Design for dying: Gianni Versace's murder in Miami's South Beach was cut from the same cloth as underclass-chic.

Gianni Versace's murder in Miami's South Beach was cut from the same cloth as underclass-chic.

Mr. Foreman is a writer living in New York City.

A great deal of pretentious rubbish has been written about Gianni Versace since his murder last week. His brutal slaying on the doorstep of his own house was, to be sure, a shocking and tragic thing, a terrible blow to his family and all those his life had touched. It has all sorts of dismaying implications for our culture. And it will no doubt darken the reputation of this country in general -- and Miami in particular -- as places where no one is safe from men with guns.

But this is no excuse for some of the hyperbole that has bubbled up in the media. The last two weeks also saw the deaths of Arthur Liman, Francois Furet, and Jimmy Stewart -- as well as many others who could be said to have made far greater contributions to the common weal than Gianni Versace. Of course Versace was relatively young. And he was also murdered, and even the best-ordered societies have a morbid fascination with murder.

But treating Versace as if he were a combination of Picasso, John F. Kennedy, and Mother Teresa is absurd. And worse than absurd. It reflects the distorted values of the celebrity culture that may well have been what sealed his fate. For while we don't know for sure that Versace was the victim of suspected "spree killer" Andrew Cunanan, it seems likely that he was gunned down because of his fame -- and because, unlike so many other celebrities, he chose not to live like a hunted man behind a screen of bodyguards.

According to Richard Martin, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (writing in the Los Angeles Times), "Versace was the first post-Freudian fashion designer unencumbered by any reticence or guilt about sexuality." This is intended as high praise and is nonsense on several levels. For a start, it is not true. For all that his homosexuality was "open," Versace's clothes for women were far more outrageous than his designs for men, and Versace himself wore only the most respectable of his own creations. As for Freud, Mr. Martin -- like so many people today -- seems to confuse him with some 1960s hippy who favored letting it all hang out. Freud actually thought that sexual reticence and guilt were a necessary part of a civilized society. Were he reading the papers today he would almost certainly be horrified to be considered responsible for Versace's design ethos or the South Beach party scene.

Mr. Martin goes on to explain how Versace took the trend of merging "the street" with high fashion to its logical conclusion. "By the 1980s and '90s, there was one figure standing untouched in the street: the streetwalker. And she became the heroine of Versace's brilliant designs." Thus, Mr. Martin says, Versace created in fashion "what Toulouse-Lautrec had done for the demimonde in the 1880s and 1890s." But Toulouse-Lautrec's whores are some of the saddest creatures in nineteenth-century painting. And there is a big difference between Toulouse-Lautrec's social realism and Versace's slumming.

The emperor Caligula forced the wives of the Roman aristocracy to sell their bodies to the public. Versace persuaded wealthy and beautiful women to pay large sums of money to pretend to be hookers. One has to ask what kind of milieu this is in which people affect to believe that the pathetic figure of the streetwalker, the most victimized, desperate, humiliated order of prostitute, is glamorous and sexy. People call the fashion world superficial, yet it is not superficiality that is behind such a disgusting sentiment, so chilling in its callousness. It is an arrogant elitism. Compared to several of his peers, Versace's sins in this regard were relatively mild. But the whole spectacle of society women costumed as hustlers is enough to make you wonder where all the Marxist revolutionaries have gone.

Versace was a cultivated, brilliant man, by all accounts loyal, decent, and blessed with a talent for friendship. He was a generous, hard-working, relatively solid citizen who demonstrated that a family business can thrive in a global economy. But he also epitomized some of the faults of the industry in which he worked, an industry which has recently promoted whore chic, pedophile chic, and junkie chic.

Anyone who criticizes the fashion world for its excess or warped aesthetics is tarred as a humorless killjoy, who doesn't "get" that it is all a game. Why shouldn't fashion be self-indulgent and fun? its defenders ask (as if only tawdriness and trash were fun). But fashion's champions also consider it to be a serious art-form, and they celebrate its far-ranging influence. And if they are right, then the kinds of messages that fashion sends really do matter. They matter not just because young girls will starve themselves to achieve the waif look and because inner-city teenagers really will fight over designer shirts, but because the whole tone of a society is set by the people at the top.

It is no coincidence that the descent into chic sleaze by a large section of the fashion business has come at a time when that world is closer to popular music and the entertainment industry than ever before. Versace himself treasured relationships with older rock acts like Elton John, most of whom are quaintly bland and old-fashioned by current American standards, but still the epitome of "cool" to Europeans, with their notoriously tin ear for rock 'n' roll. It is not clear if Versace brought the peculiar nouveuax riches of pop music into fashion or if their newfound interest in high fashion created the conditions for his rise to prominence. Certainly they sat in the front rows of his shows.

One must remember that even after twenty or thirty years of amazing wealth, most rock stars feel a little uneasy playing haut-bourgeois. And more than any other designer, Versace enabled pop- culture people to feel at home in the arena of high fashion. His relative outrageousness was certainly one key to his success with them. (It also helped that he befriended and flattered them -- with his beautiful houses and libraries and facility for languages he probably really seemed to them like a "Renaissance prince.") The whole oh-so-naughty, on-the-edge ethos of Versace had enormous appeal for moneyed former "rebels" and their jet-set friends. It was decadent, but it was fundamentally safe. Versace's clients could play the rich person's game of fashion-slumming because they knew that no one would ever mistake them for real streetwalkers. Behind their velvet ropes and security men and electric fences the real underworld could not touch them.

Like his clients, Versace lived according to the assumption of the decadent rich that the world is safe for slumming. And it is, but only if, like the Madonnas and the Sylvester Stallones, you live at addresses unavailable to the general public, surrounded by bodyguards. (They know that if you are a celebrity in this country you have to live as the wealthy do in Colombia or Venezuela.) But, just as everyone knew that John Lennon lived at the Dakota in Manhattan, everyone in South Beach knew that Versace lived at the Casa Casuerina, the biggest house on the beachfront. It must have been easy for his killer to find him, follow his routine, and then to gun him down in broad daylight like a political assassin in Bogota or Caracas.

This is not to say that his terrible fate was in any way Versace's fault. Who after all can blame him for wanting to lead a normal life, dropping into the cafe every morning to read the paper over a croissant? In retrospect he was too trusting, most likely because he was a foreigner: both Versace and Lennon loved the freedom of America but grew up in the bosom of societies that are much safer for the prominent and successful. In an age where fame is a more valuable currency than ever before, one implication of this horrible murder may be that there is no city left where celebrities may live with the freedom of ordinary people.

Another is that privileged fashion folk who, like Versace, feel the need to glamorize or make a game of prostitution or rape or heroin addiction are dangerously insulated from the real world. These dark currents are amusing only to the extent that they are distant abstractions -- only if you think you are so wealthy, powerful, and famous they cannot touch you. But no one is so wealthy or powerful or famous, as Gianni Versace discovered at the cost of his life.