Does Donatella Versace's new brand have anything to do with fashion? A new global launch that tells the story of fashion's decline in Europe
Donatella Versace is perhaps the most famous living fashion designer on the planet. There are certainly other celebrated ones, but her look, her hair, and her nature as a public figure are all signs of an iconicity that goes far beyond fashion and belongs to pop culture as a whole. It is perhaps for this reason that, as her first personal project following her creative directorship at Versace, the designer has entered into a joint venture with American group Revolve for a new brand whose name has yet to be announced and which will operate across several spheres: clothing, beauty, and even entertainment. But something doesn't add up.
We know neither the name nor the general identity of the brand, which is perfectly understandable given the timing. But what is more interesting is that we already know when the first products will arrive, what kind of products they will be, and, above all, where they will arrive. And here is the intriguing part: the first product from this new brand built on the celebrity of an Italian fashion designer will be a beauty product, and it will be distributed virtually everywhere in the world except Europe, reaching the US and Latin America, the Asia-Pacific region (i.e., China), and the Middle East.
This business decision may leave idealists puzzled, but it actually makes sense. And its very peculiarity helps give us a picture of what it makes sense to do today for a business operating in that ambiguous melting pot now referred to as "lifestyle" — encompassing more or less all those everyday objects and experiences that can plausibly be associated with a particular creator. None of this is new to fashion: exploring areas beyond clothing in the strict sense has been common practice since the 1980s. But it is curious both to see how those external areas have become more prominent than fashion's core business itself, and how today the global launch of a product with European allure (the selling point, after all, remains Donatella Versace's role) can, in practice, bypass Europe entirely. But why?