Here came the girls at Atelier Versace in Paris on the first day of Fall 2014’s parade of haute couture creations. In an ideal world if there was anyone who could fly the flag for la femme, now that the boys have had their fun during menswear, its Donatella, so it’s a good thing that couture is all about idealism. However snared in an ivory tower that idealism may be, Versace flirted with it for all its worth with haute attitude. Business as usual then. Word from Versace claimed that “fresh allure” was at the heart of the atelier’s offering this season and exactingly prepped garments frolicked with both sans pareil construction and a type of titillating deconstruction primarily concerned with flashing fragmented segments of the female form.
The quintessence of Versace in its element was long swaddling dresses with dramatically slashed partially full-frontal fronts, concealing only one leg in a provocative hybrid between bodysuit and ball gown. This was an assignation with a Charles James-ian ideology almost, especially when we saw more of the voluminous gowns of grand double duchesse silk, coated in silicon, of all things, and shaped liberally but gracefully with the body’s contours. The subsequent asymmetric aesthetics then became conscientiously graphic lead, in the most opulent of fashions, with furry trimmed gloves, yards of tasselled fringe and vinyl strips embroidered onto transparent bases, in a triumph of workmanship.
Patchwork fox and mink coats with crystal metal mesh in seabed blues engorged the body extravagantly, contrastingly so when set against the slinky infinitesimally sequinned skin-tight dresses tailor-made for the Versace vixen. Donatella’s dominating fashion brawn cannot be encased within even the tightest of bodice; instead Aphrodite fantasy flows freely from each creation to make Versace’s mythological couture odyssey an immediate highlight this season.
by Liam Feltham
Images courtesy of Style.com