Business Of Fashion – 23 janvier 2019<\/p>\n
The strength of Donatella\u2019s new work is the way she embraces it, with love and fearlessness and the same dry wit with which she deals with all the tricky propositions in her life.
\nBy Tim Blanks.<\/p>\n
MILAN, Italy \u2014 You know the expression, \u201cGo big, or go home\u201d? And that other one: \u201cYou can\u2019t go home again\u201d? Donatella Versace is the kind of woman who wants it all. On Friday, she went big AND went home. Going back to her roots, and blowing them skyhigh. As skyhigh as the gigantic safety pin that dominated her catwalk. (The invitation was a box of safety pins.) How good did THAT look when DV posed in front of it? \u201cWe\u2019re living on Instagram,\u201d she murmured during a press preview earlier in the day.<\/p>\n
Social media-savvy she may be, but Donatella is also a faithful believer in the physicality of fashion. Meaning, the show\u2019s the thing. Frederic Sanchez, back in the fold after some years elsewhere, made a visceral soundtrack which mashed up Nirvana and electronics, the aural counterpart of Donatella\u2019s luxury vs. grunge concept. But she herself has become the fashion equivalent of a DJ, remixing elements of her past to make new shapes the way a musician creates new sounds. It\u2019s enough to make you wonder why more designers haven\u2019t taken a leaf from her book, had a long, hard look at past triumphs and given them a contemporary spin.<\/p>\n
It worked here because it felt unhinged. Like the men\u2019s show in January, there were a thousand pieces in play: fabrics, textures, colours fighting each other in gorgeous chaos, but styled into a coherent, perversely irresistible proposal. Well, maybe not quite as coherent as it was in January, but even that seemed like it might actually have been the point. There was sheer deliciousness in a tattered lime green cashmere sweater bunched with jeweled safetypins, laid over a python-printed pencil skirt with a suggestion of red lace at the waist and a faux fox stole gripping Fran Summers\u2019 throat (there must be a celestial fashion consensus that each season dictates how certain models get the best outfits in the shows they walk in \u2013 I would say Fran and Adut Akech are the anointed ones for Autumn 2019).<\/p>\n
There was something exquisitely lurid about such a look, and that same quality infused the whole collection: satin slip dresses with fluoro lace stockings, or without them, with harnesses instead (like Kiki Willems\u2019s tiny little chartreuse situation); those same harnesses restraining earnest tweeds; big fat coats hiding a multitude of sins (this was a collection for SINNERS); and Adut\u2019s glorious gold mesh column with some odd red lace underpinnings.<\/p>\n
Donatella literalised her back pages with a t-shirt that reproduced Richard Avedon\u2019s 1995 ad campaign for the fragrance BLONDE. No prizes for guessing who the blonde in the ad was. She also reproduced the perfume\u2019s Lalique bottle as a print. You can\u2019t go home again? Not true. You can\u2019t escape your past. The strength of Donatella\u2019s new work is the way she embraces it, with love and fearlessness and the same dry wit with which she deals with all the tricky propositions in her life. It\u2019s a very convincing proposition, made even more so by the casual catwalk ambulation of Stephanie Seymour at show’s end, like Donatella saying, \u00ab\u00a0Those women existed and here is one of them, right here, right now, still kickin’.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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