Reggio di Calabria, the southern Italian port city where Gianni Versace came of age, isn't the sort of place where enviably tasteful women nibble on lunch and devour the most recent issues of Vogue. A small city with a rich Greco-Roman heritage, it has become increasingly downtrodden during the past decades. Growing up there in the 1950s and '60s, Versace witnessed the miserable postwar poverty that filled the streets, but could find elegance in the turquoise Strait of Messina that lay just beyond them. His was a city where Calabrian Mafiosi thrived in all their cheap glamour and children once passed the hours in ancient ruins. Versace's family home neighbored the remains of a Greek temple.
If geography is destiny, then Reggio di Calabria was a fitting birthplace for the Italian designer who built a $1 billion fashion empire on the notion that there should be no barriers between the worlds of high culture and low, no dividing line between the aesthetics of refinement and ostentation. He finished off his splendidly cut couture gowns (costing $20,000-plus) with accoutrements of denim and plastic. During his abbreviated life Versace designed costumes for several operas produced at Milan's fabled La Scala, and outfitted the cast of Miami Vice. He took stately villas and compounds in Milan, Lake Como, Miami Beach and New York City and refurbished them into homes unimaginably ornate.
Versace drew from varied universes in his acquaintances too. His undepletable pool of celebrity friends included everyone from choreographer Maurice Bejart to Princess Diana (with whom he spoke once a week), from Madonna to Lisa Marie Presley. A number of years ago he happily accepted a lunch invitation from Mike Tyson, a longtime Versace fan. At his dinner parties he often liked to have fun with seating arrangements, once placing Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis next to a Milanese soccer goalie.
It was ultimately through his very visible links to the grand and the fallen, the fabulous and semifabulous, that Versace left his most significant cultural legacy. The first designer to use known magazine models at his runway shows in the early '80s and the first to shrewdly place celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Sylvester Stallone in the front rows of his audiences, Versace fused the cults of celebrity and style. The spectacles he created, replete with the blaring sounds of rockers like George Michael and clothes that were just as loud, earned the designer all the publicity they were meant to garner. As a result, he hastened the transformation of fashion from a rarefied interest of the elite into a object of bottomless mass-cultural fascination. Remember, there weren't always MTV style awards or accountants who can identify the faces in Harper's Bazaar or makeup artists with best-selling coffee-table books. "Versace," notes Vogue's European editor-at-large Hamish Bowles, "moved fashion into the public domain in the most strident way."