“He was killed,” wrote La Repubblica, when Gianni Versace was gunned down on the steps of his Miami mansion on July 15, 1997, “like a prince laid low in his own blood, with one hand outstretched toward his oil paintings, his tapestries, his gold.” Though the shooting was later attributed to a rogue serial killer, when the news reached Princess Diana—a recent friend of the designer, and someone who understood the cost of fame more intimately than most—it seemed to confirm her worst instincts. “Do you think they’ll do that to me?” she said, according to her former bodyguard Lee Sansum, who claimed to have found her roaming the deck of Dodi Al Fayed’s yacht on the Riviera the following morning. Gianni’s death served both as her last heartbreak, and a portend to her own fatal car crash seven weeks later.
The cinematic tragedies of both Gianni and Diana’s deaths have functioned only to gild their legacies, and the significance of their relatively short-lived bond, in myth—and it’s just one of the relationships explored in an expansive retrospective of the designer’s work at the Arches in London Bridge, where, among a reconstruction of Elton John’s closet (once said to contain every Versace shirt made), a shrine to Kate, Naomi, and the birth of the supermodel, an ode to Liz Hurley’s safety-pin dress, and more than 450 archive pieces spanning 21 collections, are five looks the Princess wore in her final years. “Gianni loved his London connections,” says one of the exhibition’s co-curators, Sakai Lubnow. “And, I mean, there was no higher compliment in fashion than Princess Diana wearing your clothes.”
It all started with Atelier Versace’s fall 1995 couture collection—a noted pivot from the brand’s hyper-ornamented glamour and towards a more pared-back, tailored look. It was around the same time that Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles was being finalized, bringing with it a loosening of the leash and an increasing embrace of international designers. “They’d met years earlier, of course, at a 1985 gala at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan,” says Lubnow. “But it wasn’t until she was freed from royal protocol that Gianni could begin shaping her image in earnest. She needed a strong cut, and he translated her strength and purity into something sleek and modern and cool.” The hemlines and heels got higher and higher as Diana turned more and more to Gianni in those years, and she was just as taken with his Medusa-clasped “Diana” bag as the much-written about Lady Dior.
“It was almost a semaphore of clothes to signal her state of mind,” wrote Anna Harvey, Diana’s longtime stylist, in British Vogue’s commemorative issue in October 1997. The shift dresses and evening columns Gianni designed for her, Harvey noted, were “her most successful looks to date”. One such example: a pale-pink skirt suit—a look on loan from a Swiss collector for the exhibition—that Diana wore to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in 1996. It was her first public appearance since signing for divorce, and the same year she contributed the foreword to a Versace tome, Rock & Royalty, in which the designer paired the most famous people in the world with the most prestigious photographers of the time. “Gianni Versace is an aesthete,” the Princess said in its opening pages. “In search of the essence of beauty, which he captures with grace and ease.”