Versace’s New Collection Is What Neptune Would Wear to a Gallery Opening

From temple to tide

In Versace’s La Vacanza 2025 collection, the Mediterranean doesn’t merely whisper from the seams—it roars, ancient and eternal, in silk shirts and rhinestone-strewn tailoring. This season, the House unearths its roots in the mythic waters of Reggio Calabria and offers a wardrobe suspended in the golden hour between salt-stained beach and marble-clad city. It’s a homecoming. Not to a place, but a pulse.

Fashioned as if from tide and temple, the collection is a tactile palimpsest of Greco-Roman legacy and flamboyant sensuality. Versace, after all, has never been shy. Yet in La Vacanza, the maximalism feels elemental, as if pulled from the sea floor rather than a sketchpad. The pieces are not just garments—they’re relics of a life lived between jet streams and jasmine breezes, a lifestyle oscillating between the tactile luxury of a villa and the wild, bare-skinned freedom of a coastal summer.

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Myths in motion

Silhouettes sway between languid and sculptural, evoking that liminal moment when sunburnt ease transitions into city sophistication. Loose, cotton-wool tailoring—cut with a statuesque ease—anchors the collection with a softness that contradicts its grandeur. There are windbreakers that shimmer like wet pebbles, silk twin sets that reference both bowling alley bravado and shoreline leisure, and sarongs rendered with all the nonchalance of ancient robes. There’s something distinctly Greek in their cut, their confidence—echoes of statues turned human again.

Key among these is the Coral Theatre print, lifted from a 1993 Gianni-era sketch: a mermaid, mythical and masculine, astride a seahorse. It’s Erté meets Odyssey, rendered across pinstripes and loose tailoring in palettes of coral, vanilla, and undersea green. It might read whimsical if it weren’t for the austerity of its structure. This is fantasy tempered by architectural discipline.

Elsewhere, the Trésors de la Mer motif re-emerges—not as a direct quote, but as a mood, a lexicon. It doesn’t shout. It sighs. Baroque flourishes and underwater emblems appear in jacquard suits, their decadence understated. Rhinestones glint like shells caught in the sand; mohair evening suits are stitched with symbols of sea-born treasure. Even the nylon—light, practical, almost utilitarian—is elevated with Medusa hardware and mythic polish.

A coral covenant

But beneath the shimmer lies a deeper current. Versace’s commitment to marine biodiversity isn’t just lip service stitched into marketing copy—it’s embedded in the fabric of the season. 9,000 coral fragments adopted in French Polynesia, through their partnership with Coral Gardeners, tie the collection to a material activism. Each purchase, then, becomes not just sartorial but symbolic—a gesture towards the oceanic inheritance from which this collection draws its breath.

Perhaps that is the most poignant detail of La Vacanza 2025: its persistent reverence. For mythology. For marine life. For a house once founded on the collision of ancient culture and modern sensuality. This is not just a holiday wardrobe—it’s a meditation on memory. Of beaches where gods once walked. Of cities that still carry salt in their bones.

And in the folds of a loosely tailored jacket, beneath the shimmer of an embroidered pinstripe, that mythology breathes again.

Courtesy Versace