Naomi Campbell laughing with her arm around Gianni Versace, Claudia Schiffer in a metallic mesh dress, Carla Bruni in the background, Elizabeth Hurley in the famous safety-pin dress alongside Hugh Grant. Supermodels wearing the house's most iconic looks in a room that, for one night, was the center of the universe. We are talking about the Versace after-parties at the Ritz in Paris during the 1990s: laughing faces, rivers of champagne, and looks that made fashion history. The photographs aren't beautiful in the contemporary sense of the word. They are alive.
The closed room
To understand it, you have to start with how those nights actually worked. After the haute couture shows, Versace would move the party inside the Ritz Hotel. He had the hotel pool covered to create a dance floor, transforming the rooms into something between a reception and a rock concert. Those who gained entry described the events as fashion shows that felt like rock concerts packed with stars. There was no outside audience. It was a closed room, and inside that room, fashion photographed itself.
Holding the camera was almost always Roxanne Lowit. A former New York textile designer with no formal photographic training, Lowit practically invented a genre: backstage and after-party photography. She went where other photographers couldn't reach—behind the scenes and inside the parties—treating the night as raw material to be preserved. Her images of the 1990 Versace Couture after-party at the Ritz are auctioned today as fine art photography. Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell seated around the legendary journalist Anna Piaggi: a shot that has become an indelible historical document.
Two visual regimes
Here lies the contrast that makes this archive magnetic for today's twenty-somethings. Gen Z produces more images of themselves than any previous generation. They create them smooth, filtered, and calibrated for an audience watching in real time. Every story lasts twenty-four hours, and every shot is born already destined to be seen. The photos from the Ritz belong to an opposite regime: they were created not to be seen by anyone, except those present and the magazine archives. Their imperfection isn't a stylistic choice. It is the natural consequence of a tool—film—and an intention: to document without performing.
It is the exact same logic that brought back the so-called "indie sleaze"—the grainy, late-night photography of the early 2000s. When Instagram was born in 2010, that type of chaotic imagery slowly began to disappear, replaced by the polished grid of the curated feed. Today it returns, particularly among twenty-somethings, as the promise of something their own visual experience lacks: disorder, physical presence, and a party where people were actually in the party, not broadcasting it.
Authenticity as a rare commodity
There is a paradox in all of this. The nights at the Ritz were the exact opposite of accessible. They were the most exclusive venue imaginable—a suite entered only by figures who would define the pop culture of the decade. Yet Gen Z doesn't long for them because of that exclusivity. They long for them because of their perceived authenticity: the idea that in those photos, people weren't acting for an invisible audience.
It is a partial, perhaps naïve reading. Those, too, were constructed images, taken by a professional inside a fashion marketing event. But in the transition from historical document to viral content, something shifts. The context evaporates, leaving only the style. The flash, the shiny skin, the branded lamé, and the feeling of a night that will never happen again remain. The nostalgia circulating through feeds isn't for Versace. It's for a way of existing in the world where not everything was already an image.
What doesn't come back
In 1997, Gianni Versace was killed on the steps of his Miami mansion, and that era came to an end. The supermodels who filled the Ritz suite became historic icons; some retired from the runway, while others reappear for tribute shows. Roxanne Lowit, the photographer of those nights, passed away in 2022, leaving behind a forty-year archive.
What remains is a handful of shots re-shared by Instagram accounts, saved, shared, and commented on by thousands of people. A generation that generates millions of images a day pauses before a few dozen analog photographs and reads something in them that their own photos lack. It isn't a question of quantity. It's that those nights existed before they ever wanted to be watched.
PHOTO: Gianni Versace and Donatella, Roxanne Lowit, via Instagram
