Inherited Desire
Review of Versace La Vacanza 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director & Film Director Ferdinando Verderi with Photographer Steven Meisel with models Ella McCutcheon, Sabryna Oliveira, Betsy Gaghan, Alvise Candida, Jackson Roodman
There are fashion campaigns, and then there are fashion campaigns about fashion campaigns. With La Vacanza 2026, Versace turns inward, rifling through its own glossy mythology like a teenager pinning magazine tearsheets to a bedroom wall at 2 a.m. Steven Meisel returns to photograph the House once again, while Ferdinando Verderi orchestrates the campaign with the kind of self-aware reverence that understands nostalgia only works when it still carries a pulse. The result is “Versace Obsessed,” a cleverly recursive meditation on desire, legacy, and the peculiar way fashion history keeps seducing the next generation.
Set inside intimate seaside bedrooms suspended somewhere between dream vacation and adolescent fantasy, the campaign places new faces among relics of Versace’s visual empire. Posters from the House’s legendary campaigns line the walls like sacred artifacts. The sea glows endlessly outside open windows. Beds become stages for languid poses, flirtation, boredom, and longing. There is something wonderfully cinematic about the stillness of it all, as though these characters have spent an entire summer studying old Versace imagery and slowly started becoming part of it themselves.
Meisel’s photography wisely avoids over-polishing the fantasy. The lighting remains warm and lived-in, allowing the campaign to feel less like unattainable luxury and more like aspirational obsession. That distinction matters. In an era where many heritage houses sanitize their archives into museum pieces, Versace instead treats its history as something tactile and emotionally charged. The campaign understands that the brand’s power was never merely about glamour. It was about fantasy with attitude, sensuality with swagger, and fashion that made people want to participate in the world surrounding it.
The styling by Karl Templer reinforces this tension between memory and reinvention. Printed silks, denim shirting, slouchy tailoring, and flashes of black leather all nod to familiar Versace archetypes without collapsing into costume. Particularly effective is the campaign’s use of youthful casting against these loaded references. Rather than impersonating the supermodel era, the cast seems to inherit it casually, almost accidentally, the way younger generations discover iconic imagery online and absorb it into their own visual language.
What makes the campaign resonate most deeply is its understanding of cultural continuity. Fashion today often moves at such speed that brands become consumed with announcing “newness” before fully understanding what made them desirable in the first place. Versace takes the opposite approach here. The campaign doesn’t merely celebrate its archive; it demonstrates how an archive remains alive. The bedroom walls become symbolic mood boards of influence itself, where old campaigns continue shaping contemporary identity decades later.
If there is a slight weakness, it’s that the emotional tension occasionally feels almost too controlled. One longs for a bit more danger, a touch more chaos, the kind of unpredictability that once made Versace imagery feel genuinely provocative rather than elegantly referential. But perhaps that restraint is also part of the point. This is not the Versace of reckless excess; it is the Versace of legacy fully aware of its own image-making power.
Still, “Versace Obsessed” succeeds because it recognizes a truth many luxury brands spend fortunes trying to manufacture: the ultimate status symbol is not simply being seen, but being remembered. And few houses understand that seductive permanence better than Versace. After all, when your past still looks this good hanging on the wall, obsession begins to feel less like nostalgia and more like inheritance.
Creative Direction and Film | Ferdinando Verderi
Photographer | Steven Meisel
Models | Ella McCutcheon, Sabryna Oliveira, Betsy Gaghan, Alvise Candida, Jackson Roodman
Stylist | Karl Templer
Hair | Guido Palau
Makeup | Pat McGrath
Manicurist | Jin Soon Choi
Casting Director | Julia Lange
Set Designer | Mary Howard
Film DOP | Jeremy Hall