Versace - Resort 2021

                                                 (Images: Versace.  All credit)

Donatella Versace has delivered, via digital fashion week and through the Resort 2021 capsule collections, a super charged power drive of abandon.  There is nothing about this collection which offers any indication that COVID-19 as crimped or pushed back desired plans for mega distribution of the Versace brand nor allowing for any, at times, distractive social commentary as an inspiration.  This is Donatella's hedonism in full swing, while in the shadow and presence of a pathogen outbreak that no one has experienced in over a 100 years.  There is a deliciousness of irony for the go-for-broke, almost fatalistic stylizations that she has revealed for Versace's resort collection.

At an array of 43 pieces, Donatella and her team have pushed the intensity of three decades of power dressing, allowing the decadence to overflow from this Resort ensemble. It has certainly superseded most designers in its directness, while other brands and their recent offerings were created whilst being quarantined or in some cases are still in lockdown, offered a more reserved format.  Donatella and co had set upon, what appears to be, to define what a post-Covid world would like or at least how the aesthetic could be in demand.  In our current stimulus stuffed world are we all going to party like 1999?  Probably not or we'll end up in lockdown again, more so is the crunch that global economies will have in the wake of the virus, with central banks and governments completely backstopping the money markets.  The overall structural damage that this pandemic has caused has yet to be assessed.  So, the fast, gotta-get-that-deal era of global exchange has all but collapsed. Yet, the residual remains as does the memories. 

But, we all adore the freedom of licentiousness when it occasionally comes around and at this point it is only based off a nostalgic trip or romanticized study of the mid to late 1970s. When the 1960s hippie ended, replaced eagerly with cocaine, discos and sex, towards the dawn of the 1980s in an ever increasing change into the digital age and the 'everybody is a winner' of the entrepreneurial 1990s. Donatella has spread those three decades onto a Resort set piece with some of the finest cuts seen so far for digital fashion week.  Truly an impressive collection, with interfused Spring 2021 menswear pieces also attached, it is, as described, represents a bluntness of styles that do not hold any subtle degrees.  The Versace glamor express is on overkill, but fascinating to observe.