Versace posed and provoked the basic issues of fashion's role. Versace tantalized us with vulgarity. In this, he adapted a strategy from the fine arts in the twentieth century, including elements of the banal and coarse in his sensibility. The collage, smarmy joke, offensive imagery, and ready-made object pertinent in the juggernaut of modern art are evidence of an attempt to be vulgar. Versace employed a similar strategy, perhaps to determine an audience like that of contemporary art with its feint to the liberal left designed to evade at each step the possibility of becoming a bourgeois commodity. Modern art found one great ideal in the prostitute. As ToulouseLautrec discovered the aesthetic probity of the demimonde and the ideal model in the streetwalker during the 1880s and 1890s, so too Versace located the prostitute as the last unexamined figure in fashion's twentyyear sociology of the street.