VERSACE PRE-FALL 2011

Donatella Versace, despite being the sister of Gianni, is a woman of dubious talent.  This dawned on me one day, while watching an interview with her.  The interviewer asked “Where do you look for inspiration?”

“I find inspiration everywhere,” she responded.  ”This phone is inspiring, the car I arrived in today inspired me.”  While I could see the car as being inspiring – Versace clothes often remind me of a Lamborghini that has been adapted to run on cocaine, I can’t help but call bullshit on her general premise.  No one is inspired by everything!  One would go insane to even attempt that.  So what do we do?  We construct ontologies around our obsessions and organize them around a fundamental set of beliefs and tastes.  Some of us may see these core tastes and only these.  Others, such as myself, seem to fall into a rabbit hole of their tastes and obsessions where they suddenly seem to be everywhere – from kitsch to high culture, spanning across centuries and even millennia.  I feel like Gianni Versace was probably in the latter category, while Donatella is most likely in the former though uncomfortably (and who can blame her?) living in the shadow of her brother.  She just doesn’t seem to get it.

That being said, she has had a bit of a flash of inspiration here!  Yes, objectively speaking, most of you will find it atrocious.  I am also willing to admit that my partial Southern European (Balkan) heritage, and interest in the Baroque and Rococo probably blinds me here, but what can I say?  I love a dose of Eurotrash.

Indeed, this is kind of a throwback to my beloved Spring ’92 season.  The militaristic heritage of Baroque design is referenced in the interplay between broken down, repetitive classical patterning and animal prints.  The resemblance to Condottiere armour that I noticed last time seems further reinforced by the extensive use of metallics and leather.  All of this exists alongside Seventies kitsch (I’m sure I see my  yia-yia’s drapes in there somewhere) and the kitsch of the late Nineties as Donatella recalls her iconic wrap dress.  Ultimately, the styling makes my eyes hurt, and I find their use of an Eastern European model perhaps pandering slightly too much to their current customer base.  Perhaps even as clothes, I am on the fence about these pieces.  But as a tribute to the entire career of a unique man, from his earliest days to the period after his death, these make for a fascinating, rich and intertextual historical document.

Images Via Fashion Gone Rogue

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