Designers showcase new energy as patterns flow

Milan

OFTEN as fascinating as what designers show on the runways here is doping out the business plays behind the fashion. Take the case of Versace.

In a backstage interview before presenting her lively and assured menswear collection for spring 2018, Donatella Versace noted that she had chosen to stage the show not in one of the theatres she has used in recent years, but rather in the family's 18th-century palazzo in central Milan. It was a homecoming as pragmatic as it was symbolic.

Next month is the 20th anniversary of Gianni Versace's murder on the steps of Casa Casuarina, his mansion in Miami Beach. Though the survival into the 21st century of a label he founded in the early 1980s is nothing short of miraculous, business miracles are not accidental. Three y…