Gianni Versace
July 31, 2008
As a world-famous designer he knew everyone, the photographers Bruce Weber and Richard Avedon, the designers Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier, his celebrity fans Sly Stallone and Bruce Springsteen, and his friends included Elton John and Diana, Princess of Wales. His over-the-top classically inspired style greatly influenced fashion as well as all aspects of interior design. Versace developed the use of super-models and the use of celebrities to show off his designs. Versace liked using stunning male models in his advertising often featuring homoerotic images.
Andy Warhol
July 31, 2008
He established a large studio in downtown Manattan filled with drug addicts, trannies, models, rent boys, painters (David Hockney visited) and somehow managed to make thousands of screen-printed Brillo Pad boxes, paintings, soup cans and portraits. This great studio was called “the factory” to reflect the mass methods used to create the art. He started to make ground-breaking films and also took to photographing and videoing everyone and everything he came into contact with everywhere. “Andy Warhol’s Exposures” was a wonderful visual diary of the Studio 54 era in New York from around the mid-seventies to the early eighties.
Rudolf Valentino
July 31, 2008
Valentino’s stunning italian looks enabled him to become a professional dancer at Maxim’s in New York City. He was popular with the well-heeled clients, both on the dance floor and in the bedroom. Valentino fled to Hollywood after a scandal involving the the death of the husband of one of his clients and visited the Torch Club which was an up-market venue for gays where he met the director Joe Maxwell who gave him a part in the film The Married Virgin. His finest achievement was bringing his smouldering Italian looks to the silent screen and making women swoon in their thousands.
Vaslav Nijinsky
July 31, 2008
Nijinsky was born into a family of dancers who had their own dancing company and was trained as The Imperial Ballet School in St Petersberg. Nijinsky also choreographed his own performances and he produced landmark and controversial ballets such as Claude Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune, (1912, ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’) which was shocking to contemporary audiences as the dancer simulated masturbation and climax on stage (nice afternoon!), and Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, (1913, ‘The Rite of Spring’. His greatest achievement is probably his contemporary egyptian style choreography, involving the use of sideways views like the drawings in ancient Egyptian tombs.
Noel Coward
July 31, 2008
Noel Cowards work is full of frivolity, satire, and wit. He never referred publicly to his own homosexuality, and would not allow his biographer Sheridan Morley to mention it, because of fears of losing royalties. He seemed to believe that the public was unsure about his sexuality, despite him writing and singing songs like ‘Mad About the Boy’. His single greatest achievement can be said to be his staying power and influence in the theatrical world. In 1999 Noël Coward’s archive of 60 plays and more than 300 popular songs was bequeathed to Birmingham University by his long time companion, Graham Payn.