By Michael Mittelman
There is a telling detail nestled within the fanfare for London’s vast new Gianni Versace retrospective. It comes from Sir Elton John, a man for whom understatement is a foreign country he has no plans to visit. Speaking of his trove of Versace’s famously baroque silk shirts, he admits, ‘I never wore half of them, I just wanted to hang them. It was like an art installation’.
Here, in this small confession, lies the entire story. Not the story of Versace, whose genius for spectacle and sun-drenched maximalism is well-documented, but the story of us, now. The story of why we feel compelled to put this specific brand of ‘90s swagger under glass in a chilly London archway in 2024. The official narrative, of course, is that this is a timely celebration of a designer who fused fashion with pop culture, birthing the supermodel and draping a generation in Medusa heads and unapologetic gold leaf. This is true, but it is also spectacularly incomplete.
To view this exhibition as a simple history lesson is to miss the point entirely. This is not a retrospective; it is a séance. It is a meticulously curated act of cultural archaeology, an attempt to brush the dust off a time when celebrity felt earned rather than algorithmically assigned, when glamour had a thrilling, almost dangerous, analogue weight. We’re not just looking at clothes. We are staring at the ghost of a national confidence we seem to have mislaid somewhere between the millennium bug and the great sourdough crisis.
The reverence for these artefacts – and with Elton’s blessing, we must call them that – betrays a very British, very contemporary longing. These are not just garments; they are relics from the last party in Pompeii, frozen moments of excess before the great, grey, digital cloud descended.
A More Analogue Glamour
Consider the moment, enshrined in fashion lore, when Gianni sent Naomi, Linda, Christy, and Cindy down the runway lip-syncing to George Michael’s ‘Freedom! ‘91’. It was an event of such colossal, high-voltage charisma that it still radiates heat three decades on. It wasn’t a collaboration, or a brand activation, or a piece of sponsored content. It was a genuine cultural thunderclap, a moment when the tectonic plates of music, fashion, and celebrity slammed together to create a new kind of Olympus.
I confess to being of an age where my teenage bedroom walls were plastered with magazines featuring these very gods and goddesses. Their fame felt vast and untouchable, broadcast from a distant planet of flashbulbs and after-parties. The power of the Versace mythos was that it made this world feel, if not accessible, then at least real. It was happening, somewhere.
What this exhibition truly puts under glass is that bygone ecosystem of fame. Today, celebrity is a diffuse, endlessly streaming commodity. An influencer can be ‘famous’ to seventeen million people you have never heard of, their notoriety generated by a feedback loop of clicks, likes, and fleeting viral challenges. Their uniform is not a £3,000 silk shirt emblazoned with oceanic mythology, but a beige tracksuit from a fast-fashion brand they are being paid to flog for the next twelve hours. The glamour of the Versace era was aspirational; the ‘glamour’ of today is, more often than not, merely transactional.
This London retrospective, then, functions as a kind of cultural decompression chamber. We enter from a world of relentless digital noise and are met with the shocking silence of the object. The weight of the beading on a dress worn by Princess Diana, the impossible architecture of a bondage-inspired gown, the sheer, joyful absurdity of a shirt that looks like it was ripped from a fresco in a Sicilian palace. These things possess a tangible authority that a thousand TikToks cannot replicate. They are, to borrow from the curator’s note, ‘showstoppers’. They stop the show, they stop the scroll, they stop time.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the air in that London Bridge archway feels thick with more than just admiration. It feels thick with nostalgia for a time when Britain, and London in particular, felt like the undisputed centre of that charismatic world. It’s a yearning for the ‘Cool Britannia’ swagger that Versace’s aesthetic seemed to complement so perfectly – bold, a little bit loud, and entirely sure of itself. The exhibition’s arrival, as the UK’s creative industries grapple with funding cuts and the lingering anxieties of Brexit, feels less like a coincidence and more like a diagnosis. We are prescribing ourselves a heavy dose of the ‘90s to cure a very 21st-century malaise.
The Medusa in the Mirror
The whole affair is a bit like a dedicated enthusiast of classical music who amasses a vast collection of vintage vinyl, polishes the album sleeves, frames them, but doesn’t actually own a record player. They are in love with the artefact, with the promise of the music, with the idea of a richer, warmer sound, but they cannot, or will not, engage with it as a living medium. Elton John didn’t wear the shirts; he installed them. And now, we don’t wear the attitude; we exhibit it.
The curators speak of Versace’s ability to mix patterns and colours so that ‘You never looked like a clown, but actually quite sophisticated’. This was his particular magic: he took the gaudy, the loud, the borderline-tacky, and through sheer force of will and impeccable Italian craftsmanship, elevated it into something sublime. It was an act of supreme confidence. Wear this, the clothes seemed to say, and you are not vulgar. You are a god.
Today, that kind of declarative statement feels almost unthinkable. Our cultural output is so often mediated by committees, by brand safety officers, by the fear of offending a sliver of the demographic. We hedge our bets. We soften our edges. Versace never softened a thing in his life. His signature was the Medusa, a figure whose gaze turns mortals to stone. It was a warning and a promise: look at me, and be transfixed.
But as we stand before these vitrines, who is transfixing whom? We look at the clothes, but what we see is a reflection of our own time. We see an era of curated, cautious personal brands staring back at an era of explosive, unapologetic personality. We see a world of decentralised, disposable content gazing upon a world of centralised, enduring iconography.
The exhibition is a triumph, of course. The pieces are magnificent. But its profound cultural resonance comes not from what it says about Gianni Versace, but what it reveals about us. It reveals a culture so saturated with the new that it has become obsessed with the old. A creative capital looking over its shoulder, trying to remember a tune it has forgotten how to play. We have built a beautiful, reverent shrine to a particular kind of boldness, a temple to a lost swagger. We file through, admire the relics, and whisper about the glory days. The Medusa’s gaze, it turns out, doesn’t just transfix; it reflects.
