Designer creations - deaths of Princess Diana and Gianni Versace

ArtForum, Dec, 1997 by Homi K. Bhabha

A phone call from a friend in Milan brought the news that Gianni Versace had been shot in Miami. On Lake Como, where we spent some weeks this summer, an hour away from the Versace estate near Cernobbio and the resting place for his ashes, his tragic death was at once an incessant and evanescent item in the international news, and at the same time, a very local affair.

"Gay-boom-boom," said Franca, the perfumed and petite woman who cuts my hair, the next day, acting out the curbside assassination, horrified and hungry to talk.

"A beautiful son of the lakes," I said piously and provocatively, testing the waters in this vacation idyll where the Lega Nord propagates the secession of the North from what it considers the degenerate and impoverished South.

"Yes, si, una sensibilita italiana . . . but he liked a different kind of life, una vita americana, all mixed together . . . gay, drugs, black, white, who knows what else?"

"But the family? He was very much a family man, surrounded by his sister, and -"

"And Naomi and Kate . . . and Elton John," she interjected. "A kind of family life, I suppose . . . and Princess Diana . . . and that woman from Monaco. But is that family life one day Milan, one day Miami catwalks and gay bars, never really knowing the people you meet, where they come from, who they really are; and then this killer. Who was he? Half Filipino-half American."

"You think Versace knew the guy, Cunaa -"

"Who knows! Does he know who he meets in a bar, can he remember? Can you believe what somebody tells you about themselves in such places, such shifting people, here one day, gone the next . . . you lose hold of yourself when you live like that. You lose your footing, your soil. Then one day, boom boom! like a bad movie . . . and everybody asks questions . . . questions . . . questions . . . just like a film."

Behind me, Franca's rapid reflections competing with the agitation of her clippers; in front of me, a bank of magazine images, courtesy of Oggi, a garbled gallery of Gianni's life, lived in the fast lane, the fellowship of the Faberge bauble - Gianni glittering, Gianni with Sting and Madonna - and then, finally, Gianni prostrate before the high escutcheoned gates, in the shadow of the sandstone mansion, his head oozing a profuse, misshapen profile of blood. In the days that followed, we drove through France and Switzerland on our way back to Britain, chased by an image trail of Versace verite. One image of mourning - one that would remain indelibly present in a year marked by images of mourning was doomed to a prophetic afterlife: Princess Diana, sheltering a tearful Elton John in a warm embrace, both of them dressed in Versace black.

Later in the summer, in Westminster Abbey, Elton John sang Candle in the Wind, with the refrain changed to "Goodbye England's rose." Diana's untimely death overshadowed Mother Teresa's, and established the princess in the role of the universal carer and sharer, which had over the years become the Mother's prerogative. Have any other deaths ever gripped a global audience with as much tenacity and tenderness as those of the controversial "passed over" princess and her rather passe playboy boyfriend? The figure of the dead princess united the divided opinions that trailed her when alive. For instance, her taste for the indulgence and opulence of an al-Fayed existence (courtesy of Harrods) was interpreted as her refuge from the coldness and narrowness of British family life. And once she transcended the very narrow and singular circle of the British monarchy, her cosmopolitan philanthropy became the mark of her appeal.

With the celebrated demise of communism and the global adoption of the free-market model, we have come, some say, to the "end of ideology." The familiar use of this phrase suggests that the triumph of Western liberalism is quite uncontested, and the values of individualism have bee ~ universally affirmed. Accompanying such assertions is a narrative of global transformation that no longer sees change as part of the struggle between different systems of government embedded in the conditions of historical and philosophical specificity. The "end of ideology" argument has resulted in a peculiarly ahistorical and decontextualized approach to political "turning points" seen as emanating from the emancipatory temperaments of great leaders - Gorbachev, Mandela, Blair - rather than emerging from the sustained struggles and strategies that form the collective will of a people. In this moment, at the limits of history as we have known it (the much vaunted moment of the postnational, the transnational, the "glocal"), we are witnessing the dawning f the philanthropic "transindividual" - George Soros, Ted Turner, Princess Diana. Colossi bestriding nations and cultures, these "moral" authorities of the free world stand for the power of almost unmediated direct action. Where once the "image" of international governance was dominated by faceless bureaucrats pacing the corridors of power in aseptic Geneva, or presidential figureheads lip-synching crafted communiques through clenched teeth, we have now become used to a currency dealer opening windows of democracy behind the Iron Curtain, a media mogul from Atlanta lecturing governments on love, faith, and charity, a late glitterati princess bravely striding by a field sprouting landmines.