Hedden also had a supple leather bomber draped around his shoulders—a vintage Gianni Versace piece from the ’80s, when the legendary designer was the king of hunky suiting and pectoral-baring silk shirts. “And you haven’t even noticed!” he said with a laugh. “Everyone is wearing one piece of Gianni.” And the studded leather cord belting his jeans across the front? “Obviously it’s a cock ring,” Hedden said. “There actually is a Gianni reference from the ’90s where he used cock rings to tie the pants together.” (Fact check: true.) “So it’s true to the heritage of the house and for Gianni being a queer artist.”
Suffice it to say I wasn’t a Versace guy just yet. Sex is a tricky topic on the runway. The best practitioners of sensual menswear today (like Anthony Vaccarello and Haider Ackermann) stoke passion with mystery and attitude. Go too far and the clothes just look irrelevant. Vitale’s debut actually showed very little skin compared to the va-va-voom Versace status quo. There were narrow muscle tanks and tailored short-shorts, seductively unfastened jeans, and lots of leather, but that was about as kinky as it got. More alluring was the way the surprising, stylish cast of characters wore black leather pants with brown leather shoes, and visa-versa, a sleazy ’80s throwback that Vitale described as “so Italian.”
(A moment for the great casting by Julia Lange: How cool is it that indie starlets Talia Ryder and Ava Capri—Vitale is a fan—made their catwalk debuts on Friday night for the house that Linda, Cindy, Naomi, and Christy built?)
After the show, Vitale—so new he’s still wearing Miu Miu—introduced himself to a gaggle of journalists. The museum, once a private home, was reimagined as if guests were walking in on the smoldering ruins of a hedonistic dinner party. There was a messily unmade bed in the middle of one room, and a bathroom vanity littered with makeup-stained swabs. Boxes of half-eaten sweets were arranged on Italian modernist coffee tables—the idea was to channel the disheveled charge of Pasolini’s Teorema. Vitale has a romantic and honest disposition. He mentioned a “tormented passion” for Caravaggio and likened the casting to bringing the gods down from Mount Olympus. “I wanted to see those gods and goddesses having an affair with the mortals,” he said. He also explained that he brought his own bed sheets for a cot in one corner of the house: “I needed to add something that was just me apart from the whole narrative.”
I’m not adding everything to cart just yet. Some of the tailoring veered into ’80s power suit costume, with stiff linebacker shoulders. The freshest and most appealing looks were the ones that seemed to fuse Gianni’s boldness with Vitale’s natural style sensibility. The contrasting, high-V-neck T-shirts poking out from under shirts and polos and sweaters? That was apparently all Vitale. “There was this rule when I was a kid that when you got dressed you always wore a T-shirt, a shirt, and a jumper,” he said. “So to me this is the fundamental of every wardrobe. I wanted to do something very sexy out of it. To do something that it’s so ordinary and classic and to make it sexy.”
I’m going to need them in every color.
