Versace Retains a Place at the Table
The drape of a royal gown, the plunge of a celebrity neckline, the sheer brass of a dress held together with safety pins. Such is the stuff of fashion headlines. But history may record the artistry of Gianni Versace with a teacup.
The fragile china cup, from the Versace Home Signature collection in a pattern called La Mer, is the picture of elegance. Painted with shells and coral, it sits in a turquoise ocean of a saucer. Where the handle would be, a delicate gold wing is poised for flight.
Like the signature Medusa head on plates, the Butterfly Garden bowls, Marco Polo peacock saucers or Baroque chargers swirling with black, gold and blood red, Versace tableware echoes themes from fashion runways. Perhaps because pottery shards tell their story long after fabric fragments have disintegrated, the china has gathered legacy-building momentum since the designer’s murder in Miami Beach, Fla., last week.
“People perceive that as a lasting memento,” says Roberta Bernstein of Neiman Marcus in Washington, which carries the tableware.
At $395 for a five-piece place setting, the Rosenthal china has always had the status of couture. The designs are opulent, ornate, elegant, like the silks of a Versace shirt--or the upholstery on furnishings in his elaborate homes on two continents.
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Recent years also have seen the launch of enough products to furnish a Versace corner of one’s own, choosing among couches and Louis XV-style chairs made slick with chrome instead of gilding, plus 35 rugs, lamps, towels, linens and piles of Baroque pillows.
Much of it is sold at Versace-owned stores, like the Fifth Avenue flagship, where a floor is devoted to home. Elsewhere, china and some accessories are available at specialty retailers, including Bloomingdale’s.
Everything from soap dishes to soup bowls were inspired by Versace’s fashions, which were themselves inspired by whatever he saw--the “Glory of Byzantium” just closed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, last year’s show on Japanese style in Paris.
“It would trickle down, less forceful than in the fashions, but always what he had seen,” says Markus Ebner, a Versace spokesman in New York.
Most recently, Versace had been inspired by ivy. It swirls around the edges of a new rug, Wild Ivy. Ivy reappears in Versace’s recent casual line for Rosenthal, called Home Jeans. The Ivy Leaf pattern is priced at $136 a place setting. And ivy will appear on the first fine china pattern to be issued after the designer’s death, Gold Ivy, expected this fall.
Like many home furnishings designs, Gold Ivy has been in the pipeline for months. But it is not likely to be the last Versace design.
Mark Karimzadeh, New York-based owner of L’Art du Temps, which makes the rugs in China, notes that Versace had “a very important, strategic hand in design, but there was around him a design team.” Archives in Milan hold 20 years’ worth of copyrighted designs.
