Dario Vitale’s initial encounter with the world’s most famous painting came when he was about 10 years old. It was on a trip to Paris with his parents, keen to cultivate their young son’s precocious cultural instincts with visits “to as many museums as possible,” he chuckles, harking back to the moment he laid eyes on the Mona Lisa for the very first time. OK, “laid eyes” is a stretch—he couldn’t actually see it. The baying scrum around the Renaissance masterpiece—and his height at the time—precluded a glimpse of her crook of a smile. Still, that didn’t dull the impression left on a young Vitale. “At the end of the day, I still left the room thinking I’d seen her,” he says, wistfully. “It was almost more about the idea of being in her presence than actually seeing her.”
A sweet anecdote, granted, but what of it? There are many other things you’re probably more eager to know about the 41-year-old Southern Italian, who—back in March—was nominated to fill one of the most illustrious of fashion’s many recent open gigs: chief creative officer of Versace. How has he stepped up to the task of helming a house with such a weighty legacy? How has he found the shift from being Miu Miu’s IYKYK secret weapon to becoming one of the industry’s most spotlit talents? What’s his relationship with Donatella? And, above all, what is his Versace going to look like?
Today, Vitale gives a tease of an answer to the last question: an evocative, eclectic creative project entitled Versace Embodied that brings together contributions from field-leading artists, image makers, and wordsmiths—Andrea Modica, Camille Vivier, Collier Schorr, Eileen Myles, Stef Mitchell, and Steven Meisel among them.
That Mona Lisa moment, as it turns out, is a pretty handy key to understanding what Vitale is trying to get at with this initial statement of intent. “I kept returning to that memory,” he says. “With this project, I wanted to ‘see’ Versace without seeing Versace—to create something that was more about the feeling and experience of a Versace attitude.”
Granted, there’s actually plenty to see here. And technically speaking, this isn’t the very first thing we’ve seen since Vitale arrived at the house; that came in Venice a fortnight ago, by way of Julia Roberts and Amanda Seyfried’s viral look swap. What’s notable about this project, though, is the near total absence of product.
Rather, you’ll find stark yet dream-like still lifes of found objects and emblematic Versace insignia, shot in and around the house’s spiritual home on Milan’s via Gesù. Earnest portraits excerpted from a portfolio shot over a months-long journey across Southern Italy. Sketches of nude subjects in inimitably Versace poses—and a photograph of a modern-day supermodel striking them, too. Poetic meditations on the experience of intimacy. Images plucked from deep within archives—Versace’s, naturally, but also that of one of Italy’s most important archaeological museums. There’s even a film of a queer line-dancing performance in LA.
It’s a decidedly elegant body of work—a consensus that won’t take much back-and-forth to reach. But why did Vitale feel compelled to make this the prologue to his chapter in Versace’s history book? Donning a marketer’s cap, my own mind darts to the fact that, while producing desirable objects remains an essential part of the equation, these days, there’s a good deal of pressure—responsibility, even—for luxury fashion houses like Versace to prove themselves as more than just product peddlers. Whether it’s sponsoring art institutions, producing films, or, as is the case here, putting out projects motivated solely by artistic intent, proving cultural cachet is key to justifying lofty projections of brand identity (and price points!).
There’s also no other value in fashion today quite as mantra-fied as ‘community’—and this, at a glance, could be seen as an attempt to echo that chant. Rather than a project co-authored by an orchestrated Versace clique, though, what we have here feels less rigid; more like a loose (though still carefully considered) constellation of distinct, decidedly accomplished creative voices, each offering their instinctual responses to a theme. “It’s almost like a dinner party,” Vitale quips, with “What does Versace feel like?” as the evening’s animating topic.
For Vitale, it’s amid this volley of calls and responses that the spirit of Versace—an ineffable humanity—resides. “There are so many facets of Versace’s values that are very close to me,” its perennial championing of “people that break the rules, but with grace” among them. Another is that with Versace, it’s always been about family—a very particular family, that is. “Versace embodies the values that any family should have,” he notes. “Healthy ones, like a sense of closeness, generosity, honesty, intimacy… but then there are also feelings that are more tragic: subversion, confrontation, even anger.”
For Vitale, what these terms boil down to are the hallmarks of a life—and lifestyle—lived fully and unapologetically, even if it may seem marred by contradiction to some. Others words he returns to in our conversation include: “maximalism,” denoting less an aesthetic sensibility, more a voluptuous approach to life; “mythology,” in both the classical sense and as an essential facet of the house’s contemporary narrative; and “sex,” not so much the physical act, or any porny eliciting of it, but rather the heady conjuring of the tactile and emotional “experience of having sex,” he says.
“It’s a word that’s very central to my process whenever I create a product,” Vitale adds. It’s a statement that checks out. This is, after all, the designer widely credited with having a hand in the oxymoronic, ultra-femme sexiness that defines Miu Miu’s current aesthetic. Its catnip micro-miniskirts and cropped schoolgirl cable knits haven’t just fueled the brand’s runaway success over the last two years—they’ve also become part of the wider contemporary fashion vernacular in a cerulean sweater kind of way.
Rather than a prompt for directionless provocation, Vitale sees sex as a central factor in fashion’s capacity to enable self-possession. “When you are in full control of your body and of your sexuality, it can be very controversial,” he says, citing an Italian saying about leading with virtue in public and keeping your vices concealed. “For Versace, though, that doesn’t make any sense. With Gianni, there was no private, no public; no wrong, no right—he was so unapologetic and so bold.”
These qualities serve as the project’s palette. Two hand-scrawled poems by Eileen Myles—whose involvement Vitale insisted on for the emotional rawness of their work and their longstanding status as a fierce advocate for the LGBTQ+ community—conjure an almost confronting sense of intimacy.
A white-walled photograph of Binx Walton—scantily clad and perched atop a chopper—taken by Stef Mitchell sees Versace’s libidinal charge filtered through a sensuous, feminine gaze, while Collier Schorr’s drawings simultaneously evoke tender warmth and carnal flair. This effect, Vitale says, is a consequence of the physical processes by which they’ve come to be. They’re “‘of the hand’, which comes with a certain intimacy,” he explains. “When you draw, something happens in your body—the way you shift your weight, the way you place your hands” to faithfully translate the subject at hand. “That’s why we asked Collier to draw rather than to photograph. It’s almost like she’s looking through another lens.”
Camille Vivier’s haze-tinged shot of the Medusa medallion on the door of the Palazzo Versace—the very first Medusa in the house’s history— directly evokes the myth of Versace. This is similarly echoed in an image from one of the earliest Versace Istante lookbooks, shot by Steven Meisel, the picture itself being one of the first in the canonised relationship between the American photographer and Gianni Versace. “I wanted to have something that was at the very beginning of Gianni, […] something that hints at what he would become,” Vitale says. “There’s a real vulnerability in those pictures—the root is already there, but the plant has yet to grow.”
There are some more anomalous components, too—a stark, black-and-white image of a bathing subject, for example, shot by Andrea Modica on an extensive wander across Italy’s Mezzogiorno. And then a joyful video of a choreographed line dancing performance by Olly Elyte (aka Pony Boy), an LA-based trans masculine creative director on a mission to queer the dance style. It brings an unanticipated levity to the project, just when you might be tempted to take it a little too seriously.
To my eyes, the project’s most arresting component is an image of a crowd marveling at the Bronzi di Riace—two bronze statues of strapping, bearded Greek soldiers in the buff. Dating back to about 460 BC—during the period of Greek rule along the Southern coast of Italy now known as Magna Graecia—and discovered in 1972 in Calabria (where the Versace family have their roots), they were unveiled at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome in 1982, four years after Versace’s founding in 1978.
In the picture, crowd members stare up at these god-on-earth figures, seemingly wracked by Stendhal syndrome; eddying feelings of wonder, shock, curiosity, and horniness. “I’ve always thought it was the most Versace picture ever,” Vitale grins. “There’s something so grand about these statues, standing there with their magnificent bodies, but people were looking at them almost as if they were gogo boys!”
“There’s a voyeurism there,” he continues. “It’s so intimate and yet so subversive—and you can see that people almost felt ashamed looking at them.” This implicit tension struck a chord, recalling Gianni Versace’s democratic perspective on bodily beauty. “He would compare the Nike di Samotracia to Marilyn Monroe, recognizing that both are beautiful bodies,” Vitale says. “And to me, that really goes back to this aspect of generosity that’s fundamental to Versace—this idea of embracing everything as beauty without judgment”—or hierarchy, for that matter.
Looking at both the people involved, and their contributions, what comes to mind is how atypical the project feels in relation to the commonly assumed understanding of what Versace is. Granted, this hardly applies to Steven Meisel, but Vivier, Schorr, and Myles aren’t names you immediately associate with the Versace-verse. And there’s a relative absence of the high-octane glamour and supermodel casting that Versace is essentially a byword for.
“An entirely other world than mine,” are the words that Myles chooses to describe their new relationship to the house. But that doesn’t mean they felt entirely detached from it. “Poetry’s a tad minimal. I do like baroque, and Versace always seemed that way to me, mega-rich. I’ve always been a huge fan of the Medusa logo. Dark female force, that is cool.”
Myles’s thoughts resonate with Vitale’s own on taking up his post. “I asked myself several times: Why do I feel so attracted by this house?” he said, “and that’s probably a question for everyone, whether you’re a customer or not.” After all, Versace’s presence in pop cultural lore is so significant that you don’t have to buy it to buy into the idea of it.
Seen in this light, this launch project becomes less about broadcasting a particular image or vision of Versace, and more about fostering a polyvocal interpretation of its essence—what it is, and what it could be. “I really didn’t give them many indications [on what to do]. I showed them my manifesto”—a “playful and wild and kind of open” brief, Myles notes—“but we also wanted them to have a very genuine response to those words. I see my job as one of provoking a reaction—sometimes any kind of reaction; one that comes from something simple, not too contrived or complicated.”
I’m curious, though, as to what Dario Vitale’s reactions were on seeing the images, the drawings, the poems that came in. This, I imagine, would have been his first external sense check of the vision he’d been honing—conceptually and materially—for months. “I actually felt more or less like those people beholding the Bronzi di Riace,” he laughs. “I felt attracted, questioning why Collier thinks ‘this’ is Versace, or why Eileen would write those words when it comes to the subject of intimacy.”
Questioning is, in itself, a conceptual tenet of Vitale’s Versace—and, as he asserts, of Versace more broadly. “It’s a company that always seeks questions more than answers,” a lesson he learned soon upon his arrival, directly from its matriarch, Donatella. “I deeply cherish my regular exchanges with her—she’s the body and soul of this company, so intelligent but also so light in spirit. She’s such a generous person,” he continues, “and so willing to have me explore. But she’s also very curious: she’s more likely to ask why I feel attracted to something, or why I see Versace in it. ”
Of course, what we see here doesn’t exactly dispel questions around what’s to come from Vitale in Milan in about a week, when he’ll present his first collection for the house by way of an intimate event, rather than an all-out show. Rather than lean into the trap of conjecture, we’ll leave the last word to someone who’s had more of a look in than most. “About to pivot while certainly bringing a lot of what we associate with Versace along for the ride,” Eileen Myles hints. “I think rich can mean more things than wealth.”
This story was originally published on Vogue.com.
