Upstairs in the Pinocoteca Ambrosiana, Dario Vitale is explaining how Versace is just like Coca-Cola. “Everybody knows Versace.” And just like how Mad Men’s Don Draper “invented” buying the world a Coke (Jon Hamm aptly sat front row at Versace), so has Versace been opted and co-opted on the screen in campy true crime series and kitschy showgirl dramas. The idea of Versace has spread so wide and far, into SNL parodies and Migos lyrics, that you could convincingly argue that Versace belongs more to the culture than to any one person at this particular moment in time.
That’s also sort of true for the business. Its sale from Capri Holdings to The Prada Group is in motion, raising Donatella Versace to Chief Brand Officer and leaving Vitale and Versace in a middle state between two owners.
The middle, though, seems to be where Vitale thrives. His presentation, staged in Milan’s jewel box Pinocoteca Ambrosiana museum, delighted in the in-between. The formality of the museum, housing Caravaggios he has a “tormented passion” for, clashed with set design by Andrea Evangelista that made the marble rooms look like they had been worn down after a rager. Pool noodles were in one corner (Miami Beach, baby!) while Solitaire games were left open on desktops. In one upstairs room, a giant bed was unmade and rumpled, undies, pills, glasses beside it on the floor. “Those are my actual bedsheets,” Vitale admitted, “I needed a little niche where I could feel safe.”
The clothes were anything but safe (thank, god!) tangoing between glamour and kink with a rakish charm. Daywear in day-glo colors brought jeans up-up-up to the ribcage and layered men’s shirting. Singlets were cut so narrow they looked more like breastplates, and most jeans, when not ratcheted shut with an askew leather belt, were left open at the fly, harnessed together by a metal ring—in honor of how Gianni Versace would fasten pants shut with cock rings. In these opening day looks, there was something almost Teddy Boy—although Vitale swears he’s not aiming at the past. “I’m not that person that has nostalgia or melancholia, not at all,” he said.
Instead, he became more obsessed with the gestures of Gianni Versace than the actuality of the garments. (“Sometimes you get to know a person more by his stationery sometimes rather than what he does,” said Vitale, again proving his romance with words.) The most convincing were women’s dresses, goddess draped in an X-like shape around the body, fastened with just a single button over the models’ tailbone. Versace knickers full exposed. “You’re wearing a million dollar dress and you can open a button and you’re naked,” he smirked.
The sexiness—perhaps the glitziest shadow cast over the Versace empire, for what is sexy in the societal collapse of 2025?—was approached through these kinky little gestures. And through a fantastic cast of models, real people from himbo to gallerina, and young actresses like Ava Capri and Talia Ryder. As “Little Red Corvette” played, I wished the whole thing would devolve into a rager—or steamier. (Hehe.)
Maybe that’s how you take something as omnipresent, as essential, as known as Coca-Cola and refine it back into a jewel. You gotta freak it, complicate it, confuse it, make it about one forte and feral idea. Vitale gets it. Do you?
