While 68-year-old Jil Sander has put artistic differences behind her and returned to her eponymous company in a surprise move, announced yesterday in Milan, Donatella Versace says she too has finally put her demons behind her.
That collection, shown in Paris, in the Ritz, managed to combine religion, sexual and cutting-edge techniques - three of his abiding interests. Chaste it wasn't."It's taken 15 years for me to feel I could revisit that collection," she explained. "I always carried it around in my head as a reference but I didn't feel I could go there, because it was too painful, and it was too private."
Talking in the sun-filled first floor rooms of the courtyard palazzo which serves as offices, showspace and to this day houses the perfectly preserved marbled and gilded apartment where Gianni Versace lived when he was in Milan, she seemed relaxed; her days of all night partying, profligacy and personal problems (divorce, drugs) behind her.
The company has reigned back, self-administered an infusion of fresh blood, in the form of Christopher Kane, one of the stars of British fashion who works with Versace on Versus, her second line. So in some ways the heavy Goth mood of her new main collection might seem counter-intuitive.
But this wasn't the melancholic, death-glamourising version of Goth beloved of teenagers so much as the vampy, body-hugging variety that tends to appeal to the likes of Angelina Jolie when she wants to make a major statement on the red carpet.
That meant femme-bot velvet and leather bustier dresses, dazzling silver metal mesh and chiffon corseted dresses that practically strobed under the spotlights, over the knee mesh leather fetish boots, black round necked, wool shift dresses with metal inserts in the shape of a cross and a lot of embroidered and jewelled crucifixes - which presumably, will come as optional extras in the Middle Eastern markets.
Posted in: Autumn-Winter,Milan Fashion Week,Versace
