Prada has secured Versace at a €180m discount amid market turmoil and after months of speculation
Prada has agreed to buy the Versace fashion brand for €1.25bn ($1.38bn) from the fashion conglomerate Capri Holdings.
It comes after months of speculation about a potential deal to combine the two Italian fashion houses and, more recently, rumours that the acquisition was set to collapse after market upheaval in response to President Trump’s tariff policies.
Continue reading...When she took over after her brother Gianni’s murder, few expected her to last 27 years and become a household name
When Donatella Versace took over the house of Versace in the aftermath of her brother Gianni’s murder, most observers privately assumed that her reign would be no more than a postscript. The bottle-blond younger sister, with no formal training and a drug addiction that was the fashion industry’s worst kept secret, was seen as a sentimental appointment by a shell-shocked family.
She proved everyone wrong. Versace is now defined as much by Donatella as by Gianni. She steps down from designing after 27 years as an icon in her own right, one of the most successful female designers in modern fashion history. Sober for 20 years, she has steered Versace to become a global household name, valued at $2bn (£1.6bn) when it was sold to Capri Holdings six and a half years ago.
Continue reading...LGBTQ groups laud fashion designer for speech in which she said ‘minority voices’ were under attack
Gay rights groups in Italy have praised Donatella Versace for speaking out against the government’s anti-gay policies in a heartfelt and personal speech while receiving a fashion award.
“Our government is trying to take away people’s rights to live as they wish,” Versace said on Sunday night, citing in particular a government policy that allows only the biological parent in same-sex couples to be officially recognised as the parent. “They are restricting our freedoms,” she said.
Continue reading...One of China’s best-known actors, Yang Mi, ends contract over controversy
The luxury fashion label Versace and its artistic director, Donatella Versace, apologised to China on Sunday after one of its T-shirts was criticised for identifying the semi-autonomous regions of Hong Kong and Macau as countries.
Versace said on its Weibo account that it had made a mistake and had stopped selling and destroyed the T-shirts on 24 July.
Continue reading...The designer’s SS20 collection once again proved her talent for making a splash; elsewhere, Dolce & Gabbana put the leopard into leopard print
From one 90s superstar to another … Donatella Versace dedicated her spring/summer 2020 menswear show to the Progidy’s Keith Flint in Milan at the weekend. The designer described the musician, who died in March this year, as “my friend, and a disruptor of this world”.
Homage was paid through the pounding soundtrack of the band’s monster hit, Firestarter, and models bearing his distinctive double mohawk and tinted bug-eye sunglasses. Although the revelation that Flint and Versace were friends may have come as a surprise, it’s not an incongruous pairing; Versace has been something of a disruptor herself. Picking up the mantle of the family business her brother, Gianni, established in 1978, she embraced full-blown sex appeal in her collections from day one, and has admitted in the past to not knowing how to do things quietly. Last year, she surprised the world when she announced that she sold her family company to Capri Holdings – formerly known as Michael Kors Holdings.
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