This is an episode of the Glossy Fashion Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the fashion industry. More from the series →
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On the Glossy Podcast, senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi and international reporter Zofia Zwieglinska break down some of the biggest fashion news of the week.
This week, we take a look at the competition between Warby Parker and Google’s soon-to-launch AI-powered smart glasses and the established competitor, Meta and Ray-Ban. The latter has already sold 2 million units.
We also discuss the appointment of Rosie Huntington-Whitely as the new fashion director of the Revolve-owned retailer FWRD, and the Italian investigation into the Swatch Company and Citizen over allegations surrounding their pricing practices.
Later in the episode, we are joined by editor-in-chief Jill Manoff to dive deep into what’s been going on at Versace in the last year. After the Prada deal to acquire Versace was finalized last week, the fashion industry was shocked by the abrupt ousting of creative director Dario Vitale barely nine months after he joined the brand.
Below are a few highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Manoff: “They clearly have lost value over the years. Capri Holdings purchased Versace for $2.1 billion in 2018 and then sold it for $1.4 billion. There’s a lot of talk about it being a lot of the same — the same gold, the same Medusa prints. Donatella Versace, who is no longer at the helm of the creative side, was aiming to keep the legacy of Gianni Versace alive, but it felt like a lot of repeating over the years.”
Parisi: “At the beginning of the year, Versace’s sales were down 15%. There’s a perception among luxury analysts that Versace has been trapped within Capri. Capri had ambitions of becoming the American LVMH, but when the Tapestry deal fell apart, that ambition warped and got stalled. They never really went full luxury. So Versace was the only real luxury brand in this stable of non-luxury brands.”
Zwieglinska: “The risk of Dario Vitale was whether [his sole Versace fashion] show was going to happen at all. It seemed like the decision to oust Vitale by Prada was already made when the acquisition happened, since he was out the moment the deal closed. So why let him have a show at all, considering whatever creative direction he showed wouldn’t be going forward anyway?”
Parisi: “Vitale has the shortest tenure of the many creative directors who have had short tenures at brands in recent years. Jonathan Anderson said at Dior that it will take four or five collections to fully realize what he wants to do at Dior. The fact that Vitale’s first collection at Versace got such good reviews makes me think that, given a few more seasons, he could have done something really cool for the brand.”
