In 1997 the fashion designer Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his Miami home. Fashion Victim tells the strange story of Versace's rise to fame and subsequent murder.
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Commissioner's
Comment Nick Fraser
Storyville Series Editor
On the day Gianni Versace left his Miami beach mansion to buy some magazines he was shot three times at close range by Andrew Cunanan, a serial killer of whom the FBI had been hunting across US for the past month.
Gianni Versace's death was unusual even by the standards of his gaudy life. "Fashion designers aren't usually murdered," exclaims the editor of Paris Vogue, Joan Juliet Buck. "They usually die quietly in their bed at the age of 87."
This film appeals to me because it encapsulates the full vulgarity of an era that suddenly seems closed to us. One can only feel emotions of awe at the scale of Versace's' decadence. But his clothes were widely worn, and they continue to offer an indispensable notion of glamour to fashion victims throughout the world.
But what of Cunanan's part in this? Born of Phillipino parents, a drifter besotted with glamour, who became a prostitute and then supported his lifestyle by selling drugs... he had met Versace only once in his life.
It seems that he killed the designer to obliterate something that he had once aspired to and could no longer command. Look on this wreckage and remember what, for the rich of the world, the 90s were really like.
