In Monterey and Miami, both artists used parties as marketing machines—crafting spectacles to shape their own mythology decades before “personal branding” became a buzzword.
In Parties That Changed the World, two legendary soirées—one historical, one modern—reveal surprising cultural parallels across time. Miami was abuzz with Versace ’s arrival. “Music people, fashion people, actors—he attracted everyone here.
He had that power,” Donatella later told The New York Times. He, too, was enamored: After decades of decline, Miami was having a moment in the early ’90s. A surge of gay bars and nightclubs had transformed the city, making it glamorous and electric. Though Versace owned homes all over the world—in Milan, Lake Como, and New York—his “heart belonged” to Casa Casuarina, writes Horacio Silva, “where he entertained an endless conga line of celebrities, models, editors and the odd actual drag queen.” Soon, other red-hot designers of the ’90s, like Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs, were vacationing there too. String-bikini and spandex-clad models followed, then celebrities—John F. Kennedy Jr., Daryl Hannah, Prince, and Elton John. Suddenly, South Beach was one big candy-colored photo shoot. Versace became the unofficial uniform at nightclubs—skin-tight minidresses for her, flashy silk shirts for him—and sales at the brand’s boutique in nearby Bal Harbour soared. Versace turned all of South Beach into his runway. After he lavished a reported $32 million on renovations, every mouth in South Beach was watering for an invite to Versace’s big housewarming bash. His reputation preceded him. A year earlier, at the 1992 Bal Harbour opening, Vogue’s Andre Leon Talley said: “Versace always does a fabulous party, and he’s always inspiring. He’s to fashion what Andy was to Pop Art.” His 20,000-foot, palazzo was a work of art in itself—and a shrine to the Versace brand. Most of the furniture was upholstered in the label’s own fabrics. The 24-karat gold, million-tile mosaic pool had been inspired by a scarf in his Marine Vanitas collection. And the brand’s gold Medusa-head logos were stamped everywhere—on the walls, the balconies, even the drains. Versace, who loved to entertain, didn’t design his gilded palaces for solitude. “He wanted to be where the buzz was,” Bowles, a visitor to Casa Casuarina, said. But for the designer, that buzz was often in his own backyard. As Deborah Ball wrote in House of Versace, “One balmy evening in the fall of 1993, with Donatella and a host of celebrity friends at his side, Gianni threw open the doors to Casa Casuarina, the extravagant home in the heart of Miami’s South Beach neighborhood that would lift him—and his brand—to new heights of fame.” Guests drifted through the open-air mansion with champagne in hand, grazing on decadent dishes likely arranged by Donatella—whose capable touch usually oversaw the party’s food, entertainment, and every curated flourish. As ever, money was no object. Ingrid Casares—a ‘90s nightlife fixture, “Madonna’s Best Friend”, and co-owner of the nightclub Liquid—was at “all” of Versace’s parties. She tells Vanity Fair that at the housewarming, Versace had “guys in the pool like mermen swimming around,” adding, “And I want to say that Elton and Sting both performed.” Their partners David Furnish and Trudy Styler were there, too. So were Ingrid Sischy, editor-and-chief of Warhol’s Interview Magazine, and Bruce Weber—who, according to Casares, were both “really instrumental” to Versace’s social network in the beginning. The rest of the party, Casares remembers, was mostly “New Yorkers, some locals like a guy named Wallace Tutt , his gay friends, and of course gorgeous male models that were featured in his Miami campaign.” Later, aspiring model turned informal social secretary Jaime Cardona would manage the guest lists for the soirees at Casa Casuarina. After the housewarming party,something in Miami shifted. Versace became our “patron saint” and “the ringleader of the club that everyone wanted to be a member of,” Tara Solomon, who wrote a column called “Queen of The Night” for The Miami Herald, told Vanity Fair. And “From the very moment of the 1993 housewarming party,” Ball wrote, “Casa Casuarina became the center of gravity on South Beach, and Gianni himself became a symbol of the area’s 1990s zeitgeist like no other celebrity. His parties… were the envy of the beach.” Versace’s parties weren’t just for fun. On December 15, 1994, Versace opened Casa Casuarina’s gates for a benefit supporting Best Buddies, an organization that pairs volunteers with people who have developmental disabilities. A string quartet filled the air, the pool glittered under the lights, and hors d’oeuvres were passed to the more than 250 guests including Gloria Estefan , Best Buddies founder Anthony Kennedy Shriver, and his parents, Eunice and Sargent. “Guests got an inside look at what has not only become the talk of the town, but the world,” reported a local journalist covering the event. Versace smiled for the cameras: “It’s a feeling of Christmas, you know, open the house for such a great organization like Best Buddies is a pleasure.” Madonna’s surprise birthday party in 1995 was a far more intimate affair. Less than 30 guests reportedly gathered in secret before the pop star’s grand entrance, and later watched in awe as a cake so enormous it “had to be lowered into the turquoise pool of Casa Casuarina, where it drifted like a giant water-borne float. Men in Versace bikinis waded in to cut slices for the guests,” wrote Ball. claims the men were local dancers, the Twins, and the massive cake, in the shape of a tiara, was covered in orchids and white roses. The fête was only a small token of the Versaces’ appreciation. Earlier that year, Madonna signed on as the face of the brand’s spring-summer 1995 campaign, shot by Steven Meisel—one of the first major collaborations between a luxury house and a global pop star. The partnership proved so successful that she returned seven months later to shoot a campaign for the Atelier line, modeling a $5 million, 1,200-diamond tiara that earned a Guinness World Record—and plenty of press. On New Year’s 1996, Donatella hosted Miami’s “most exclusive house party with megastar guests and a lavish spread oozing with lobsters and stone crabs,” wrote Solomon. VIPs Cher and Sean Penn partied until 1 a.m., which is when Jack Nicholson allegedly rolled in—but Versace, wrote Solomon, was nowhere to be seen. He may have slipped upstairs before midnight, or skipped out altogether. Despite his rap, Versace didn’t drink much and was happy to be in bed early. He was concerned about Donatella’s cocaine use, her health, and the brand’s image. Then again, Ball claims, “The more the rumors spread about the wild parties she threw—with the best-looking people, the best drugs, and the best music—the hotter his brand became.” Hotel Del Monte was famous in its own right. Once known as “the World’s Most Elegant Seaside Resort,” every room was tricked out with its own phone and indoor plumbing—the height of luxury in the 1880s, when it opened. Presidents, movie stars, and titans of industry stayed at the hotel, and its glamour established Monterey as a premiere destination for the rich. The grand plan for “A Surrealist Night in an Enchanted Forest” was hatched after one of Dali’s daily swims in the Del Monte pool. With Pearl Harbor months away, the war still felt “over there” for most Americans. But for Dali and Herbert Cerwin, the hotel’s public relations director as well as a fellow refugee, it hit much closer. Among all the artists who fled Europe, they were the lucky ones. “Then it came to me,” Cerwin wrote in his memoir, In Search of Something. “We will raise funds for them. We will give a benefit party. It will be a big party—a party such as has never been given before and only as Dali would give it.” Gala, ever the shrewd businesswoman, secured sponsorship from the Museum of Modern Art. With the party only weeks away, there was much to do. Invitations mailed to Monterey locals, Hollywood celebrities, and East Coast socialites requested guests arrive in costumes “copied after your dream,” or “of a primitive animal,” or as “people of the forest.” Dali and Gala cooked up a kooky list of essential party ingredients: 4,000 burlap sacks, 2,000 pine trees, 12,000 high-heeled shoes, 24 headless mannequins, 24 animal heads, two tons of newspaper, two truckloads of fruits and vegetables, one wrecked car, one nude model, and the largest bed in Hollywood. For that, Cerwin persuaded Jack Warner, the youngest of the four Warner brothers, to part with a prop from the 1925 film The Merry Widow that was reportedly big enough to sleep ten. The last item on Dali’s list was live animals. “We do not need many animals, but they must be very unusual,” Cerwin claims Dali explained at San Francisco’s Fleishhacker Zoo. Dali had a particular thing for giraffes: The gentle giants had appeared in many of his canvases, and he just had to have them wandering about his forest. Soon, Dali’s carefully planted stories about the party began popping up in newspapers across the country. Reservations flooded in, and Hotel Del Monte quickly drew over a thousand RSVPs. The hotel could only accommodate about half of them, and because Dali had crammed the Bali Room with so many props, there was no space for additional tables. But the show must go on: VIPs were placed at center tables, with lesser guests in the hall. The rest would be turned away at the door. According to Barbara Briggs-Anderson’s book, Salvador Dali’s “A Surrealist Night in an Enchanted Forest,” Dali allowed the press inside for a first look an hour before the festivities began. Flashbulbs from Paramount and Universal popped as Robert DeRoose of Life scribbled notes for a special feature he was writing, called “Life Goes to a Party.” The Monterey Herald, Look, and several newsreel crews crowded in too, clamoring for even a glimpse of Dali’s bizarro props come to life. Showtime was at eight. When Hollywood legends Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope swept in, they weren’t just stepping into a ballroom, but taking a walk through Dali’s mind: beautiful, surreal, and faintly terrifying. The walls disappeared into a forest of trees, where live monkeys and at least one bear lurked behind the trunks. Burlap sacks stuffed with newspaper hung from the ceiling like stalactites, transforming the cheerful room into a dimly lit cave, amplified by spooky blue lighting. The wrecked car was overturned with the nude model sleeping inside—playing dead with help from a mild sedative. Guests watched, breathless, as Charlotte Maye and Burt Harger slowly emerged from the wreck, swathed in bloody bandages that Dali himself had wrapped, before launching into “The Dance of Death” that Dali himself choreographed. Cerwin claims Dali had an explanation for the spectacle: “In America people are always in automobile accidents, is it not so?” The pièce de résistance was Gala. Dressed as the Princess of the Forest with a white unicorn head atop her head, she reclined on the enormous bed from Warner Brothers, its headboard draped in red velvet and fresh gardenias. In her arms, Gala held a six-month-old lion cub that she fed milk from a Coca-Cola bottle fitted with an oversized nipple. And from Gala’s bed, a long dining table extended out into the room where the VIPs sat as if they were all having dinner in bed. A live caged porcupine and ice sculptures of animals were the centerpieces, surrounded by pumpkins, squash, dried corn, and melons. Behind every fourth chair, mannequins—with animal heads sprouting out of their necks—stood watch as the first course, sole, was served to guests inside high-heeled shoes. Bob Hope sat next to Jackie Coogan—once a child star and later cast as Uncle Fester in The Adams Family—as he lifted a silver coupe to find live frogs underneath. “It’s alive!” Hope shouted. For guests, the most popular props were headdresses—or sunglasses, for Gloria Vanderbilt. One guest wore lettuce on his head, another had a bird’s nest in her antlers, and a third donned a pineapple on top of a wire basket. One rather confused guest, Briggs-Anderson writes, “staggering under a huge set of buffalo horns, whispered to a busboy: ‘I still don’t get it.’” Indeed, the evening was so odd that even the famously reclusive poet Robinson Jeffers, who rarely attended parties, left home to experience the spectacle for himself. The man of the hour wore lungs, kidneys, and a heart from an old anatomical chart sewn onto his black leotard. At one point, something dawned on Dali: “You didn’t get me the giraffe,” Cerwin claims Dali seethed. By most other accounts, however, the party was a hit. A Game and Gossip article, “Dreams Go Walking, Your Nightmare Turns Into the Real Thing,” described the event as the “dizziest, screwiest, most unusual party ever staged in the USA and one that will never be forgotten...” The day after, the Monterey Herald wrote: “Surrealist Salvador Dali threw a party last night and by dawn most of the best people were subconscious…” In his unpublished memoirs, portions of which made it into Briggs-Anderson’s book, Del Monte’s founder and controller of the party’s purse strings Samuel Morse wrote: “I have attended a lot of parties in my life, some of them quite fantastic, but this one topped them all. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all if someone had brought in a platter with a bleeding head on it with Salome dancing vigorously with nothing on but the last veil. In fact, nothing would have surprised me.” Before Dali, artists were known almost exclusively for their work, and often considered lucky to be appreciated in their lifetimes. But Dali was a painter who blurred many lines: between creator and creation, between art, performance, publicity, and self-promotion. The party expanded the definition of what an artist could be; afterwards, Dali’s eccentric persona became inextricable from his paintings. The party was a performance piece, and he its living centerpiece, demonstrating the power of the absurd. It generated a mythology that tangibly increased his cultural and economic value. Decades before Versace turned his opulent lifestyle into a marketing machine, Dali and Gala were already practicing what we now call personal branding—engineering moments that they knew would be irresistible to photographers. They both understood how powerful visibility can be in a modern, image-driven world. The couple anticipated the mechanics of contemporary celebrity culture, demonstrating that even scandal could elevate an artist, and that controversy could be a tool rather than a liability. When the Museum of Modern Art requested the party’s proceeds for refugee artists, Del Monte sent an itemized list of the party’s accounting, detailing a staggering red ink. Reportedly, MoMA never received a dime. Today, Dali is most remembered for his waxed mustache, melting clocks, and wacky personality; many have all but forgotten that he was also a Nazi sympathizer. In that sense, the surrealist forest helped lay the groundwork for a new model of fame: one in which spectacle sustains myth, and myth sustains the brand—often even outliving the man who put on the show. On July 15th, 1997, Gianni Versace was shot in cold blood on the front steps of his beloved Casa Casuarina. Everything changed after Versace died. “It was like Studio 54 after it was raided. The whole thing began to fall apart,” said Miami club owner Chris Paciello. His death wasn’t only mourned by the fashion community, it was mourned by us all. Like Dali, Versace spun dreams—not just from the clothes he designed, but also from the mansions he owned, the celebrities he entertained, and the parties he hosted. He understood that the fantasy around the brand could be just as powerful as the clothes themselves. Tara Solomon tells Vanity Fair, Versace “knew how to cast a party like he cast a runway show. Each person was there because they brought something unique… But it was never contrived.” is parties were advertisements with a pulse, and all the supermodels, movie stars, and rock gods who rocked his designs became part of the Versace mythology. He helped invent the modern luxury-brand ecosystem, where brand identity is built as much around culture and image as it is through product. Versace’s social life also normalized cultural crossover—pop stars at fashion week, campaigns starring celebrities, influencers at movie premieres. Before the ‘90s, most designers were relatively private figures, but Versace became a star attraction. Admirers often camped outside Casa Casuarina, desperate for his autograph or even just a glimpse at the silver-haired designer. After Versace was killed, Madonna, Mickey Rourke, and Sylvester Stallone left their homes in Miami. Hotspots closed. Photographers stopped coming. The vibe of the beach became more guarded, and those who still went were far less glamorous than the old crowd. The party was over. Yet the Versace brand refused to go home, thanks to Gianni’s sister. Donatella has been described as her brother’s “muse,” “right hand,” “a gay man’s trophy wife,” “half Gianni in drag,” and a “rib taken from his side.” In Versace’s own words, Donatella was his “ideal woman.” It was she who tirelessly courted Madonna; who designed the brand’s edgier Versus line; who cast models for the legendary photo shoots. One of history’s most iconic pieces of clothing, Jennifer Lopez’s jungle dress, was her design. And it was Donatella who took the wheel in 1996 when Versace was diagnosed with cancer in his left ear. “Well, every day that I live from now on—it’s my party,’” the designer said after going into remission. But Donatella, with that trademark platinum blonde hair and a cigarette forever dangling from her mouth, was the one who kept the parties—and thus, the brand—raging. Similarly, without Gala, Dali’s brand may have ceased to exist. She, too, was his “muse”—her image appearing in many of Dali’s most famous canvases—but in an art world that favors the myth of the male genius, the term “muse” diminished who Gala really was. As Dali’s de facto manager, publicist, accountant, and brand architect, she negotiated his contracts, managed his finances, controlled access to him, and even dictated his wardrobe. It was Gala who encouraged his flamboyant behavior, his move into surrealism, and their move to America where he thrived on mass media attention. As Hungarian philosopher Brassai wrote in his book, Conversations Avec Picasso: “As for Gala, lover, inspiration, teacher, muse and businesswoman all at once, she took the reins of the ‘Dalí phenomenon’; his great success is, in large part, her doing.” Dali himself said: “I would polish Gala to make her shine.” In reality, it seems Gala was the one doing the polishing. On that strange night inside the Bali Room, she was part of the spectacle herself. Still, she’s remembered less as the architect of the Dali phenomenon, and more as the princess of his enchanted forest. Neither artist did things halfway. Versace and Dali were both extra, gleefully so. As the painter once said: “The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.” And as the designer proved: “I don’t care about the money. I just like to spend the money.”
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