Of all the designers with debuts this season, who has the toughest job? Dario Vitale might be at the top of the list. Vitale is the first person not born a Versace to head up the brand. Donatella Versace, who led the company longer than her late brother Gianni, remains at the label as Chief Brand Ambassador. And the house is in the midst of being sold to Prada, the parent company of Miu Miu, where Vitale was until very recently the design director for womenswear.
All that might’ve stymied a designer with less conviction, but Vitale, who’s 42, does not lack for confidence. This was a gutsy first effort, a thorough rethinking of Versace’s place in people’s wardrobes, one that brought it down off the pantheon and put it squarely in the everyday. Vitale said, “mythology started when gods and goddesses were a bit bored of having affairs with themselves, so they descended Mount Olympus to walk among men. It’s not just about an evening gown to the floor”—there were no gowns, in fact. “We make it a little more real. I know a lot of friends who would die to wear an embroidered leather vest, but to go to the disco club, not to go to the Met.”
His idea was to look back at Gianni Versace’s late ’80s designs. Vitale’s mother was a serious collector of the designer’s clothes at the time, though this won’t strike anyone as a mum’s wardrobe, save for some excellent era-appropriate pumps and lady bags. Yes, the cast included models of multiple generations, but the clothes seemed to be skewed squarely at Vitale’s own millennial brethren, with their taste for vintage and penchant for layering. Plus anybody else older or younger and firm of body—that part is important.
Vitale’s Versace is sexy, but in an undone way that breaks with the house’s past: The jersey dresses were Madame Grès-ish coming, but going, they were barely held together above a pair of logo briefs. Tops were cut low on the side like Miami Beach muscle tees, the edges left unfinished; belts on high-waisted jeans were left undone, and sometimes the zippers too. And never before have a chainmail bra top and matching skirt come down a Versace runway with a prim little cashmere cardigan tied around the hips.
It’s been a big week for color in Milan. Vitale’s linen tailoring showed he can mix it up with the best of them: aubergine with orangey red, azure with kelly green. He also had a fresh way of addressing Versace’s famous prints. The idea, he said, was “to do something that almost looks like a wardrobe of our clients, where you have several different printed shirts, and no one is similar to each other. It’s almost like a great states of print.”
We were at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, a gem of a museum apparently never used for a fashion show before that houses the largest collection of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings and notes, as well as a Caravaggio among its treasures. Vitale said he has a “tormented passion for Caravaggio.” He also has a thing for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, a movie in which the arrival of a mystery man upends a bourgeois household with liberating results. Vitale dressed the museum like a home; even going so far as to put his own bed sheets on a mattress tucked into a corner of one of the rooms. In his reimagining of Versace, he’s cast himself as The Visitor in Teorema. “It’s an awakening,” he said.
