Simone Ashley is going back in time.
At the dawn of the new millennium, no celebrity party was complete without a dozen brightly colored, body-con minidresses on the dance floor. The craze for these second-skin looks reached a peak around 2007, the year in which then queen of the WAGs Victoria Beckham wore a purple and silver Hervé Léger bandage dress to a Marc Jacobs show, and a little-known Cali girl called Kim Kardashian—herself exceptionally fond of a body-con mini—appeared in the first season of her family’s new reality TV show.
The seeds for this bodacious trend were sown five years earlier in Milan, when Donatella Versace sent models including Amber Valletta down the spring/summer 2003 runway in graphic, clinging minidresses in punchy neon shades of pink, green, yellow, and turquoise. Some twenty years on, Bridgerton star Ashley turned out for the house’s pre-Fall 2023 extravaganza in Cannes (a collaboration between Donatella and Dua Lipa) wearing a daring Versace minidress that evoked the spirit of that influential collection.
The star sat front row in a thigh-grazing pink and purple dress with a cheeky cut-out detail and lime-green straps. While Simone’s dress is from the pre-Fall collection (although not designed by Dua), the influence of the house’s colour-block spring/summer 2003 runway is clear to see.
As well as shaking up women’s approach to party dressing, that Noughties Versace collection left its mark on pop culture. Beyoncé wore an orange and pink dress from the collection in the video for her era-defining solo smash “Crazy in Love.”
“Donatella sent us the whole collection,” Tyler Hunter, who styled the video, told Vogue on its 20th anniversary. “We wanted to create a whole fashion moment around it.” The star wore another dress from the collection to perform at the BET Awards in 2003, and in 2021 Zendaya paid homage to Bey at the ceremony in the same look.
