Are Versace and Fendi about to present a collaboration?

According to many sources, Versace and Fendi could be about to present a collaboration next Sunday, on the penultimate day of Milan Fashion Week. As reported by Business of Fashion, last Wednesday Versace would have sent buyers, press and friends of the brand the invitation to a secret show signed by Donatella Versace, without specifying exactly what it was but raising all sorts of assumptions. The idea of a collaboration between Donatella Versace, Silvia Venturini Fendi and Kim Jones was in the air since, a few months ago, during her visit to Rome on the occasion of the Fendi show, Kim Kardashian had published on Instagram a photo that portrayed her together with Kim Jones and Donatella Versace inside the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome. Many have already called the potential collaboration LVMH's response to the hacking between Gucci and Balenciaga last spring.

The news comes at a particularly positive time for the group that owns Versace, Capri Holdings, which last July had raised its revenue projections for 2021 to $ 5.3 billion – exceeding analysts' expectations and also gaining 1.9% in premarket trading. Moreover, the potential collaboration would seem to testify that the link-up of Gucci and Balenciaga has not been a unique case in recent fashion and that therefore the synergies between the big fashion brands, even if not necessarily of the same conglomerate, could become a real trend in the year to come. The case of Gucci and Balenciaga is certainly the most striking but in past years collaborations such as that between Vetements and Comme des Garçons for the SS17 season or that of Valentino with Undercover for his FW19 collection. 

Gucci x Balenciaga

Valentino x Undercover

Vetements x Comme des Garçons

Dior Homme x Travis Scott

In general, the world of big luxury brands is becoming increasingly collaborative, with two remarkable examples consisting of the last Dior Homme show signed by Kim Jones and Travis Scott, which however had seen the contribution of other designers such as Matthew Williams and Yoon Ahn, and the birth of the duo Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. A trend, therefore, that if outwardly resolved in the collaboration of great "authors" of fashion reveals, internally, the birth of a new open and curatorial approach that challenges the idea of the creative singularity that until now has been the conceptual basis of storytelling and mythology that fashion has built around itself in recent decades.