Tributes are a strange business. A closure of sorts. Then again, there is always the risk of re-opening old wounds that may, more or less, have healed. Donatella Versace has been tussling with this dilemma for two decades. It is twenty years and two months since her brother, Gianni, was murdered outside his Miami mansion. Last September, in her usual Milan Fashion Week timeslot, she finally tackled the tribute, and then some.
If you like your fashion shows with glitz, glamour and emotion, this was the mother of them all. Supermodels? She had them, today's and the originals: Kendall and Gigi, Claudia Schiffer, Carla Bruni, Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford, and Kaia Gerber, her sixteen-year-old daughter, wearing a crystal and embroidered catsuit printed with her mother's image. At the end, Donatella strode out flanked by the original supers to the sound of George Michael's Freedom, the favourite soundtrack to Gianni's shows twenty years before.
Her body is as tiny and compact as ever; she cannot be more than 158cm tall, but her face is softer and her smile is irrepressible. At sixty-two, the contrast she cuts with the traumatised, wrung-out figure who tottered down the catwalk for the first time without her brother two decades ago is a delight, especially in a business where too often the trajectory runs from pomp to bathos. "I knew if I was going to do it, I had to do it full-on," she told us. And she did exactly that.
Many of the clothes at the Spring 2018 show were not merely timid nods to her late brother's genius; they were unabashed replicas of some of Gianni's greatest hits. The cacophonous baroque patterns, the Warhol prints that Andy gave him permission to use, the crazily embroidered leggings with matching mini-kilts, the studded and fringed Wild West leather jackets and denim shirts, the leopard-print ball skirts; they were all there, ready to be dissected by a new generation.
Pretty much the only thing Donatella altered of Gianni's legacy was the chain-mail dresses. "The originals were so heavy," she says. "Now you can make them with a much lighter-weight mesh."
