Gianni Versace Epitomizes High Style: This Week’s LiveAuctionTalk.com Topic Rosemary McKittrick is a storyteller. Her weekly art, antiques and collectibles column brings history and artifacts to life.
Santa Fe, June 25, 2009 -- For Gianni Versace fashion and art were one in the same. His career as a designer was about recreating that vision in fabric. A truly “original” take on fashion resulted.
“I like the body. I like to design everything to do with the body,” he said.
Versace’s designs were skin tight, low cut, high slits, and mini-skirts, tailor made for young, edgy women. Colorful. Glitzy. Sensual. Exhibitionist.
Flamboyant design for both men and women--that was Gianni Versace. He dragged fashion out of mothballs and into modernism.
Versace’s career was cut short on July 5, 1997 when he was assassinated in front of his home on South Ocean Drive in Miami Beach. He was 50.
On March 18, Sotheby’s, London, featured furniture and works of art from the home of Versace on the shores of Lake Como, Villa Fontanelle, Moltrasio. The auction house recreated several rooms from Versace’s favorite weekend retreat in its New Bond Street Galleries.
A Breakfront Bookcase; Italian Gilt and Patinated Bronze-Mounted Cherrywood; by Karl Roos; mounts by Giuseppe Spagna after designs by Giuseppe Valadier; circa 1814; sold for $842,892.
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