Arrivederci, Versace.

IN MIAMI BEACH, FLA., HOMEMADE TRIBUTES FILLED THE steps of Casa Casuarina, the grandiose South Beach palazzo where Gianni Versace lived and died. Even in New York, cathedral city to cynicism, a common bouquet of grocery-bought flowers wilted on the doorstep of Versace's elegant town house, and a daffodil was stuck into the grillwork of the front door. Housekeepers accustomed to Versace-style bouquets of haute-florist orchids and roses would eventually sweep away the plain tributes, but they were touching signs of the real humanity that can, in the hands of a genuine genius, connect fashion and culture, magnificent pageantry, glamorous runways, and mundane lives. Versace is mourned not merely by the affluent but by everyone in touch with contemporary culture, from which he drew energy and to which he gave extravagance and excellence.

Some brutality and senselessness stalk every one of us, but the hits are made only on the defining figures of our culture. Versace was such a larger-than-life fashion maker. The meanest thing some fashion types had to say about him was that he was extravagantly vulgar, for Versace was never other than a designer of the people, for the people. He knew that lust and beauty were alike.

Versace expressed better than any other designer the sexuality of our times in his clothing. He is the first post-Freudian designer because he evinced sexuality without Victorianism or guilt. He has extolled the streetwalker and the unabashed erotics of women and womenswear.

His menswear was genuinely revolutionary, insisting on men as sex objects. He became the standard-bearer of gay men's fashion because he eschewed decorum and designed for desire. The boxy shirts of traditional menswear were replaced by body-caressing blouse materials and draping; decolletage and the credo of his book Men Without Ties were in praise of the male body as an erotic field. Nobody did it better; his was the first genuinely mainstream gay menswear.

Versace placed fashion in the arena of music, media, and contemporary spectacle. Other designers had purveyed to the media in a one-way transaction; Versace took from the street, gave to the media, and took back from celebrity and charisma. His relationship with Madonna, Rupert Everett, Elton John, Sylvester Stallone, Jon Bon Jovi, Patricia Arquette, and even Princess Diana was not in being valet or dressmaker to the stars but in establishing fashion as an equal partner in popular culture.

Versace is in one way indicative of the great role the fashion designer has come to play at the end of the 20th century. No longer dressmakers to the elite few, the great designers give dreams to the masses, transcend fashion to communicate aspiration, and transfer their magic into a universe of tabletop and home furnishings. Fashion designers have become our best, needed heroes. Ralph, Donna, Calvin, Giorgio, Tommy all function as such. In the dearth of other idols in our culture, we rely on fashion's unquestioned authority in T-shirts, bus shelters, advertising, media, high fashion, and occasionally even off price bargains. Designers are the List religion, reliable and ubiquitous names amid the maelstrom of contemporary living.

But even among these, Versace was extraordinary. He was honest. He was out. He was extravagant without embarrassment or remorse. He mixed vulgarity and chic, reveling in both. Fashion so often tries to deny the sexy or the vulgar; Versace saw the pleasure in both, the opportunity that they offered to high-style fashion. It is said that Chanel in the '20s and '30s insisted that there be a slight concavity visible between the legs in her skirts to remind any spectator of anatomy. Fashion prizes the uncouth truth of bodies but most often tries to be proper and decorous. Versace let sexuality clamor and lead fashion without apology.

And he was, to anyone who knew him, a man of exceptional, wondrous kindness and sweetness. He was a man without ties: unfettered, unpretentious, and unequaled.

Martin is curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York.