Versace Women’s and Men’s RTW Spring 2021

Not many runway shows are pulse-pounding. Versace’s are unfailingly so with their blaring music, leggy supermodels, fierce fashions and famous faces in the crowd — or even walking the show. Hello, remember J.Lo in that dress!

“We will have to do without a front row of VIPs. Something’s gotta give, right?” Donatella Versace said in an e-mail interview ahead of a livestream of her coed spring show, with Versace employees, all of whom tested negative for COVID-19, making up the sparse audience.

Versace went for an undersea theme out of a yearning for nature, escape and fantasy. “Right after the lockdown was lifted, we all saw that the world was actually recovering very fast by the lack of human presence,” she said. “The air was cleaner, the sky seemed of a deeper blue. I want it to stay like this.”

The collection was solid and very on-brand in its use of vivid Miami colors, bold prints and unabashed sexiness. Versace paired boxy pinstriped jackets with HotPants, poured models thin and curvy into tube skirts — and she never met a scuba top that went past the ribcage.

While some looks teetered into camp territory — the bedazzled clam-shell bra, for example — Versace clearly had fun with the theme, scattering rows of printed shells on an Eighties shell suit (LOL!) and adding squid-like ruffles to the sleeves and hems of narrow plissé dresses, and bigger, undulating flounces to miniskirts and two-tier ball skirts.

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