That inimitable Versace taste point could see a come back: PH Avedon

I suspect half of the New York fashion industry read this book this weekend because tragedy and all, you can't seem to get Versace out of your head. You have to admit that the very idea of Versace…the Roman imperial decadence, the color and the excess , the sex , the heat, the divas and the clashing prints, the iconic Avedon imagery…the myths of those wild parties you were too young to have attended…it is absolutely intoxicating! So a book about Versace needs to transmit in words- that whole frisson,-even as it has to proceed into the territory of business analysis. Deborah Ball in "House Of Versace" delivers both glamorous frisson and incisive business insights throughout the book in a way that has you rooting for the survival of the house that Gianni Versace built. There's the back history of the family, the most comprehensive I've read anywhere and there's a beautifully traced arc of the house's explosion from its humble roots to the hey-day of 80's excess back to the sober frugality of the current day.
One of the most intriuging sub-texts of "House Of Versace" is the tension caused by Donatella's cutting edge instincts as it deviated from the classic Versace tropes. But the irony is, I grew up on Donatella's 90's Versace and I think in many ways her choices of models like Kate Moss and Stella Tennant, her au courant if technically messy couture collections and her desperate attempts to make Versace of-the-moment actually will find respect when the inevitable retrospectives wheel around.
There are few well written books on the subject of fashion ( Dana Thomas' "Deluxe" , Teri Agins'" The End Of Fashion " and Marilyn Bender's "The Beautiful People" are three that stand the test of time) and that makes Deborah Ball's work quite vital. True you get the sense that in a recession challenged book world a decision was made to smooth out the prose so as to make "House Of Versace" as readable to as massive a market as possible. Ironically the success of this book is probably contingent on many people having an emotional response to the Versace name. For the niche market- what Bender would term "the dog whistle crowd"-( i.e that ridge of fashion fanatics that can pick on that almost invisible spectrum of whats'cool-next) this book offers an interesting premise. Fashion monsters love a twist. How monstrous would it be for that Medusa head to become the latest in ironic must-haves. Donatella humanized and made three dimensional , Gianni rendered human inside his tragic legend, Allegra treated with respect and honesty. You can buy this book without shame.