January 16, 2006

Last season, Donatella Versace resuscitated the South Beach stud of the early nineties. For fall 2006, she stepped back to the previous decade, showing an array of eighties prints and colors to a front row of New York socialites who looked too young to remember them from the first time around. It was, according to the show notes, a deliberate evocation of "the male icon" her brother Gianni created in that decade, a notion reinforced by the revolving trademark Medusa head that served as a backdrop.

According to the house of Versace, blue is the color you'll want to wear, but it’s a hard techno-blue, which means it paired well with the leather that was the accent of choice. Skins were writ large in jackets (some dyed with an ombre effect), trousers, and a shearling-collared car coat, but the use of leather didn't stop there. It showed up as small diamond patches or stripes on some shirts. On another shirt, it was used to bind the blue silk, and it trimmed the seams of an elongated double-breasted coat in burgundy wool. Stretch pads on elbows gave the impression that blousons were designed for significant movement.

There was a similar pared-down urgency to the tailoring—sleek, one-buttoned suits in pinstripes or a Prince of Wales check. Another coat and jacket, also in Prince of Wales wool, came pre-wrinkled, recalling Gianni’s own experiments with the look—back in the eighties, of course.

— Tim Blanks