Donatella Versace opened Paris Couture Week with her Atelier Versace Spring/Summer 2014 show on Sunday evening, with Grace Jones as her new collection’s official muse and Lady Gaga as an honorary guest. Paying tribute to ‘The Goddess’, Versace’s line was all about starlet glamour and red carpet gowns with plenty of flesh on show and a stab at pushing a boundary or two thanks to embellishments that looked like skin tattoos.
Donatella explained before the show, “I was thinking of a woman who is powerful but also feminine and soft – a contemporary goddess…I love to combine the traditions of couture with the daring of contemporary life. I like a woman to look controlled and elegant, but also for her to have a provocative attitude. I love the couture – you can really have fun with it. The budgets are bigger so you can let your imagination run a bit.”
And it certainly showed in dramatic style on the catwalk as the show opened with the words “I am so fab, check out, I’m blonde, I’m skinny, I’m rich and a bit of a bitch” from Lady Gaga’s new track Donatella (the singer also happens to star in Versace’s spring ad campaign). The theme of the show also proved to be about plunging hoods as a nod to Grace Jones, with one of the stand-out pieces being an off-the-shoulder belted white fox-and-mink jacket featuring a mesh hood with sparkling crystal studs. Combining lengthy jersey silk dresses with oscillating jewels and mother-of-pearl pinks, purples, whites, nudes and chartreuses, the items were typically Versace: high gloss and maximum glamour. Tailor-made for the tanned rich-girl with expensive taste, heavy eye makeup, platinum hair and shiny stilettos, really.
Pictures: Isidore Montag
Or Lady Gaga. The singer, who wore a flowing black hooded dress herself, was seated in the front row throughout the show, giving Donatella a personal standing ovation and bow as she made a speech about the designer and the collection’s muse, Grace Jones, “A combination of performance, art and theatre, and her work with Philip Treacy, of course, was something I always truly admired. To see these hoods as well as these silhouettes and the show is sort of a full circle moment for me.”
Earlier, Gaga and Donatella had arrived on the Atelier Versace red carpet together looking like twins with matching platinum hair and outfits – Donatella flaunting a gothic, body-hugging black number and Gaga sashaying in a long black couture jersey gown.