There’s a certain way a pair of kitten heels make a girl walk that changes a lot more than the proportions of the clothes she’s wearing. This not-so-esoteric point was ably demonstrated by Gigi Hadid, Kendall Jenner, Adriana Lima, Karlie Kloss, et al as they strode down a very long runway at Versace. In distinct contrast to the forward-pitched high-heel strut, such low-styled stilettoes cause a rolling motion from the hips that, when combined with tight-fitting cropped kick-flares, skimpy minis, or dangerously curved jersey dresses, will provide some mesmerizing chassis action in retreat. Not that the front view offered by Miss Hadid wasn’t fully eye-popping too, particularly in the case of her bra-free demonstration of how to wear a scoop-neck slip dress. Allora!
It is safe to say that sexiness is back at Versace, but—in keeping with the more hard-core, military, female-empowerment mood Donatella Versace set out last season—it’s a different, more various kind of sexy, embracing models of a range of shapes and ages. “I love mixing the cool girls with the reality girls,” Donatella said backstage. “It’s about a woman’s power—for every kind of woman!”
For Fall, again, Donatella made sure she paid attention to daywear, starting with black leather-trimmed suits and belted coats, moving into biker-jacketed tailoring, taut ski-pants, and a section of sporty crosshatched knit dresses, and one big chunky sweater in an abstracted alpine pattern on Natasha Poly. Then came the prints, some of them consisting of baroque curlicues designed by Gianni Versace and then “broken apart on the computer.” Still, it wasn’t so much the use of ice-blue, or coral, or the wavy and “stretched” lines that drew the eye so much as the general sense of energy radiated by this new, much more inclusive and individualistic band of Versace models. That and the other emergent trends of the season: lots more leg on show, and a comeback for the power of dressing in black.
