The Liberace of Style
Gianni Versace was
synonymous with glitz and indecorousness, but he was also a man of great
talent. He makes me think of Liberace, another man of great talent famous for
over-the-top sartorial splendor that made people nervous. Both men were blessed
with a strong capacity for pure delight. There was nothing hostile, rancorous,
weak-minded, or confused in their confident love of extreme display. People
adored them for it.
Also like Liberace,
Versace understood how to wield theatrical magic. Richard Martin, the curator
of the Costume Institute's show and author of the catalog, has stripped the
Versace ensembles of the celebrity aura of their original wearers--Claudia
Schiffer, Princess Diana, etc.--so that the clothes can show their own true
qualities. He's right. Arrayed on dummies, the Versaces have the air of waiting
backstage for their entrance music. Their showbiziness isn't just in the
dramatic fabrics, bold cut, and applied glitter. It is in their look of
heightened self-consciousness--the "get this!" effect that establishes
character. Many of these outfits seem intended for actors in 1940s Bible
spectaculars, or 1950s screen dramas set in the 1920s, or present-day screen
comedies where the clothes exaggerate the roles--the Vamp and the Creep and the
Weirdo and the Bitch. The clothes do the work, the actor could be anybody. Just
right for modern living.
Some of the pieces have been worked up from modes
originally invented for ladies in the 1920s and 1930s by Mme. Grès or Madeleine
Vionnet, for instance--two neoclassic and erotic designers not at all averse to
using bodily exposure--and then fantasticated a few notches further. Versace
tends to twitch the drapes so they hang an extra bit, as if already plucked at
by a lustful hand. A black columnar dress with long sleeves and a neckline up
to the chin in front leaves the whole back bare to well below the waist at one
side. The bareness is enhanced by a drape that seems yanked down on purpose to
expose the bottom 8 inches of skin over the right kidney. Three inches below
that begins the slit in the skirt, opening over the right buttock and
descending to the shoe. This two-stage rear cascade of bare flesh, adroitly
swerving to avoid the cleavage of the buttocks, is invisible from the front.
The face is left to do its work alone.
Versace followed ancient
Italian tradition in his deep love of materials, and that's not just silk,
cotton, linen, and wool but also metal and leather, synthetics and plastic.
Five centuries ago, Italian dress was far more sumptuous, chic, and sexy than
anything French--just look at the striped codpieces in Signorelli paintings.
The Italians taught France everything about daring sartorial elegance--to say
nothing of daring stagecraft, cuisine, and architecture--until Louis XIV was
able to turn around and impose French fashion on all of Europe. Italy had to
wait until after World War II to regain its rightful status as a primary
fashion source. But superior Italian design has never ceased to be expressed in
marble, bronze, and silver, and later in steel and aluminum, in vinyl and
Lucite, in tile and ceramic, in straw, in painted paper and painted plaster.
The relish Versace brings to his clear vinyl dresses strewn with rhinestones,
or to shiny-colored opaque ones punctuated with nifty cutouts, has traditional
bravura and sprezzatura in it, suggesting Bernini at his most outré. The
vulgarity is integral to the glory, just as it is in majolica plates or Puccini
operas.
Sometimes Versace took this spirit too far, into trendy
conceptual play. When he forgets the eye and the body and tries to appeal to
the mind; when he blinds you with too-vivid zebra juxtaposed with too-vivid
leopard so you can't see the dress; or when he overburdens the feminine torso
with a short, floppy, bulky hoop skirt apparently made of hugely printed pastel
silk curtains from a Las Vegas hotel room, topped by a short, bulky blue denim
jacket with big brass buttons, then he starts looking too French, and by that I
mean, theoretical.
In clothing, optical
chaos offered up as carefully unbecoming unbeauty is meant to refer to the idea
of modernism rather than embracing it directly, in bodily terms. What does
embrace both the modern and the body, by contrast, is Versace's sleek, stiff,
short hoop-skirt dress made of briskly clashing silk-print sections in color,
swept with a flowing black-and-white silk-print stole. Here the scale of
warring shapes and prints is attuned to the female shape underneath, so the
result is a modern garment, not a modern sandwich board. Another triumph is the
brilliant leopard-skin-cum-baroque-gold-ornament silk-print scarf, draped into
a closefitting column that turns the wearer into a walking blend of wild beast
and ormolu candlestick. Note how the swirls of gold hit the body over the
breasts, navel, and ovaries, while the leopard's spots slink over the crotch,
thighs, and knees. Yum.
Also yummy is a virtual slip in sparkly white metal mesh,
trimmed top and bottom in sparkly black cotton lace. But the most perfect
garment is a sleeveless black dress of tough synthetic net, ornamented with
inspired beading and delicate black leather appliqués that rise from the hem in
black flames (maybe seaweed) around the thighs and pelvis and descend from the
neckline in uneven black clusters of grapes (maybe clouds) over the breasts and
shoulders. Through the middle, the synthetic net makes moiré patterns as it
moves against the bare midriff.
At the end of the show are
some of Versace's stage costumes for operas and ballets. There we see his
imagination working with mobile combinations of expanded and unearthly human
creatures, covered with color and pattern and accompanied by music, not so very
far from the desired effect in much of real life right now. Versace may have
resembled Liberace, but he was also like Andy Warhol, in that he saw the mythic
capacities of modern tawdriness. He found his own way of expounding them in the
most modern of media, the new eroticized and commercialized arena of high
fashion. Requiescat
in
Pucci .
