italy, it was a time of tension between north and south. The north was industrialised, the south was, as it had always been, an agricultural subculture in which peasant farmers could barely make ends meet. There was hardly an organised fashion-garment industry, which meant that most wealthy women had to buy cheap and shoddy clothes either in the few fashion shops that had reopened after the war or from market stalls and barrows.
The Versace family were able to sidestep this path. Gianni’s mother was a very successful businesswoman, with most of her regular clients coming from the higher echelons of local society. Gianni remembered, even when he was a successful world name, running home from school one afternoon to see Mrs Ippolito – one of his mother’s grandest customers – being fitted for a black dress. He was probably no more than nine at the time, but he recalled the excitement he felt as he pushed open the shop door. He wasn’t interested in school and preferred to sit, watching his mother at work. She was the person he revered more than any of the fashion folk he met around the world during his adult career. His gift of fashion was so obvious to his mother that, by the time he was a teenager, she allowed him to travel alone to London and Paris to buy clothes for the shop.
In 1972, as soon as he was old enough, he went north, looking for design work. He was soon backed by Genny as a designer and Callaghan, which was based in Bologna. He very quickly knew he had the confidence to create his own company. He was, as Diana Vreeland once described the Italians to me, “ready to prance”. As his collections, like nothing anywhere else, began to appear, the results were electric. At that time I was working for Laura Biagiotti, but I dreamt of getting a job – any job! – at Versace. No hope, of course, especially as Gianni spoke only a small amount of English and my Italian was truly dire. But I watched his rise and rise with excitement. I also heard the vicious gossip people in rival fashion houses spread. Yet everybody knew that Gianni Versace was already the leading star in Milan’s fashion firmament. To my youthful eyes, he made the collections of some of the other Italian star designers look rather pedestrian, if not repetitive and boring.
He was an original, ready to try anything that would keep fashion alive and vital. Watching every innovation he popped up with – each one more exciting than the last – I began to wonder why he was so bold and fearlessly determined to push forward the taste levels. By using his imagination, he started to think in terms of vibrant, strong colours. Then came unexpected materials – rubber and metal mesh for dresses; brilliant clashes of pattern and colour; and of course, “the Girls”, sexier and more tantalising than any models seen before. Linda Evangelista… Christy Turlington… Claudia Schiffer… Naomi Campbell… soon to be known as supermodels. In fairness, although Gianni made the girls famous around the world, many people believe that the late Azzedine Alaïa used them first for his shows, but as they were very private affairs, they were an insider’s secret. The association with Gianni made their name and also his; it was his boldest move.
Most advertising and promotional shoots for Milan fashions were shot by tried and trusted European and especially Italian photographers, but they did not have the worldwide renown of New York photographers, who were able to demand large sums of money to work with an Italian fashion house. Despite the newness of his name, Gianni had the chutzpah to approach Richard Avedon, one of the most famous fashion photographers. Shortly after his “supermodel” show in March 1991, Gianni was working with Avedon, to be followed by Irving Penn and Herb Ritts. No wonder Polly Mellen, grande dame of American Vogue, summed up the deal in two words: “Gianni DARES!”
I left Rome to return to England, but I still followed Gianni’s march to the top and I realised that he was totally different from his fellow Italian designers. And it wasn’t just his amazing confidence, it was also the breadth of his interests. He provided costumes and sets for ballets, most notably those of Maurice Béjart, for dancers such as Zizi Jeanmaire and her husband, Roland Petit, and being an Italian, for opera productions.
Gianni wanted women to wear his clothes with joy and excitement. And, as is so often the case, the elements that made it happen were there, ready: the colour, the Renaissance influences, the boldness of the shapes but, above all, the GIRLS. It was something completely new, and although there were many cries of outrage, his way was the one pulsating with confidence, as even his critics knew.
Girls… clothes… colour… music… It was a template for the future of fashion.
In hindsight, Gianni did so much for fashion, even if, at the time, quite a few people were doubtful and even distressed – as they frequently were with Yves Saint Laurent, with whom Gianni had more in common than any other designer. Both of them had the vision to ignore the obvious; both had the ability to produce collections that precisely summed up the zeitgeist; and, above all, both had the skills to excite women who had neither the money nor the figure to wear their runway clothes but who were nevertheless thrilled by the way the clothes were so strong.
Gianni had the confidence of the assured creator, who learnt all he felt he needed to know from his mother, the person all Italian boys know they can trust. In March 1996, The New York Times noted that he had dedicated his most recent collection to women who “listen to classical music but enjoy rock”. He managed to get New York’s “uptown gals” lunching at the top restaurants wearing Versace jeans with a Chanel jacket.
Famously energetic and involved in everything around him, Gianni once said, “I don’t care for half measures. I believe in making clear-cut choices.” Even as early as the late 1970s, his label was priced not only for its power and authority but its “wham bam thank you ma’am” freedom that appeals hugely to the American market. Although he never said this, it can be taken as read that he was designing for super-informed fashion followers who knew why they were wearing Versace and how to do it. It has been pointed out that although they were sexy, his clothes had grace as well as power.
I would say that he transformed the world idea of what Milan fashion could be, although the cool elegance of Giorgio Armani and the late Gianfranco Ferré’s mastery of cut held their own. But it is Gianni who understood the artistic heritage of his country, going right back to the days of his childhood in southern Italy, when pieces of Greek statues could be picked up in the streets where he and his friends played. The Medusa head, the classic key border, the rich Renaissance colours, the complex monumentality of the baroque embroideries – his vocabulary of design remained all around him, reflecting his country’s unrivalled cultural background that stretches back centuries.
As everyone knows, on July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace was murdered in the early-morning Miami sunshine. No warning. No time to escape. But he left us a marvellous archive and his sister, Donatella, has refocused the Versace brand in his own image, while not forgetting what she helped him build for the family. For Milan. For Italy. And for the future of the Versace label.
Text Colin McDowell
Illustration Stephen Doherty
Taken from the latest issue of 10 Magazine, ALAÏA, SHIFT, POWER, NEW, on newsstands now…
