The late Gianni Versace carved a name for himself in the history of fashion with designs that often seemed to find inspiration and muses in the demimonde of streetwalkers.
It is therefore difficult to think about a fashion house that often destabilised the basic rules of taste and tantalised us with the tacky and the vulgar opting for severely sculptural silhouettes and architectural lines.
Yet that’s exactly what Gianni’s sister Donatella did in her S/S 2011 collection.
While looking at the archives, Donatella must have kept a firm eye on Le Corbusier’s architectures, André Courrèges’s mid-60s designs and, well, early 80s videogames.
Leaving behind extreme flirtatiousness, she indeed focused on clean silhouettes.
The opening white dresses, jackets and pencil skirts and coat/apron dresses, characterised by a certain futuristic touch emphasised also by cut-out motifs or occasional red, yellow or see-through PVC lines, were actually modern reinterpretations of André Courrèges’ Spring/Summer 1965 wool gaberdine and wool satin outfits.
In some looks there was the same sharp dynamism and athleticism, Donatella Versace claimed she had borrowed from the trailer to Tron Legacy for her A/W 2010 menswear collection.
While architecture seemed somehow to inspire also the ankle-length sandals (and to have infiltrated the hairstyles with buns covered in black vinyl…), geometry was the main principle behind the jackets and skirts: the former seemed to be based on sharp rectangles, the latter on sinuous cylinders.
Rigidity was the key as it was also proved by the short A-line dresses that, rather than being draped around the body in traditional Versace style, were sculpted in the fabric and wouldn’t look out of place in a modern remake of Things to Come
(should there ever be one…).
The signature Greek border of the Versace
fashion house was also reinvented in a more rigid way, and used for prints, vinyl inserts and also to create optical motifs on bags.
Colours then appeared, though in a sort of restrained and simplified palette.
The designer limited herself to red, turquoise, yellow and black, arranging the colours in vertical lines, evoking early 80s videogames and the typical C64 and Atari graphic that didn't have the mind-bending quality of modern consoles but at least allowed you to develop a bit more your fantasy as you tried to imagine those few coloured squares on your screen forming an alien, a spaceship or a human figure.
The final gowns, covered in fringes that created dynamic movements as the models walked, brought back Versace's traditional exuberance and sensuality on the runway.
While with these designs the Versace fashion house is not following the 70s trend like everybody else (and that's good…), a change of mood in one collection can't be interpreted as a total reinvention of the identity of a fashion house.
This collection has probably got behind it a much more practical and logical explanation: being Donatella Versace a designer and a businesswoman, while working on this collection, she probably had in mind also the opening of a new store in Asia (in November 2010).
Indeed, with nineteen shops over there, she knows she will definitely have to keep firmly in mind the tastes of the Asian consumers and buyers.
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