Dario Vitale Launches an Artisanal, Unfiltered Vision for the House—More Cultural Chorus Than Campaign
Versace has always thrived on audacity, and under Dario Vitale, the House isn’t stepping lightly into its next chapter—it’s plunging into the deep end. Today brings Versace Embodied, an expansive, eclectic, and unapologetically artisanal project that reads less like an ad campaign and more like a cultural dispatch. It’s a chorus of voices—photographers, poets, artists, performers—bound together by one theme: the essence of Versace.
The project’s first chapter acts like a prism, refracting the codes of the House into wildly different expressions. Camille Vivier lenses the Medusa at Via Gesù 12, the door to Versace’s Milanese heart, with her signature dreamlike surrealism. Andrea Modica captures youth along the Southern Italian coast, grounding the work in the Mediterranean heritage that defined Gianni’s earliest collections. Meanwhile, Collier Schorr turns inward, sketching figures in raw, unguarded intimacy—illustrations that thrum with Versace’s erotic intensity.
Vitale doesn’t stop at the present; he folds in the past, too. Steven Meisel’s Istante catalogue from Spring/Summer 1997 resurfaces like a time capsule, not as nostalgia but as a reminder of Versace’s long flirtation with cultural vanguardism. Beside it, bronze torsos and archival photographs of the Riace bronzes situate Versace within an art-historical continuum—myth, virility, and voyeurism colliding in ways only this House could sanction.
Yet it’s not only objects and archives; bodies take center stage. Binx Walton is caught on a motorcycle by Stef Mitchell, her lens turning a fashion shoot into a proclamation of independence. Olly Elyte choreographs space for dancers and models to move with unfettered physicality, embodying Versace’s unique fusion of rigor and abandon. Eileen Myles contributes a poem scrawled across Yves Klein blue—raw, personal, and transgressive, the words echo the House’s unfiltered sexuality and humanity.
It’s eclectic, even chaotic at moments, but that’s the point. Vitale isn’t offering a neat campaign narrative—he’s staging a conversation. A conversation between eras, between mediums, between bodies and gazes. In place of the usual glossy product push, Versace Embodied operates as a cultural force, drawing energy from the tension between art and fashion, intimacy and spectacle.
The result is something unmistakably Versace: fearless, sensual, and irreverent, but also deeply curious about what happens when you let culture in. For a House that has long walked the tightrope between high fashion and pop spectacle, Vitale’s first gesture suggests a tilt toward the artisanal, the intellectual, and the collective.
This isn’t a promise neatly tied with a bow—it’s an opening salvo. A preview of Vitale’s Versace: eclectic, questioning, unafraid to dissolve the boundary between campaign and cultural project. Versace Embodied doesn’t just dress the body; it asks what it means to embody Versace itself. And with this ambitious first chapter, Vitale makes clear that his House is one of dialogue, tension, and fearless creation.
