Gianni's Big Book

'Every day I need my breakfast, and my books," says Gianni Versace, better known for his flashy fashions than for his bibliophilia. "They are my companions beside my bed." Coming to a night table near you is his glitzy new volume, Designs, as boisterously seductive as a Versace ball gown, and already looking like a sellout in Europe. A flamboyant orgy of colors, words, and pictures, Designs amounts to a visual autobiography. "The book contains all the things I love in my life—richness, fantasies, humor, freedom. My mother taught me never to be afraid of what other people think. You just feel your dream and do it!" In his prints and embroideries Versace's irreverent masterstroke is to fling together everything that catches his fancy—pagan mosaics, Byzantine Madonnas, Warhol silkscreens—and make them look not only as if they belong together, but as if they emanated from a single sensibility. "There is no such thing as clashing colors—look at nature! And certainly no such thing as clashing styles. A Renaissance palazzo, rock 'n' roll, Andy Warhol—they are all in accord. I search for, and find, beauty everywhere."

AMY FINE COLLINS