We know what you’re thinking: “Versace? Restrained? Never!” Well, it’s been a year of curveballs, and the casa Donatella inherited from her late brother is no exception to the trend. Of course, this was not your archetypal minimalism à la Jil Sander or, indeed, the Helmut Langisms that seem to be haunting everyone on Planet Moda. Instead, it’s a characteristically ornate approach to modernist purity, somewhere between Saint Peter’s Basilica and Le Corbusier. For the occasion, Donatella scoured Gianni’s colourful inventory, reigniting shapes and graphics that barely surface on the internet for something a little less flashy.
And quite right, too. For millennials and Gen-Zers born at the cusp of Gianni’s death in 1997, it’s easy enough to pick out the greatest hits – 1980s baroque pop, mid-90s Glamazonia and medusa-studded belts with white jeans – but scratching deeper requires serious research. Guiding the way, the house’s matriarch looked to Gianni’s SS82 collection, of which only pixelated excerpts survive online. A damier print, then spliced across a whole spectrum of wrapped fabrics and palettes, was here pared-back to its simplest form, colouring shift dresses, mini skirts and ornate, Renaissance shirts – again, hushed in a pastel blue, pink and yellow palette (very AW94), rather than the protocol black and gold. Much like its original inspiration, a salon-style show with models parading in twos and threes, this outing also nodded to the girl gang Gianni built, sending Mean Girl trios down the catwalk armed with chrome clutches. Heck, even the house’s signature metallic dresses showed face, ditching the “Oroton” lamé pieces for a checkerboard silver and mint green embroidered column dress.
While it was AW82 that birthed this show’s favoured monogram, it was nonetheless SS95 that brought girl-boss tailoring into the mix. Riffing on the same snatched waist, busty upper and cut-throat shoulders that made Gianni’s offering such a hit, this was a softened, far girlier version, with suits fabricated in Barbie-core tweeds. These slightly saccharine, if not twee, touches are undoubtedly the hands of Donatella, who has, during her tenure, injected the Versace brand with a femininity that can be dainty and femme, as well as emboldened and brash.
Hot on the heels of that high-camp cruise show, co-designed with Dua Lipa, Donatella is proving that she is more than a custodian of Versace, but also a curator of its contemporary iterations. If that means a light touch, with less Greco-Roman indulgence, then so be it. This season’s seamless (literally) A-line dresses came with cut-out stiffened necks, while leather Chanel-style suits were pleated at the waist, and black, sleeveless tunic dresses were mounded with enveloped bras. For a change, it seemed Versace had heeded the words of Coco Chanel: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” Accessories felt like neat punctuation marks, arriving as mini purse-sized numbers or cool, perfectly matched draughtboard totes. Closing the show with supermodel OG, Claudia Schiffer, was also a telling move. Aside from her role in Gianni’s heyday, she embodied the hyper-90s thread woven between the looks, showing that even when something as glitzy as Versace tones down the extra, it’s still a spectacle.
