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Versace
Oroton metal mesh, 1982
This is the fabric that made Versace look like no one else. Gianni developed Oroton, a super-light chain mail, in 1982, and its tiny metal links drape over the body with the slither of silk. Usually in gold or silver, it turned evening dresses into liquid light under a spotlight, and he kept returning to it for the rest of his career, right up to the crosses of his final couture show in 1997. The mesh dress pictured is an early example, from Spring/Summer 1983. If you want one material that sums up Versace glamour, start here.
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Josephs Legende
Versace's costumes for La Scala, Milan, 1982
Gianni's stage career began with costumes for Richard Strauss's ballet at Milan's La Scala in 1982, the same year as Oroton, and the theater never let him go. He became a regular collaborator of La Scala's ballet and went on to dress Maurice Béjart's productions into the 1990s. The costumes matter because they show where the drama on his runways came from: big gestures, rich surfaces and clothes built to be seen from the back of an opera house. Pictured: La Scala's auditorium.
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Versace
Pop Art collection, Spring/Summer 1991
The Warhol Marilyn dress lives here. Working with the Andy Warhol Foundation, Gianni printed the faces of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, taken from Warhol's screen prints, onto his clothes, and set them beside baroque swirls, leopard print and harlequin diamonds. It is Versace at full volume: pop culture treated as high fashion, with nothing toned down for good taste, and the clearest single season for seeing how far his print bravado could go.
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Versace
Supermodel finale, Autumn/Winter 1991
The clothes were short, bright cocktail dresses in red, yellow and black, but the moment is why they are remembered. Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington closed the Milan show lip-syncing to George Michael's "Freedom! '90," the hit whose video had starred them. Gianni turned a catwalk into a pop event and helped make the supermodel the face of the decade; this finale is the image people mean when they talk about Versace in the 1990s. Pictured: a Versace boutique, as no free photo of the finale is available.
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Versace
Baroque print silk shirts, early 1990s
A silk shirt crowded with gold scrolls, Medusa heads and classical ornament is the Versace piece most people picture first. The baroque swirls shouted from his 1991 runways, and the shirts carried them off the catwalk, as much at home in a nightclub as at a premiere. The one shown here, from Spring/Summer 1992, fastens with a gold Medusa button. They are the most wearable way into Gianni's love of classical ornament, and the print that still says Versace from across a room.
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Versace
"Miss S&M" bondage collection, Autumn/Winter 1992
The most daring season Gianni ever sent out. Officially Miss S&M and now known simply as the bondage collection, it brought black leather, studs, dog collars and harness straps into luxury eveningwear and cut them to show plenty of leg. Decades later the harness is an ordinary fashion staple, which shows how far ahead it was. The original harness dresses are extraordinarily rare, so this season is the one collectors of Gianni-era Versace chase hardest.
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Black Versace dress of Elizabeth Hurley
Black safety pin dress, Spring/Summer 1994, worn by Elizabeth Hurley
Perhaps the best-known Versace creation of all. The black dress from the punk-themed Spring/Summer 1994 collection, first shown on the Milan runway, split down the sides and was held together by oversized gold safety pins. When Elizabeth Hurley wore it to the 1994 premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral beside Hugh Grant, she went from almost unknown to front pages around the world overnight, and red-carpet dressing has chased that kind of moment ever since.
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Versace
Madonna's Versace campaigns, 1995
Gianni chose the biggest pop star on earth to wear his clothes in print. Madonna fronted the Spring 1995 campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel, and it went so well that she shot a second for Autumn/Winter with Mario Testino, whose pictures from that July shoot became the cover of her ballad collection Something to Remember that November. The images show the 1995 Versace woman at her sleekest: blond, polished and glamorous, a long way from the punk pins of a year earlier. Pictured: a Versace boutique, as the campaign photographs are not free to show.
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Versace
Atelier Versace vinyl and PVC couture, Autumn/Winter 1995
Couture usually means silk and hand embroidery; Gianni sent out plastic. The Atelier Versace season showed single-color dresses sliced with Perspex, including a form-hugging vinyl dress worn by Karen Mulder under a clear PVC layer shaped like a ballgown. The red suit pictured, with its clear vinyl yoke, comes from the same season. It is the clearest proof that his house couture line, launched in 1989, was a lab for ideas as much as a showcase for craft, and it still looks futuristic three decades on.
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Diana, Princess of Wales
Born
Versace worn by Diana, Princess of Wales, 1996 and 1997
After her divorce, Diana wore more international designers, and Gianni, a friend, dressed her for some of her most visible moments. In 1996 she chose a royal-blue Versace gown for a fundraiser in Sydney and a purple Versace dress for a gala dinner at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, each set off with Jimmy Choo shoes. Pictured is the lilac Atelier Versace skirt suit she wore for her anti-landmines speech at the Red Cross in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1997. These looks show the house dressing a royal with polish rather than shock. She was among the mourners at his funeral that July.
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Versace
Byzantine crosses, Atelier Versace Autumn/Winter 1997
Gianni's last collection, shown at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris on July 6, 1997, nine days before he was killed outside his Miami Beach home. Inspired by the Glory of Byzantium exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, he encrusted gowns with oversized jeweled crosses and set them against his Oroton mesh, and Naomi Campbell closed the show in the final bridal look. Seen now, it reads as a summing-up: classical ornament, metal that moves like cloth and pure theater.
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