Warhol Walks Milan

Gianni Versace's Spring 1991 show has a strange advantage over many louder fashion moments from the same period: you can understand it from a distance. The Marilyn faces, the James Dean faces, the colour, the hard outlines, the almost impolite clarity of the image. It doesn't need an explanatory caption before it starts working on you.

That was not the same as being simple. Vogue dates the collection to October 7, 1990, in Milan, and its archive notes how wide Versace's art net was that season: Sonia Delaunay, Victor Vasarely, Russian Constructivists, Vogue covers, Pop culture, all dragged into the same bright room. He gave Vogue the useful sentence himself: "To use art in a flat way, without creative intervention, is in bad taste." I like the defensiveness of that line. It admits the danger. It also tells you he knew exactly where the charge was.

The Warhol-derived Marilyn Monroe and James Dean prints could easily have been a stunt, the kind of museum-shop cleverness that ages before the hanger cools. Instead they became one of the clearest images of the supermodel decade, not because the references were rarefied, but because they were already public. Versace did not borrow Pop Art to look clever. He used it because fame had become material.

That is where the collection sits beside the house's other early-nineties arguments. I wrote about the March 1991 finale as a runway event that made the models feel inseparable from the collection, and about the backstage engineering of a later Versace season in Eight Hands to Get Dressed. Spring 1991 is the print version of the same instinct. The runway isn't merely showing clothes. It is laundering mass imagery through the body until the image looks newly expensive.

The Met's record for a Gianni Versace evening dress from Spring/Summer 1991 is almost comically dry by comparison: silk, glass, gift of Gianni Versace, 1993, Costume Institute object number 1993.52.4. Museum language does that. It turns a screaming dress into catalogue grammar. However, the dryness helps. It reminds me that this was not just a memorable runway photograph drifting around Pinterest; it was an object with weight, material, donor history, and a place in an institutional archive.

Christie's gives the other afterlife. A Gianni Versace Couture suit from the same Spring/Summer 1991 moment, allover Marilyn Monroe and James Dean imagery, with rhinestone and silk embroidery trimming the jacket pockets, sold in the Elizabeth Taylor sale in 2011 for $20,000. That detail feels exactly right. The thing moved from runway to celebrity wardrobe to auction lot, and each stage made the original idea more literal. Fame wearing fame, then fame sold as provenance.

I am wary of calling the collection a collaboration with Warhol, since the interesting part is not a neat artist-designer partnership anyway. The interesting part is how Versace understood repetition. Warhol had already made the famous face into a mechanically repeatable surface. Versace put that surface back onto a moving famous body, and the loop became almost too perfect: Marilyn, Dean, Naomi, Gianni, Taylor, Donatella reissuing the prints in 2018 at the Milan Triennale, the archive learning to sell its own shock back to itself.

Some clothes become historical because they solve a construction problem. Others because they catch a social one before it has proper language. Spring 1991 did the second. It recognised that glamour no longer needed to pretend it was separate from media saturation. The dress could be the magazine, the model, the artwork, the souvenir, and the advertisement in one go. Too much, probably. That was the point.

Sources:

Versace Spring 1991 Ready-to-Wear Collection — Vogue

Gianni Versace, Evening Dress — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A Versace Polychrome Warhol-Inspired Imagery Suit — Christie's

Versace Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear Collection — Vogue