Versace Fashion Fall 2010

Designer clothes Donatella Versace's Fall collection took a very different route from the pastel-colored goddess drapery that looked so pitch-perfect and confident in last Spring's drop-dead glorious incarnation. This time, maybe in reaction to general fashion talk about discretion, minimalism, pragmatic daywear, and longer lengths, she switched to dealing with tailoring. In the house of Versace, that's a trickier proposition, and now that body-con feels like it's on the way out, she committed herself to a tough task.


Her solution? Slicing and dicing fabric in geometric, asymmetric planes; zippering the pieces together; and coming up with half-short, half-long skirt lengths. It had the feel of an experiment only half realized, because before we were very far into the show, Versace had switched to pants in biker mode, and then into the familiar house territory of short-and-tight dresses. Along the way, there were great jackets and even a camel coat. Nevertheless, those aren't really the kind of visuals to get the adrenaline pumping at Versace. Even in times when all the fashion chat is about calming down and pulling back, there's still plenty of room for designers whose natural instinct is to fly in the opposite direction.