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Mentioned in this issue: doomed but popular leather belts, the problem with “just great clothes,” the most important shopping sprees of 2026 so far, Jessica Simpson’s short-lived edible beauty brand, tender cutie-patooties of the avant-garde, Barbies rocking Margiela tape belts, and more…

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The best fashion show I went to last year was doomed, exhilarating and historic: Dario Vitale’s first Versace show, which was also his last. The clothes were loud and brash and pretty ugly, but in a vital, inspiring way: nasty plunging tank tops, uncool Crayola colors, cocktail dresses stuck into underwear, mismatched tailoring squeezed into harmony with juicy layers of leather belts. Ugly clothes are so important, especially when someone knows how to make them beautiful by saying something unexpected. Vitale’s show seemed to ask: what if fabulous clothes were not about looking “right” or “now” but about freedom — the freedom to be whoever you want and look good by your own wild, hedonistic standards? With each look that sleazed on by, I felt puzzled and shocked by what Vitale was doing, which was thrilling.

The show was polarizing — many in the audience and online were unconvinced. But it had its champions, including designer and creative director Edward Buchanan. “I thought, Okay, well, someone got it f**king right!” he recalled. In Italy, where Buchanan is based, fashion risks are rarely taken, and younger designers are rarely heard from. “I was energized by the risk that he took to express something for a new generation. It was the chicest way to translate something which can be ostentatious.”

“We’ve seen so many clothes are just ‘great clothes’ — it’s just something minimal, that looks nice, makes you feel put together, quite bourgeois,” said Jesse Hudnutt, a merchandising consultant. “This had the air of the leather, it’s slightly punk, the bulge is showing. It had attitude.”

Harper’s Bazaar Executive Digital Director Lynette Nylander saw something steamy and real. “I love how gay it is. Fashion needed something homoerotic. This feels like, flash your bum crack and then go swimming at dawn because you’ve been out all night. There’s a lifestyle that he applied to the sexy.” (This is crucial: the late Gianni Versace was very open about his sexuality, and his designs treated men as macho sweeties and women as goddesses to be worshipped, not mere hangers for egotistical designs.)

Juliette Binoche in Vitale's power-clash tailoring. (Getty Images)

I left thinking: oooh la la, where can Vitale take this next?

We’ll never find out, because in December of last year, Prada acquired Versace, and shortly thereafter, Vitale departed. (The details of his exit remain mysterious, especially as Vitale’s pre-Versace role was at Prada brand Miu Miu; he essentially reunited and then split with his former employer. Versace CEO Emmanuel Gintzburger then resigned this week.) In February, Pieter Mulier, who created magic at Alaïa, and who is a protégé of Prada’s Co-Creative Director Raf Simons, was plugged in. You can read what I made of that swap here, but Mulier’s Versace is sure to be more slick, upscale and serious than Vitale’s.

You might think Vitale’s reign would be seen as a blip to gently mourn his collection as a promising but one-off curiosity, maybe something to smile at and ignore while we await the arrival of the big and cool Mulier.

But instead, Vitale morphed into a fashion hero. Haters changed their minds. Even more astounding, once the pieces began arriving in stores, a lot of people — ones I consider our bravest and most audacious dressers — started buying and/or wearing Vitale’s designs. They included Miyako Bellizzi, the Oscar-nominated costume savant behind “Marty Supreme,” and British Vogue’s Chioma Nnadi. Robyn performed in one of the naughty tanks and pop-tone jeans. Alana Haim slunk around in a screaming yellow cocktail dress while promoting “The Drama.”

Costume designer Miyako Bellizzi, who always knows what's next, wearing Versace earlier this year. (Getty Images)

The big shopping story this spring was the arrival of Matthieu Blazy’s first Chanel collections in stores, and how bananas women were going for his teal shoes and funky patterned bags. But the coolest people I ran into at the shows in March were also poking into Versace to get some of that ooey-gooey goodness.

In part, Vitale’s ouster threw his originality into high relief. “We’ve seen so much consolidation in fashion, and we feel like there is a way in which this consolidation is just making everything feel the same,” Hudnutt said.

To buy Vitale’s Versace was to put a thumb in the pompous eye of fashion’s mainstream. “Maybe Dario’s story is an everyman’s story of being f**ked over by the man,” said Nylander. “You’re the people’s choice, and you know you’re talented, and you know you’re the shit, but ultimately circumstances at play made it so you couldn’t thrive.” And fashion shoppers want to vote with their dollars.

Robyn performing in a big daddy leather vest covered with gold studs and high-waisted red leather pants: full-on Versace. (Getty Images)

But this is not just status signaling. The clothes are really, truly good and different. “He’s completely fearless when it comes to colors that I would think are disgusting. Like a pastel purple and a jewel-toned lemon is just not my jam at all, but he cleverly balances the color with the fabrication,” said Nylander. “When I put it on, I’m like, God, what am I doing? But it’s right, because of the way the colors are done.”

After the show in Milan, Buchanan recalled, “I went to the showroom in Paris because I wanted to see it up close, and I was like, Oh my god! The embroidery, his silhouettes, every detail, the mix of silver and gold together — I mean, the work was top notch.”

In fashion, almost everything plunked in front of you is the result of marketing and PR. Vogue and other magazines work hard to bring you the best designers; the Met Gala spotlights the biggest brands with the most money, and carefully points us to a few key smaller labels (like Colleen Allen, who dressed American Vogue’s Chloe Malle this year). Brands work tirelessly to get the right clothes on the right celebrities. This is also true of the brands that seem outside of fashion’s big machine and celebrity-editorial complex: those “cult labels” you discover through shopping newsletters are often gifting their products to the authors, who are then receiving a slice of affiliate revenue each time you buy something they “recommend.”

A lot of times, those brands are good. (Other times, you’re like, “Quit trying to make ‘fetch’ happen!”) But when someone is able to build momentum and support without that system, they warrant big time celebration and, I think, a bit of reflection from editors and shoppers alike. (I’d say Jil Sander’s Simone Bellotti, New York’s Rachel Comey and Eckhaus Latta, London’s Simone Rocha and John Alexander Skelton, Paris’s Duran Lantink of Jean Paul Gaultier and American-in-England Conner Ives are other names to know here.) The best way to pursue and support people outside the highly scripted fashion bubble is to wear their clothes.

Lynette Nylander in her garish Versace skirt and matching pumps. (Courtesy Lynette Nylander)

“I think for those of us who have been following the industry for as many years as we have, we sit up and appreciate when someone takes a risk and hits a home run,” said Hudnutt. 

“This is an industry that’s supposed to be open to new ideas,” said Buchanan. “We always talk about looking for the next thing. But are we really looking for the next thing?”

Jesse Hudnutt acquired some real hunka-burnin-love leather boots. (Courtesy Jesse Hudnutt)

As for Vitale, the success of this collection, even without the designer there to promote it, has group chats and Instagram rumor-peddlers convinced he’s headed somewhere. Last week, the chatter was Emporio Armani. We’ll have to wait and see, which I’m happy to do: I’d rather look at and think about AND WEAR! good clothes than play dopey shareholder on a pretend Monopoly board I post about on social media.

For my part, I wonder if fashion and visual culture are, more broadly, entering a new phase, finally pivoting from quiet luxury to quiet, Luxury! — as if we’re finally ready to tame a misbehaved dog. Chanel and Versace are as different as Loonen water and Jessica Simpson’s short-lived beauty brand of edible body frostings, but they share something important: a sophisticated sense of humor and delight, different from the guffaw, maybe-cynical quality of Demna’s Balenciaga or Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe, which trickled down and out to memeable clickbait clothing that lent itself to weak tea social media analysis. It’s a new kind of funny business, where beauty is preferable to a luxe lobotomy!

A Barbie girl in an avant-garde world. (Marc Chatelard courtesy of Maurice Auction)

The elusive Martin Margiela is fashion’s Greta Garbo: he stunned us by rewriting the rules of fashion, telling us that broken plates were just as terrific for fancy clothes as France’s finest silks, and then, in 2008, genuinely disappeared. So it’s a bit of a pearl-grabber that he is auctioning off his personal archive of designs, prototypes, memorabilia and more at Paris’s Maurice Auction in early July. Even more surprising: the auction catalog, which is online in PDF format, is something like a memoir or annotated scrapbook.

What comes across is his sweetness, even sentimentality. This is particularly evident in the case of three Barbies included in the sale. Barbie was his first model, he writes; some of his first designs were for the plastic fashionista. Shortly after he launched his brand in 1988, he was asked to recreate three ensembles from his Fall 1989 show, down to the shiny industrial tape belts and crackle-painted Tabi boots, for Barbies. After they were shown, though, the dolls were lost. “I was in shock,” he writes. “I think I never could cope with that loss.” During the pandemic, more than 30 years later, he realized he still had the patterns and remade them.

Even more of a tearjerker: the Hermès pieces on offer (and there are many) are his mother’s personal wardrobe, comprised of pieces she selected during the six years Margiela designed womenswear for the French alpha house. “How could one imagine a more beautiful tribute?” the catalog asks.

Fashion is so alienating, especially to those of us on its fringes. We look at the big hats and silly silhouettes and think, Are these people for real? “Avant-garde” clothes often arrive on unsmiling models, peddled by self-serious designers. Maybe Margiela’s greatest contribution to fashion, or the lesson designers and observers should take away, is that he had none of that severity, and so much tender mischief.