"There are two faces," Donatella Versace declared backstage. "We wanted to show the softer side of Versace." Tonight's Atelier show was a sharp U-turn from her recent couture and ready-to-wear outings, with their emojis, their made-for-Instagram logo dresses, and their computer precision. Where she wound up felt somewhere in the vicinity of Laurel Canyon by way of the Coachella Valley, if festivalgoers wore bespoke dresses made from hand-painted floral fil coupe, or unraveling strips of pastel chiffon cinched across the torso by narrower strips of chain mail.
But if this was a softer, more deconstructed, and, as her notes suggested, easier Atelier Versace, it wasn't for the tame. "Out there we are stoned," Jim Morrison intoned on the soundtrack as Lara Stone made her exit on patent leather platform go-go boots. There was barely an edge in sight that wasn't frayed, be it the cuff of a single bell sleeve or the tiered tufts of chiffon on the asymmetric skirts of showpiece gowns. Some dresses seemed just barely held together with strings of flowers, while others balanced solid silk chiffon on one side with peekaboo cutouts on the other. As ever, skin was on unabashed display, often exposed through the sheer corsetry ungirding from which she suspended all that bias-cut drape.
Versace didn't see the idea of perfect imperfection all the way through to the end. Some of the dresses were more showgirl than festival girl. A lifetime of flash is hard to let go of. But look past those outliers. She was really onto something with those vibrant floral velvet numbers.
After the second show, where Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Naomi Campbell perched in the front row, Versace headed over to the amfAR dinner at Ledoyen, a famous Paris boîte in the shadow of the Grand Palais. There were other designers in the mix, not to mention a handful of celebrities, but Versace and her tattered model tribe were the stars around whom the rest of the party revolved.
