Spirit of Giving at Versace Show

The Gianni Versace show was the fifth annual fund-raiser sponsored by the California Fashion Industry Friends of AIDS Project Los Angeles. And it was by far the most successful. Tickets, sold out in advance, brought in $500,000.

Michael Anketell, a founder of the APLA fashion event, says a total of $2 million was raised in the first four years. The money goes to APLA’s Necessities of Life program, which supplies free food, clothing and medical care to AIDS and ARC patients.

This year for the first time, most of the evening’s expenses were covered by donations. Even the Century Plaza Hotel, where the black-tie dinner and show have been held four out of five times, got into the spirit of giving with $75,000 credit for food costs.

In addition, for the first time, the organization received a number of unexpected cash donations of several thousand dollars each. Several came from Los Angeles designers, including Nancy Heller and Carole Little and Leonard Rabinowitz of St. Tropez West, who have supported the event from the start. Another surprise donation, a five-figure check, came from Italian designer Giorgio Armani, long considered Versace’s archrival.

But Versace himself paid for the lion’s share of the evening’s expenses. He supplied everything from the fabric used for tablecloths, napkins and lampshades to the $10,000 tab for renting a Sunset Boulevard billboard advertising the show. (As a donation to the cause, Patrick Media, which owns the billboard space, reduced the price from the normal $40,000 per month.) Versace also signed up 10 world-class models for the evening--Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, among them--who, he notes, volunteered to work without pay.

Support for this, the city’s only major annual fashion industry fund-raiser for AIDS-related causes, has grown slowly over the years, says Anketell. Saint Germain, the jeans company, was the first to make a commitment to it, five years ago. This year for the first time Guess? made a major donation. May Co., Robinson’s and the Broadway were among the first department stores to get involved. Recently I. Magnin and Neiman Marcus have become loyalists.

Neiman Marcus Vice President John Martens decided to support the cause, he says, “because we’ve had people in this store who’ve been affected. It was in support of them I did it.”

If support has been slow in coming, the glamour of this year’s event has already attracted new interest. “We got calls from people who couldn’t even pronounce Versace’s name,” says Anketell. “They recognized him from Vanity Fair and the fashion magazines.”