VERSUS SPRING 2011

Suggestive schoolgirls imaginary plenty of paid and micro-flower prints it's the motto for Versus Spring 2011 collection which took place at Milan Fashion Week. A shot of youth on runway brought by Christopher Kane to Versus.

Kane is Scottish, of course, and a specialist in that knife-edge balance between innocence and eroticism, but if the tartan flagged something about his personal identity it was also an homage to his mentor. In 1994, Donatella used tartan for Versus, and as this spring collection kept coming out, so the merge between her work and his became yet more cleverly evident.

So it was with the wickedly tight, microfloral-print mesh dresses, ranging from tight to mid-calf, and spliced into complex cutaway necklines—all distinctly Versus codes from the nineties but brought bang up to date for a young audience. So it was with the shorter color-blocked dresses, with their flirty pleated inserts and minute spaghetti bows. And so it was, too, with the completely professional follow-through in the shoes, which were done in matching fabrics, in the sunglasses stamped with either tartan or mini flowers, and in the bags.

At the end Kane and Versace nailed the trends and the brand-heritage thing—and, most importantly, came up with some dresses that girls are going to fight each other to wear first. A very optimistic collection which showed us that the future of Italian fashion is in the right direction.