How do you top the Instagram-breaking Jennifer Lopez? If you’re Donatella Versace, you turn the cameras on your audience. A giant LED screen split the runway down the middle at Versace tonight. After the age-defying perfection of J. Lo, seeing ourselves reflected back at us was “a rather cruel joke,” as a seatmate put it. But then again it made the point: We’re all the stars of our own Instagram feeds. Further, the designer who can dress us best for a moment—or a life—in the spotlight is DV. So far Milan has mostly been a week of handwork and craft. Donatella remains the resident master of flash.
That goes for both her womenswear and menswear—this season marked the first time she combined the two collections. At a preshow press conference she endorsed both “hyper-femininity” via exaggerated shoulders and hips and nipped waists and “hyper-masculinity.” While gender fluidity isn’t really Versace’s thing, equal opportunity flamboyance most certainly is. That meant girls and boys wore electric floral prints and zebra stripes, ditto the metallic pinstripes and traditional checks. The only distinction between a pair of hot pink pantsuits was that the men’s was single-breasted and the women’s was double.
Since signing with Capri Holdings a year and a half ago, Versace’s collections have grown to include significantly more daywear. Here, Donatella adopted a glam-casual stance: Her jeans were pieced together in precise stripes and worn with leather jackets patchworked in a similar fashion—standard five pockets they were not. A bigger surprise was the rugby-stripe sweater. Its all-American sportiness was out of left field, even if the designer spliced it into sexy corseted shapes. A pair of oversize polos with the familiar logo treatment worn by two male models hewed closer to the house formula.
Of course, evening was the main event. If pushing into new territory was the daywear plan, for after dark the idea was closer to revival. The safety pins that famously held together Elizabeth Hurley’s slashed LBD were replaced by engraved rings, like piercings, and there was an abundance of the house-signature chain mail. The material was mostly cut short, and, in the case of the show closer, it was trimmed with a 3-D band of crystals at the neckline and featured a curvy lampshade skirt. Naturally, its model, Kendall Jenner, put it on her Instagram Stories. At 123 million, Jenner’s got 9 million followers on Lopez. Who needs J. Lo after all?
