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"Versace promises I will Dolce Vita" |
Lady Gaga's love for Versace is old news and vise versa beginning with the music video for "The Edge of Glory" where Gianni's archive creations were modelled and scratched around the set and then with Gaga herself posing next to Italian icon/designer Donatella (faaaaabulous darling!) more than once in Atelier Versace creations. Right after that you got some crazy-ass Versace costumes for her "Born This Way" tour and then came the release of artpop, in which the house got its own song named "Donatella", a musical celebration of the Versace lifestyle which is all about champagne, wealth, partying and being "a little bit of a bitch".
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Earlier this morning I woke up facing Lady Gaga posing for the new s/s 2014 Versace Campaign, after casually opening my laptop. And the kaboom had nothing to do with her being utterly beautiful in this somewhat lilac bondage dress (an iconic piece that made the house what it is) nor with the fact that her hairstyle is almost identical to that Donatella has for the past 200 years. It's all about Gaga being the ultimate Versace woman. The It girl of the Italian 80s bourgeois. And it's only eventual that she is the new face of the house and it's only great marketing that this combo was buzzing around for quite some time.
But as the extravagance of the 80s is long gone with all the Nintendos and yo-yo things, in times of financial and inspirational recession that kind of lifestyle is socially banned for good. Just like the new Gaga. The Gaga of the Artpop era. A non-mainstream but at the same time so mainstream figure which people love to hate, monsters love to hear and so on. Ingeniously so, the "dropouts" formed a gang, a gang firmly pinned together (Versace pin dress reference, hooray) that the un-coolness describing them (at least the one given to both by the masses) makes for a cool-cool combo that I personally adore.
The campaign was shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott.
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Listen to "Donatella" by Lady Gaga:
Watch "The Edge of Glory: