Confidence With Its Shirt Off: What Prada Just Bought.

"The paradox is that people think that if they wear something simple and non-saying, that somehow they themselves will emerge all the more stunning and beautiful from it. It's not true."

— Vivienne Westwood

I think about this quote more than I probably should. Especially when I look at Versace. Because for years now, the best thing a person could do with their body was disappear from it. Neutral. Correct. Nothing that asked to be touched, nothing that dared you to look twice. And I understand why — after 2008, logomania started to look like a liability, a way of announcing exactly how much you'd spent at the exact moment spending felt embarrassing. A decade and a half of influencer culture turned visible wealth into a kind of aesthetic vulgarity, and quiet became the smart move, the safe one, the one nobody could criticize you for.

But smart isn't the same as alive.

A reaction, held long enough, becomes its own orthodoxy. And somewhere in all that beige, we forgot what it felt like to want something you couldn't justify.

The Dress Was Never the Point

Elizabeth Hurley walked into a premiere in 1994 wearing a black dress held together, quite literally, by safety pins — gold ones, huge, deliberate, doing the one job a dress is never supposed to admit it's doing: barely staying on. She wasn't even in the film. Didn't matter. Every photograph from that night is her.

That's not fashion. That's a dare.

Six years later, Jennifer Lopez put on green silk cut so low it broke a search engine. Not because it was daring in the abstract — because every inch of that fabric knew exactly what it was doing, and did it without flinching. Neither dress was tasteful. Both were precise. The pins had to sit exactly where they sat. The silk had to fall exactly the way it fell. That's the part people miss: Versace's excess was never chaos. It was a controlled risk, engineered down to the centimeter, that happened to look uncontrolled.

That's the whole difference, honestly, between good maximalism and bad maximalism — a distinction I think is worth actually drawing instead of just gesturing at. Bad maximalism is volume standing in for a decision nobody made: ten loud ideas thrown at one body, fighting each other for attention. Good maximalism is one enormous idea, executed with total, humiliating conviction. The gold isn't there because more is more. It's there because someone decided, specifically, that this dress needed gold to say the thing it was trying to say — and then didn't blink.

This is the thing people get wrong about Versace: the excess wasn't the point. The nerve was the point. Skin, prints, all of it in service of a single idea — that getting dressed could be an act of seduction aimed at the whole room, not just one person in it.

That's not vulgar. That's confidence with its shirt off.

Wanting Something You Don't Need

Nobody needs a Versace dress. Nobody needs a Medusa on anything. That's the whole game of luxury — selling desire to people who already have everything they require. Every house has to answer the same unglamorous question eventually: why should anyone want this? Most of them answer it with heritage, or craftsmanship, or the quiet flex of a logo nobody outside the club will recognize.

Versace used to win that game in one move.

Look at it.

Not "consider the craftsmanship." Not "appreciate the heritage." Look at it — and feel something you weren't expecting to feel on a Tuesday.

Somewhere along the way, the house got embarrassed of its own hunger. Started softening the neckline. Cooling the gold down to something more "wearable." And once a brand apologizes for the thing that made people want it, it isn't becoming more sophisticated. It's becoming illegible. Forgettable in better fabric. Nobody is desperate to own a slightly toned-down version of a fantasy — they already have a beige coat for that.

Prada, of All Houses

Prada closed its acquisition of Versace in December 2025, and on the surface it's a balance sheet. Underneath it, it's almost funny — two people who shouldn't work at a dinner party, seated next to each other anyway.

Prada is cerebral. A little cold on purpose. Decades spent making fashion that's strange, sometimes deliberately ugly, always a little suspicious of its own beauty — it makes you think before it lets you feel anything. Miu Miu, in the same building, is doing the opposite — girlish, chaotic, in on its own joke, up 35% in sales last year because it knows exactly how to flirt with a customer half its age.

And then there's Versace. Not thinking. Not joking.

Just wanting to be touched.

I hope Prada is smart enough to leave that alone. Not correct it into another house-style, the way a parent company so often smooths a founder's original nerve into something more manageable. A house that runs on desire instead of irony isn't a problem waiting to be fixed. It's the one thing in the building that still knows how to seduce someone without a punchline — and Prada, for all its intelligence, can't manufacture that from scratch. It can only inherit it, or ruin it.

Enter Mulier

Pieter Mulier took over as Versace's creative chief on July 1st, straight off five years at Alaïa — and here's what makes this genuinely nerve-wracking instead of just newsworthy: Alaïa's sensuality was quiet. Disciplined. A body wrapped so precisely in fabric it barely needed to move to feel erotic. Restraint as seduction — his final Alaïa show was praised, specifically, for its control: seamless knits, sculpted silhouettes, nothing left to chance and nothing overstated.

Versace has never once believed in that kind of quiet.

So which man shows up in September — the one who builds desire out of control, or the one who's spent five years perfecting the art of not saying too much?

I don't know yet. But here's what I'll be watching for: does the tailoring make the skin feel inevitable, or does it cover it up in better lighting? There's a version of this where Mulier's discipline finally gives Versace's hunger some architecture — makes the gold feel earned instead of loud, turns spectacle into precision instead of replacing one with the other. And there's a version where he quietly turns the volume down, dims the palette, softens the cut, until nobody remembers why they were supposed to want it in the first place — Alaïa wearing a Versace nameplate, and a customer who can already buy restraint somewhere else has no reason to follow him here.

One of those is the most interesting debut fashion's had in years.

The other is a very well-made apology.

What I Actually Want

I don't want the old Versace back. Nostalgia is for people who've given up on being surprised.

I want to feel, watching a dress walk toward me, like I shouldn't be allowed to look at it and I'm going to look anyway. Not because loud is better than quiet — I don't actually believe that, and I don't think Versace should believe it either. Because we've spent a decade being told that wanting things is a little embarrassing, that the coolest person in the room is the one who needs nothing, feels nothing, gives nothing away. That restraint is automatically the more serious choice, when really it's just one choice among several, dressed up as maturity.

I don't believe that anymore.

I think we're tired of being tasteful.

I think we want to be touched.

And that's why, for the first time in a long time, I'm actually paying attention to what Versace does next.