The Versus girl has done some growing up since last September. Donatella Versace and her main man Christopher Kane ditched the Spring collection's playground equipment for a triangular-shaped runway that would echo the show's dominant decorative motif. What else was different? No more plaids, no more micro florals, no more geometric blocks of color. They opened with an impeccably tailored charcoal coat—if you couldn't call it conservative, it was certainly classic. The only hint that things wouldn't stay that way for long could be found on the glittery toe straps of the models' stack-heeled sandals.
Versace and Kane made an erogenous zone of the midriff without ever exposing an inch of bare skin: They cinched the waistline of the second coat out in leather, and inset sheer, boned corsets into many of the dresses and at least one of the jackets that followed. As the show progressed, gray flannel gave way to Lurex-shot Fair Isle sweaters, corsetry boning that looked as though it had been dipped in glitter, and party dresses glitter-printed in a recurring triangular motif.
Before the show Kane called the pattern on the penultimate skirt "glitter fireworks." Despite all that shine, though, this was a rather restrained collection from designers who've made a virtue of colorful exuberance. As an aside, both of them were thinking along vaguely similar lines in their own collections. In the end, if it was hard to get as excited about this collection as the last one, it wasn't tough to be impressed by the craftsmanship.
