Glamour’s back. The ’80s are being revered. Print and color are in season. Why wouldn’t Donatella be having a great time designing Versace? Coming off last season’s triumphant retrospective for her brother Gianni set her up for—if not a risk, then another mountain to climb. Well, no worries on that front: She wisely took the impetus and carried on in her own direction.
Somehow that included a play on classics—a slick trenchcoat, a schoolgirl shirt collar, beige tailoring, super-platformed brogues. Then there was a riff on trad-punk tartans, all chopped-about, with multilevel kilts topped off with the odd beret. Silhouette-wise, what evolved were draped tulip-shaped miniskirts and bubbles, waists cinched in with broad leather Versace-logo buckle belts, and wide, wide shoulders. Where there were corsets, there were T-shirts crammed beneath them, DIY-club-style.
The Versace archive is a fathomless source of brash, busy, primary-color, pop prints, which young designers revere. The trick here was that Donatella took that encouragement to go all-out with total looks—head scarf to body-con drapery to leggings to print-covered boots. That’s where it got interesting, because while the Versace sexiness is so much a house ‘classic,’ it was the head coverings which refreshed and reinforced the frisson of glamour. With just this one device, Donatella nailed something important. In the’80s and ’90s, the years of bouncing Cindy Crawford blowouts, such looks simply couldn’t have happened. Now, it was the tightly wound jersey scarves and dark glasses that rendered the trio of black dresses so visually impactful. Subliminally, they signaled a lot of things which are now up for consideration.
Donatella said that to her, those pieces meant “mystery, which is always glamorous.” Then again, she’s always been a woman whose eyes are open to diversity. Today, inclusiveness takes in the fact that there are so many cultures in the world where modesty is a standard requirement—yet a requirement that does not necessarily preclude fashion-consciousness. During London Fashion Week, we have reported the parallel London Modest Fashion Week, just the tip of an emerging market which spans continents and millions of young women who relate. Elsewhere this season, we’ve seen head scarves, balaclavas, and the like beginning to turn up on runways, looking like edgy, geeky gestures. Here, Donatella Versace’s endorsement made much more of a thing of it. You can take the hint any way you like—but in an on-point way, breaking down barriers and prejudice has always been integral to the house of Versace, and to some eyes, this collection fully honored the brand tradition.
