Poster Gianni Versace Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo by Irving Penn, 1997
About the Item
- Creator:Irving Penn (Photographer),Gianni Versace (Fashion House)
- Dimensions:Height: 35.04 in (89 cm)Width: 25.2 in (64 cm)Depth: 0.2 in (5 mm)
- Style:Post-Modern (Of the Period)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:1990-1999
- Date of Manufacture:1997
- Condition:Wear consistent with age and use. In very good condition.
- Seller Location:Milano, IT
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU4911221189432
Gianni Versace
The signature extravagance of legendary fashion designer Gianni Versace — forever aligned with glamour, sex, celebrity and spectacle — can overshadow the Italian couturier’s broad and deep engagement with history and culture. More than any designer before him, Versace mined celebrity, music and Pop art for inspiration, and his subversive, maximalist and unabashedly seductive designs infused high fashion with an entirely new ethos.
“I don’t believe in good taste,” Versace once explained. Instead, he had a sexy good time with fashion — as he did with life. Today, vintage Gianni Versace clothing, handbags and other accessories look astonishingly fresh and freshly relevant.
Gianni Versace was born in Calabria, Italy. His mother was a successful dressmaker who employed more than 40 seamstresses. As a child, little Gianni marveled at her workshop, which would become a university of sorts, where he learned the exceptional construction techniques that were at the foundation of his creative expression. In 1972, at age 25, he moved to Milan to work in fashion. He launched his first collection — and his label — in 1978, with his older brother Santo managing the business concerns. Soon, sister Donatella, whom Gianni dressed and took to discos when she was still a child, joined the family venture, where she had a creative role and managed enormously popular ready-to-wear lines such as Versus.
Vintage Versace has become catnip for modern fashion enthusiasts who seek out the now-iconic house codes that originated in the designs of the 1980s and 1990s. His glamorous and seductive apparel — the clingy skirts and slender, strappy party dresses, as well as the erotic magazine ads that publicized them — looms large, but Versace’s art and historical influences were also vast.
Versace was an art collector, and he took on commissions to create costumes for theatrical performances during the 1980s and spoke of looking to numerous cultures for inspiration. The New York Times noted in 1997 that the fashion industry “is now driven by contemporary culture because Mr. Versace made it that way.” Insiders consider his 1991/1992 Autumn/Winter runway show — which featured supermodels Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista lip-synching George Michael’s “Freedom” — as the moment when the two worlds of fashion and pop culture became one, changing both forever.
Versace's adventurous spirit of design resulted in his creating jewel-toned prints rooted in Grecian motifs, Etruscan symbols, the Italian Baroque and Andy Warholʼs Marilyn Monroe. There were slinky dresses in Oroton, his patented chain-mail textile that draped like satin, and leather bondage ensembles. Sex sold, for both women and men. Wrote the late curator Richard Martin, “[Versace] became the standard-bearer of gay men’s fashion because he eschewed decorum and designed for desire.”
Following Versace’s tragic murder in 1997, Donatella took over the role of artistic director and continued to evolve the house codes with a twist of her feminine and feminist perspective. Today, Santo Versace is chief executive officer of Versace and Donatella is its chief creative officer.
Browse an extraordinary collection of vintage Gianni Versace evening dresses, handbags, day dresses and more on 1stDibs.
Irving Penn
With a career in magazines that spanned the mid-20th century heyday of print journalism and lasted through the first decade of the 21st, Irving Penn was the preeminent photographer for six decades at Vogue, where he worked right up until his death, in 2009, at age 92.
Penn’s refined and dynamic photography of models, celebrities and products like Clinique and Jell-O pudding, all shot in compositions of stunning equipoise in the cool remove of his minimal studio setups, were designed to stop traffic and cut through the clutter of magazine pages.
Penn flourished under the mentorship of two legendary art directors: Harper’s Bazaar‘s Alexey Brodovitch and Vogue‘s Alexander Liberman, both Russian émigrés like Penn’s father. Brodovitch introduced Penn to Surrealism and avant-garde photography as his teacher at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art and hired him as his assistant at Harper’s Bazaar during the summers of 1937 and ’38. Penn bought his first camera after graduating that year. He met Liberman in 1941, passing off to the recent New York transplant his freelance art director job at Saks Fifth Avenue. Liberman returned the favor by hiring Penn at Vogue in 1943 to sketch cover concepts, later encouraging him to shoot his unconventional juxtapositions of accessories and household items himself.
Assigned to photograph some portraits in the mid-1940s, Penn took a cue from the stage-set windows at Saks. He angled two studio flats in his studio and placed his subjects, including Truman Capote, Jerome Robbins and Salvador Dalí, in the resulting tight corner, literally and psychologically. Spencer Tracy leans jauntily against the walls in his portrait, while Georgia O'Keeffe simmers straight-armed in her confinement.
Penn didn’t work well with the distractions of the outside world. In 1950, when he was instructed by Liberman to buy an evening jacket and shoot the couture shows in Paris, he managed the assignment by having the dresses brought to him. He rented a top-floor studio with great light but no electricity and photographed models, including Lisa Fonssagrives (whom he married shortly after), against a mottled gray theater curtain that he continued to use for the rest of his career. Between deliveries from Dior and Balenciaga, he began his personal project “Small Trades,” in which he had local Parisians — a knife grinder, a mailman, a cucumber seller — pose for him with tools of their trade against the same backdrop. (He extended the series in London and New York.)
While Penn made bold, reductive still lifes for advertising campaigns throughout his career, in 1972 he applied his sculptural understanding of form to the unlikeliest of subjects: cigarette butts he gathered from the streets. The Museum of Modern Art showed Penn’s cigarette butts in 1975, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited another series of material salvaged from the street in 1977. At this time, Penn also began revisiting his earlier photographs, reprinting them at larger scale and with the more painterly quality achieved with the platinum-palladium process. In his lush, oversized platinum-palladium prints, he elevates the lowly castoffs to heroic objects worthy of archaeological scrutiny.
Find vintage Irving Penn photography on 1stDibs.
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Ships From: milano, Italy
- Return PolicyA return for this item may be initiated within 1 day of delivery.
- GIANNI VERSACE Poster created by Mimmo Rotella for Mostra Dialogue du Mode, 1987By Mimmo Rotella, Gianni VersaceLocated in Milano, ITRara Locandina by Gianni Versace created by Mimmo Rotella for the exhibition held at the Palais Galliera, Musèe de la Mode et du Costume, in Paris. 1986-197. The Poster was made in 1...Category
Vintage 1980s Italian Modern Posters
MaterialsPaper
- Poster Gianni Versace for "Theater der Mode" for Villa Stuck, 1992By Gianni VersaceLocated in Milano, ITPoster by Gianni Versace for the opening of the exhibition "Theater der Mode" in 1992. The poster was made for the exhibition dedicated to his theater collection in Munich, Germany, in Villa Stuck...Category
1990s Italian Baroque Posters
MaterialsPaper
- Italian Sideboard in Neoclassical Style in Mahogany Att. to Gianni VersaceBy Gianni VersaceLocated in Milano, ITWonderful neoclassical style Italian cabinet attributed to Gianni Versace inspired by "Medusa" from the 1950s. The sideboard has been expertly crafted from fine mahogany feather wit...Category
Vintage 1950s Italian Neoclassical Credenzas
MaterialsMahogany
- Gianni Vigorelli Set of Six Vintage Red Dining ChairsBy Gianni VigorelliLocated in Milano, ITThe set of six extravagant dining room chairs are design by Gianni Vigorelli in the ‘50s and are of fine Italian manufacture. The peculiar chairs have their original red fabric with a fun pattern of dark circles. The wooden structure is characterized by a triangular frame on which there’s the trapezoidal back rest. This frame points down to the seat where it is attached. Four legs with brass tips complete the structure of the eccentric chairs...Category
Vintage 1950s Italian Mid-Century Modern Dining Room Chairs
MaterialsFabric, Wood
- Italian Vintage Fiocco Armchair by Gianni Pareschi for BusnelliBy Busnelli, Gianni Pareschi 1Located in Milano, ITBeautiful armchair Fiocco produced by Busnelli, born in 1970 from the design of Gianni Pareschi. It brings in the living room the same note of vivacity and brio of a colored ribbon ...Category
Vintage 1970s Italian Mid-Century Modern Armchairs
MaterialsMetal
- Fiocco Armchair in Dark Green by Gianni Pareschi for BusnelliBy Busnelli, Gianni Pareschi 1Located in Milano, ITBeautiful armchair Fiocco produced by Busnelli, born in 1970 from the design of Gianni Pareschi. It brings in the living room the same note of liveliness and brio of a colored ribbo...Category
Vintage 1970s Italian Mid-Century Modern Chaise Longues
MaterialsFabric
- Irving Penn, Photogravure Black and White, 1947By Irving PennLocated in Barcelona, BarcelonaIrving Penn photogravure plate page 21 inside the book Phographie 1947 edited by Arts et Metiers Graphiques. Measures: 17 x 22.5 cm Black wood framed size: 40 x 50 cm Copyri...Category
Vintage 1970s European Mid-Century Modern Photography
MaterialsPaper
- Irving Penn, Photogravure Black and White, 1947By Irving PennLocated in Barcelona, BarcelonaIrving Penn photogravure plate page 21 inside the book Phographie 1947 edited by Arts et Metiers Graphiques. Measures: 17 x 22.5 cm Black wood framed size: 40 x 50 cm Copyri...Category
Vintage 1970s European Mid-Century Modern Photography
MaterialsPaper
- Attributed: Irving Penn, N. Dahomey (Benin) "Hausa Man" C. 1968 PhotographBy Irving PennLocated in Atlanta, GAAttributed: Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009). An original photograph of titled "Hausa Man" - N. Dahomey (Benin) Usis Photo. While I am unable to certainly identify this piece as...Category
Vintage 1960s American Photography
MaterialsPaper
- Irving Penn by John Szarkowski (Book)Located in North Yorkshire, GBThis book was published in 1984 by MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art) in conjunction with an exhibition which was the first major retrospective of Penn's work. Penn was one of the most ...Category
20th Century Books
MaterialsPaper
- Amedeo Modigliani Female Nude 1916 for Metropolitan Museum of Art PosterBy Amedeo ModiglianiLocated in Portland, ORAmedeo Modigliani was an Italian artist known for his distinctive style and unique approach to portraiture and figurative art. Born in Livorno, Italy, in 1884, Modigliani showed an e...Category
20th Century American Expressionist Posters
MaterialsMetal
- Original Vintage Poster The Metropolitan Museum Of Art American Wing New GalleryBy Thomas Maitland ClelandLocated in London, GBOriginal vintage advertising poster for The Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing featuring a great illustration by Thomas Maitland Cleland (1880-1964) of a sunny day outside the ...Category
Vintage 1920s American Posters
MaterialsPaper