Milan pays tribute to the King of Glitz

Ten years to the day after his murder in Miami, Gianni Versace's life will be celebrated tonight at Milan's La Scala with a two-part ballet starring the garish, dazzling, crotch-clutching, way-over- the-top costumes that fashion's King of Glitz reliably provided.

They have been dug out of the warehouse by his close friend and collaborator, the 80-year-old Belgian choreographer Maurice Bejart. He has thrown together the most fabulous of them for a specially written ballet, Grazie Gianni con Amore - Thank you Gianni, with Love.

It will begin with 50 dancers, all attired in costumes designed by Versace for his joint productions with Bejart, including Pyramid, Dionysos and Souvenir of Leningrad, clambering out of a white box. The second half will feature costumes designed by Versace's sister and onetime muse Donatella, who took over the atelier on Gianni's death and, after a shaky start, has built a design identity of her own.

"Gianni's costumes were so extraordinarily beautiful, it was hard to compete," she told Women's Wear Daily. "So I went for something completely different." Her look, she said, was "modern and clean", with swathes of Swarovski embroidery.

Watching the show will be 1,400 guests, including supermodels Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell. Liz Hurley is expected too: it was a Versace-designed black dress held together by giant gilt safety pins that catapulted her to global fame when she wore it in 1994 for the premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

A host of designers will be present, including Karl Lagerfeld, Armani and Valentino, and surprise guests are also promised. The show will be followed by a dinner for 500 at Milan's Palazzo Reale.

Bejart and Versace first met at La Scala in 1983 and collaborated on 10 ballets. "I can still picture Gianni adding the finishing touches to those marvellous costumes," Bejart recalled, "crouched amidst heaps of clothes, painting embroidery gold ... Gianni loved life too much not to love the theatre. He wanted to turn every woman into Greta Garbo and every boy into James Dean."

Explaining her decision to mark the grim anniversary with a ballet, Donatella said that a catwalk show or museum exhibition would have been "banal and reductive". But she admitted: "Taking the costumes from those years in my hands again, fixing them up, has been highly emotional."

For the first time since taking on her brother's mantle, Donatella is willing to reflect on what it meant to do that. "It was very difficult, there were tough moments, I made mistakes ... Only now, after many years, I begin to feel that I am in this role on my own merit. Now I feel more secure, and also capable of making this gift for Gianni, who I know would have liked it a lot." She has invited everyone involved in the Versace operation to tonight's event.

The commemoration does not end with the ballet.

Already the main boulevards of Milan are punctuated by 64 giant representations of his designs, and in September, during Milan's fashion week, an exhibition of artworks he accumulated during decades of avid buying opens.

ADMIRERS

"Gianni Versace's look was synonymous with powerful, curvy, sexy women"

JANE BRUTON

Editor, 'Grazia'

"He loved making models larger than life. That would bring attention to his clothes"

CINDY CRAWFORD

Supermodel

"Gianni was a genius. The house still evokes his vision - so powerful and so modern"

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

Designer

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