oN A CHILLY EVENING IN MILAN IN MARCH 1991, THE AUDIENCE settled into their seats under a heated tent erected in the garden behind Gianni’s palazzo at Via Gesù. Right on time, the house lights went down and the strains of an operatic aria floated out. Soft spotlights fell on four women—Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, and a platinum-haired Linda Evangelista—each clad in a black minidress and thigh-high patent leather boots. As the aria morphed into Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” the models, their hair teased into voluptuous styles, strutted down the white marble runway.
For nearly thirty minutes, one stunning model after another—Helena Christensen, Carla Bruni, Stephanie Seymour, Tatjana Patitz, Dalma Callado—emerged, reveling in Gianni’s latest hairpin-curve collection: Crayola-colored minidresses that flared at forty-five-degree angles from their waists, low-cut catsuits with yellow and blue swirls on their smooth flanks, and bejeweled bra tops combined with short skirts. Bluish lights made the models’ young skin glow against the Technicolor clothes. The photographers crouching along the length of the runway let out approving wolf whistles as Gianni sent out five or six models at a time.
Then, after an imperceptible pause, the music shifted again, and George Michael’s “Freedom” rose over the sound system. Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Cindy Crawford stepped onto the runway together, wearing little Empire dresses with sweetheart necklines in black, red, and yellow. Arm in arm, the quartet strode down the stage followed by a bright spotlight, lip-synching the song and smiling broadly.
A roar went up from the audience and a hundred flashbulbs exploded as the photographers recognized the shot of the season. A few months earlier, George Michael had featured the four models in a six-minute video for his hit song. The clip, with lush images of Cindy lounging in a bathtub and Naomi dancing languidly, had become the hottest video of the year. The women’s fame had been soaring over the past year. Gianni’s spectacular show took the four and pushed them—and him—to a new peak. Gianni was not just dressing celebrities but also making celebrities of the models who wore his clothes.
Until about 1990, top models like Naomi, Christy, and Linda wouldn’t have dreamed of walking a runway. Traditionally, modeling was divided into two separate camps. Runway models had bodies—good shoulders, small waists, boyishly slim hips, and extra long legs—that flattered designers’ clothes, but their faces usually weren’t pretty enough to appear in magazine ads. In turn, the models who did the magazines had gorgeous faces but were rarely thin and long enough to carry off tiny runway samples. Moreover, designers paid far too little to tempt the women onto the runway. In the late 1980s, Christy earned about $800,000 for twelve days’ work selling Maybelline cosmetics.1 A Milan fashion show paid about 1.5 million lire, the equivalent of $1,000. All the urgency and sweat of a live runway show wasn’t worth the top models’ time and money.
But Donatella, already busily seducing celebrities into the Versace fold, spotted an opportunity. In the late 1980s, she recognized that a trio of new women—Christy, Naomi, and Linda—were attracting media attention in a way that had never occurred for models before. Looking for new fodder, celebrity reporters turned their sights on the three new models, who were quickly dubbed “the trinity.”
The first of the three to be discovered had been Christy, a California-born daughter of a pilot and a former flight attendant of Salvadoran descent. With clean, intelligent looks that exemplified an idea of sophisticated American beauty, she became a favorite of Steven Meisel, an edgy photographer who was a protégé of Anna Wintour. The second, Linda, the daughter of a General Motors auto plant worker in Ontario who had sleek catlike looks, had seen her career take off after marrying the head of a powerful modeling agency, who promoted her to the top photographers, particularly Meisel.
The third woman, the youngest by several years, would one day eclipse her sisters to become a true superstar. Born on the wrong side of the Thames River in south London, Naomi Campbell was raised by a single mother, an exotic dancer of Jamaican origin. As a teen, she aspired to become a dancer herself, and her mother scrimped to send her willowy daughter to dance school in central London. One day in 1985, when Naomi was buying tap shoes in London’s West End, a model agent spotted the fifteen-year-old. When she got a glimpse of Naomi’s warm, toffee-colored skin, Asian eyes, and thousand-watt smile, lightning struck. Not long after, Naomi made her debut in the British edition of Elle. She had turned up at the shoot with just two smudgy Polaroids, but the editor was bewitched.
Soon after, at a shoot in London, Naomi met Christy. “She was in a high school uniform,” Christy recalled later. “She was really cute.”2 When Naomi moved to New York, Christy helped her meet the top magazine editors and photographers, including Meisel. By 1988, Meisel began shooting Naomi, Christy, and Linda together. It was a potent mix. Not all models look right together, but these women’s different looks complemented one another. Soon magazines were booking them together.
By then, Naomi was becoming a darling of New York’s nightlife, hitting as many as five parties and clubs in an evening and drawing tabloid attention for her colorful personal life. In 1987, at just seventeen, she met heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, and they secretly began dating. When she made their relationship official by appearing ringside at one of his fights in early 1989, the media interest was tremendous. If her affair with Tyson nudged her into the media glare, her subsequent relationship with Robert De Niro put her there full-time. In September 1990, she became the first black woman to grace the cover of the September issue of Vogue, the most important issue of the year, with its feature on fall fashion.3 To the paparazzi’s delight, Naomi, Christy, and Linda often hit the clubs together.
Christy introduced Naomi to Donatella, who saw that the models offered a golden opportunity if she could tap the tabloids’ insatiable interest in them for her own purposes. Moreover, the trio’s popularity with the most influential photographers and magazine editors was the ticket to goosing editorial coverage of her brother’s clothes in America.
“Gianni, we have to bring these girls over for the runway shows,” she told him excitedly after returning home from one trip to New York. “They are incredibly hot. We have to book them for the shows.”
“You must be nuts!” he told his sister. “Look at them! They don’t have the bodies for the runway. How would I ever dress them?”4 Indeed, all three women had ample breasts, hips, and bottoms—nothing like traditional catwalk models. They also had no idea how to do the quirky runway walk, where a woman slings her hips forward and keeps her buttocks tucked tightly under. Compounding the issue was their agents’ resistance to Donatella’s offer.
“It was nearly impossible to get the girls to come over because the pay was so low and because a lot of the girls were too big,” said David Brown, a top model agent who started working in Milan in 1981. “Plus, the runway shows weren’t important in terms of publicity for them.”5
But Donatella’s sixth sense was right. According to Nunzio Palamara, an early Versace employee, “Donatella was always traveling, while Gianni went to Como for the weekend. It was Donatella who brought Kate Moss,” the famously waifish British model. “Gianni said, ‘Who is this shrimp?’ And Donatella said, ‘You’ll see. In two years, you’ll be asking me to get her at any cost.’”6
Donatella began lobbying the three models’ agents, promising triple and beyond the going rate for runway shows. She had by then become friendly with the trinity, hitting the clubs and parties with them in New York. She promised them perks unheard of for models: flights in the Concorde, the best suites (never a simple room) at Milan’s five-star hotels, free clothes, cars, and drivers at their disposal. Once she got them to visit Milan, Donatella treated them to a few days in the luxury of Villa Fontanelle, parties and dinners at her private apartment, and nights out at Milan’s hottest discotheques. The women soon acquiesced.
Their appearance in Versace’s shows ushered in what would become the supermodel era, making them first-name-only famous. To this Rat Pack, Donatella added other models: Carla Bruni, Helena Christensen, Claudia Schiffer (an ethereal German blonde whose agent had refused to let her appear in George Michael’s “Freedom” video), and Cindy Crawford. Not all of the women were naturals on the runway: Despite the best efforts of Versace’s team, they couldn’t break Schiffer of her awkward lope.
“We used to have to put Claudia in flat shoes because she didn’t know how to walk,” Angelo Azzena said. “She was an ugly duckling. She would get to the end of the runway, make her turn, and it was like, ‘Where am I?’ But Gianni didn’t care. She was on the cover of American Vogue.”7
Soon after the March 1991 show, Gianni and Donatella began squeezing every bit of juice out of the supermodel phenomenon. They staged bread-and-circus shows for the press in which they would send as many as six supermodels down the runway at once. Gianni hired photographers to take shots of him with the models backstage in their showstopping dresses alongside their Versace-clad famous boyfriends—images his press office fed to eager newspapers. The supermodels and celebrities would then head next door for a party at Gianni’s home, where the powerful editors of magazines had an up-close-and-personal view of the couture dresses in all their glory.
“There was champagne and caviar everywhere, and the girls were there with their celebrity boyfriends,” recalled one fashion journalist. “Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield, Stephanie Seymour and Axl Rose, Linda Evangelista and Kyle MacLachlan. The buzz was amazing.”8
The models adored the exuberant Gianni, who treated them like princesses, flattering and joking with them backstage. While other designers paid little attention to their models, Gianni personally thanked each of them after a show. “Sei bellissima!” (“You are so beautiful!”) he told one after another, pulling them over to join him while he gave television interviews. He surprised them with gifts for their birthdays and wrote them warm notes when they had personal problems. Donatella sent them to the boutique on Via Montenapoleone, where they giddily grabbed armfuls of free dresses. (Designers doled out so many free dresses to the models that most of them had racks of unworn clothes in their closets, the tags still hanging from them.)
“I understand them,” Donatella said of her models after a 1995 party she threw in the Ritz discotheque to celebrate them. “Linda is the most difficult—she has to have her say on everything, from the light to the photographer. But with me, she’s wonderful.”9
Egged on by Donatella, Gianni paid the top models as much as fifty thousand dollars to appear exclusively on his catwalk, sending the total cost of an individual show to hundreds of thousands of dollars, including travel, hotels, and free clothes. Other designers complained bitterly that Gianni was driving the costs up for everyone. His shows were getting so much press that everyone had to play the same game. Armani, in particular, found Gianni’s supermodel fixation vexing. He scrupulously chose anonymous models who would never eclipse his clothes. Years earlier, he had hired Iman, the splendid Somalian model, for one show, but he abruptly canceled her for a second show when he saw that the audience paid more attention to her than the Armani clothes she was wearing.10 “I refuse to pay figures like that,” Armani snapped to journalists in 1994. “It’s an ethical question. There are people who live for an entire year on amounts like that.”11
The models abetted the cost escalation. “Gianni had endless pots of money,” said Carole White, Naomi’s agent at the time. “The Concorde became a status symbol. An agent would say to a designer, ‘Well, Gianni is Concording her in. Why can’t you?’ These girls got anything they wanted.”12 In the end, most designers couldn’t resist the frenzied press coverage that came with the supermodels. (After one Chanel show, Schiffer needed four bodyguards to fend off the paparazzi and reach her car.13) So a bidding war ensued.
“It got bigger and bigger because they were outbidding themselves,” recalled Christy. “Every year I thought, I can’t make more than this, but every year I almost doubled my income.”14
The models’ agents began demanding that magazines name the models in the photos, and they wanted approval over photographers, makeup artists, and hairdressers. In the September 1991 issue of Vogue, Linda alone had thirty pages and the cover. “We don’t vogue—we are Vogue,” she told a magazine that year. “We have this expression, Christy and I: We don’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars a day.”
While that last remark brought down a rain of catcalls, for Gianni the glorification of the supermodel did more to entice the American public than millions of dollars in advertising could achieve.
“Before, it was, ‘Who is this Versace guy?’” said celebrity stylist Wayne Scot Lukas. “They used to pronounce his name Ver-sayse. But then people knew him because those girls who wouldn’t get up for less than ten thousand dollars a day chose his clothes. The lifestyle of these people made it something really fabulous.15
Of the original trinity, Gianni’s favorite was Naomi Campbell. She became a muse for him. On her lithe five-foot-nine frame and pert thirty-four-inch bust, his show-stopping dresses looked fabulous. Her dance training helped her move like a natural star on Gianni’s runway, her slinky walk beyond compare. “She’s simply the greatest catwalk model ever,” said one fashion editor. “When she’s on the runway, you literally cannot take your eyes off her.”16
But Naomi was notoriously difficult to deal with. Over the years, her tantrums were breathtaking in their vitriol and violence. Several personal assistants charged that she was violent and abusive with them. Court-ordered anger-management classes had little effect on the belligerent supermodel. Once, when yet another assistant sued her for assault, Naomi posed for paparazzi wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Naomi Hit Me” across the front.
After enduring her many demands, Naomi’s agents lost their patience. When she decided to dump one agent, he blasted her publicly. “No amount of money or prestige could further justify the abuse that has been imposed on our staff and clients,” he wrote in a press release. But the constant blaze of headlines about her latest dustup or new celebrity boyfriend—among them U2 bassist Adam Clayton, Sylvester Stallone, and Eric Clapton—only served to jack up her notoriety. And the more outlandish her behavior, the more she earned. Her burgeoning drug habit amplified her volatile personality. She first tried coke when she was twenty-four while attending a concert. “It made me feel invincible, like I could conquer the world,” she once said. But in the 1990s, her habit would worsen.17
With Gianni, Naomi was different. She felt coddled and protected by Gianni and the Versace clan. He invited her to the villa in Como when he thought she needed some rest. He tended to her personally backstage before a show. Once, he hired the DJ from a hot Milan disco popular with the supermodels to come to Via Gesù to entertain Naomi and the others at home. In turn, she never turned up late for his shows and spared him her explosive temper.
“She trusted Gianni totally, which for Naomi was a big deal,” said White. “She wants to be looked after and loved and he did that. He gave her the attention she craved.”18
“Gianni was wonderful to us,” Naomi recalled. “He fed us, he used to ask us if we felt okay, if we needed any help. He didn’t treat us like cattle. He treated us like individuals. If something didn’t fit or the shoes hurt, we could tell him. I used to get so nervous for his shows because I wanted to do my best for him.”19
Naomi and Donatella were close. Naomi sent Donatella to her hairdresser in New York, who did weaves and extensions for such stars as Iman and Whitney Houston. Once, at about 2 a.m. the night before a Versace show, Naomi was coming back to the Four Seasons with Linda Evangelista when she bashed into a glass door and broke a tooth.
“When Linda saw me, she started to freak,” Naomi recalled. “They wouldn’t let me look in the mirror and kept telling me it was only chipped. But it was broken half off.” The two women immediately called Gianni and Donatella.
“The next thing I knew, Gianni and Donatella were standing over me looking at my tooth,” Naomi said. Even in the middle of the night, “Donatella was dressed immaculately in this patent leather trench coat.”20 Donatella promptly got her own dentist out of bed at dawn and insisted he see Naomi right away. At the dentist’s office, Donatella, Naomi’s agent, and a Versace bodyguard were sitting outside the examination room when they heard a ruckus inside. A nurse, clearly shaken up, emerged. “I think someone had better come in,” she said. Donatella rushed in to find Naomi trying to wriggle out of the dentist’s chair as the doctor approached with a large needle. “Help! Help!” she screamed. Donatella managed to calm Naomi down enough for the dentist to cap her tooth. Later that day, she looked perfect on the runway.21
In 1994, one lucky event showed just how powerful the mix of models, celebrity, and high fashion could be in Gianni’s hands. That year, Gianni had an idea for a little black dress with daring slits, and he had his seamstresses cut one frock from under the arm down to the hip on each side. A seamstress used safety pins to hold the sides of the dress together on the mannequin while she worked. Gianni was struck by the effect. He had an assistant make oversized gilt safety pins with medusa heads stamped on the closures. He placed the pins along the sides of the dress and down the front of the deep décolleté. With the precariously placed safety pins and deep slashes, the dress was a coy, punk-inspired interpretation of the classic little black dress, a mix of high style and tough street fashion.
Versace PR people sent the collection to London to be photographed by the UK magazines. One day, Phyllis Walters, Versace’s publicist in London, heard from a friend who worked in public relations and was trying to drum up publicity for the red-carpet premiere that evening of a small new film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. “There is this rather good-looking guy who is starring in the film,” she told Phyllis. “His name is Hugh Grant. What do you think about dressing him tonight?”22
Walters had Grant try on several Versace tuxedos, but none fit because the actor was quite thin at the time. But Grant had brought along his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley, a little-known model. “Is there anything here that I could wear tonight?” she asked, rummaging through the rack of clothes in Walters’s office. She pulled out the safety pin dress and put it on. Walters and her assistants stopped to stare. Hurley looked stunning. The sample had been worn on the runway by Helena Christensen. Hurley, at five foot eight, had a similar figure, with an ample bust, flat stomach, and slim hips.
“We were all staring at her,” Walters recalled. “She had no makeup on, her hair was tied back. She was in flat shoes. But she looked absolutely amazing.” Walters immediately phoned two paparazzi photographers. “Listen, I know you’re going to be looking for Hugh, but you need to focus on the girlfriend,” she told them. “I promise you. You’ll make a fortune.”
The paps got the shot of Hurley, wearing an I-can’t-believe-it smile, in the showstopping dress. Next to her, Grant peered down at her, appearing slightly baffled as to how she got into the gown. The photo made the front pages of newspapers around the world, turning an unexceptional film premiere into a memorable media event.
“When Gianni saw the photos, he said, ‘Who on earth is this?’” Angelo Azzena remembered. “I thought he would be angry, but instead he was thrilled. Liz became famous. We made her famous.”23 The free publicity for Versace was priceless, and the safety-pin frock became one of the most famous little black dresses in fashion history. At Gianni’s next show, Grant and Hurley sat in the front row, dressed head to toe in Versace.
By the time Hurley and Grant sat in Gianni’s front row, Gianni’s show was the undisputed high point of Milan’s fashion week. He began staging them in the courtyard of Via Gesù, where he had an elaborate ten-meter-high iron-and-Plexiglas canopy mounted over a long runway. Gilt chairs with multicolored cushions were squeezed in tight. On each chair sat a slick catalog with photos from Versace ad shoots and celebrity pictures. The catalogs were so popular that fans waited after the show to beg guests for their copies.
Outside, a pristine red carpet rolled like a tongue from the doors of the palazzo to the curb, with klieg lights mounted on either side. Beefy men in tight black T-shirts attempted to herd the waiting photographers into a secure formation, as one dark Mercedes after another pulled up, unloading the celebrity of the moment. Gianni could have had them arrive through the palazzo’s back door, but he understood the PR value of having them run the gauntlet of photographers and gawkers. Gianni’s show was often the week’s finale, and guests could relax at Via Gesù after the grueling marathon. While Armani showed during the afternoon because his collection was heavy on day suits and dresses, Versace, with his abundance of cocktail dresses and evening gowns, always showed in the evening, adding to the festive air.
The buzz on the night of his shows was tremendous. Fans hoping for a glimpse of a supermodel or a celebrity ran up and down Via Gesù, from his headquarters to the neighboring Four Seasons Hotel, which, with its fifteenth-century frescoes and standing box at La Scala available to guests, was in such demand from the fashion crowd that the desk discreetly discouraged other travelers from booking that week. Bouquets of flowers overflowed from editors’ and buyers’ suites into the hallway outside. Row after row of embossed shopping bags of expensive gifts filled the lobby. Gianni often had a dress or a day suit waiting in the suite of an important guest, laid out with shoes and a bag, ready to wear to his show. Elton John sometimes thrilled guests by playing the black grand piano in the hotel’s plush lobby. Since Gianni had to stage as many as three shows to meet demand, the supermodels, in full makeup and sexy evening gowns, sprawled on the deep easy chairs in the lobby between one show and another, drawing a crowd of admirers.
The era was ripe for an entrepreneur like Gianni Versace. The 1990s would be a feast for fashion, as the sudden wealth of the New Economy, globalization, and the explosion of international media combined to give the industry a sharp jolt of growth. While all boom times generate demand for baubles, the nouveaux riches of the 1990s were particularly young and demanded hipper, flashier symbols of their success. The spreading wealth of the Internet economy meant that even the middle class started to trade up to higher levels of quality and taste. At the same time, cheaper and cheaper airline tickets brought hordes of American and Japanese shoppers to Europe, where they got a close-up look at the easy élan of European clothes, shoes, and bags. The traveling shoppers spread the word back home, ratcheting up demand for European labels. American Vogue, which traditionally focused on American designers, began giving European houses much more coverage. By the middle of the decade, the global luxury goods sector was growing by as much as 30 percent annually.
Press coverage of fashion was also expanding enormously. By the early 1990s, there were fifteen hundred runway shows in the four fashion capitals—New York, Paris, Milan, and London—with hundreds of journalists covering each one.24 The Internet, magazines, and new television programs focusing on fashion brought once-distant foreign names to the living rooms of shoppers around the world. Internet sites such as Vogue’s Style.com broadcast the runway shows in their entirety (along with shots of the after parties and celebrity guests) just hours after the lights went down. The media surge brought pictures of runway shows and fashionable baubles to countries such as South Korea, Russia, and Brazil just as their national incomes were soaring.
Gianni’s embrace of fashion as high entertainment was perfect for the times. Media showmanship had become indispensable to fashion, and Gianni was a virtuoso performer. His appropriation of everything from fine art to rock music and dance—whipped up with a strong dash of celebrity—was a feast for the media and their voracious appetite for showy images. He would become the first true superstar designer, opening the door for the likes of Tom Ford, Stella McCartney, and John Galliano. (By the mid-1990s, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of luxury goods giant LVMH, emulated Gianni by hiring John Galliano and Alexander McQueen—two technically brilliant designers with a flair for shocking the establishment—to shake up Christian Dior and Givenchy.)
“Versace knew that fashion could participate in the great Gesamtkunstwerk”—a great mixing of art forms—“of the end of the millennium that had recruited equal parts of rock, special effects, the cult of personality, and unadulterated eroticism,” wrote fashion critic Richard Martin.25
Gianni primed it all with lavish spending on advertising. At its peak in the mid-1990s, Versace bought about three thousand pages of magazine advertising a year, often taking out nearly a dozen consecutive pages in a single issue. He once had a compact disc made of music from a runway show and paid for several magazines, including Rolling Stone, to carry it as an insert, along with a minicatalog of photos. In the late 1980s, Gianni had adopted a freewheeling approach to mixing advertising and editorial coverage in fashion magazines. He hired photographers that most publications (particularly those in Europe) couldn’t dream of hiring and had them take scores of extra photos. Gianni then offered the shots to newspapers and magazines, who happily published them as editorial layouts. His press office pushed the magazines to run the images just before an ad campaign broke, creating a seamless stream of Versace propaganda. Editors often put a model wearing Versace on the cover just to persuade Gianni to buy ads.
As a result, a single edition of a glossy magazine was often brimming with Versace images, between the advertisements and editorial spreads, all projecting Gianni’s chosen image or star of the season.
“Versace pioneered the whole ‘I’ll give you my ad campaign if you make it look like an editorial’ thing, which the American press didn’t buy but the European press went crazy for,” said Patrick McCarthy, executive editor of Women’s Wear Daily and W Magazine. “The London Sunday Times was running Avedon’s pictures of Elton John in Versace on the cover, as editorial. You’d see a magazine with a Versace on the cover, and Versace would have given them the picture, taken the picture, paid for the picture.”26
Gianni usually played the good cop, charming the top editors of the fashion magazines to convince them to use his clothes. In turn, Emanuela Schmeidler, his longtime head of public relations, played the bad cop if she thought Versace wasn’t getting editorial coverage commensurate with the house’s ad spending. By the mid-1990s, Schmeidler was a legend in fashion circles, infamous for her aggressive treatment of journalists. Lean, with catlike features, a fake-bake tan, and long auburn hair that was always freshly blown out, she dressed like a walking billboard for Versace.
“When I was at New York magazine, I did this story on the communications directors at the various houses,” Anna Wintour recalled. “I remember doing the girl at Versace and it was head-to-toe suede. That’s what we started knowing Gianni for. It was full on, everything matched.”27
As Gianni’s shows became a must-see for journalists, Schmeidler wielded her power like a blunt ax. Once she assigned two top editors from a leading magazine to the same seat at a fashion show. When an associate protested, Schmeidler snorted. “They are very thin,” she said in heavily accented English. “They will both fit.”28
But Schmeidler was unstinting in the crucial game of lavishing attention on editors who might feature Gianni’s clothes in their magazines. In 1994, when Vicki Woods, then editor of Harpers & Queen, admired a skinny slithery gold mesh dress that Schmeidler wore to a Versace event in London, Schmeidler asked immediately, “You like my dress? I send you one.”
Woods laughed. “Emanuela, you don’t have one big enough for me,” she replied.
“Give me your size,” Schmeidler shot back. When Woods told her, Schmeidler, who often marveled at the pear-shaped figures of many British editors, winced theatrically. Woods promptly forgot the exchange.
A few months later, a deliveryman arrived bearing two huge boxes. Inside, buried in layers of ribbons and crinkly tissue, lay a gold metal mesh skirt and matching top, a copy of Schmeidler’s outfit, but cut much larger—or “eased,” in fashion parlance—around the chest and thighs. In the other box was a black barathea dinner jacket with silk lapels and medusa-head buttons, cut long enough to cover an ample bottom. “With love, Gianni,” read a little note. Such a couture outfit would sell for twenty thousand pounds, Woods reckoned. The editor stood before it agog.29
Gianni’s campaign to remake fashion, and to capitalize on his creativity worldwide, was succeeding brilliantly. Thousands of pages of advertising, the models caught in bacchanalian poses, appeared every year in the top magazines, shot by the world’s best photographers. The world’s foremost celebrities such as Madonna, Prince, and Sting filled his front rows, wore his camera-ready clothes to red-carpet events, appeared in his advertising, vacationed in his homes, and recorded music for his shows. The women on the catwalk were famous in a way that models would never be again. And Gianni had proved himself the superman of fashion.