Exposition Art Blog: Art & Fashion - Versace Women's Spring Summer 2018

Art & Fashion - Versace Women's Spring Summer 2018

  "Donatella Versace cried at rehearsals the night before her tribute show to her brother Gianni, she said. “So today, I won’t.” By now, what happened has been documented thousand-fold on social media: the curtain draw, the fabulous five lined up in their gold dresses to their personal anthem, George Michael's Freedom: Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen. The supermodels didn’t hesitate to accept Donatella’s invitation to celebrate the life and work of Gianni Versace, she said, in a show that marked the twentieth anniversary of his tragic death. “I finally found the courage to really go to the archives and pay tribute to Gianni,” Donatella explained in a small gathering before the show, noting that “it took a bit of pain” to get to a place where she was comfortable dealing with his legacy. “In one show you can’t really touch on everything Gianni did.” But she did her utmost, in twelve segments presented by current top models clad in outfits covered in her brother’s original prints. “Gianni was joy, he was happiness, full of life; and these prints were a big part of his personality,” Donatella said.







  The prints drew on collections from 1991 to 1995, but it was the monumental spirit of the really early 1990s that filled the air of this tribute show: a time of unchartered territories, when Gianni was pulling up the roots of bourgeois “good taste” and shifting the paradigms with what Donatella called “take-it-or-leave-it, jaw-dropping, in-your-face sassiness.” It was a time when supermodels were forged, when mannequins became more than just that, and influential people from the arts and beyond came together - Gianni, Elton John, George Michael, Madonna, Princess Diana. It’s 26 years since the show that came to rule them all, autumn/winter 1991’s baroque collection, which saw Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista walk arm-in-arm down Versace’s runway for the finale, and where the designer premiered his swirly, golden baroque print. On Friday evening in her optical white space at the Triennale, Donatella opened her tribute show with that print, passing the baton to a new generation of girls she said are finally reflecting some of the character of the supes."(vogue.co.uk)











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