Feature No. 02

Petrarch never met Laura

Versace laid out its own relics and called it Obsessed. Petrarch saw Laura once, in Avignon in 1327, and spent forty years writing her. On what a house does with its parts, and on who the crisis actually belongs to.

Versace released the second chapter of its Obsessed campaign on 31 July. Steven Meisel shot it. Each model inside a flat-lay of the house’s own relics, Vanitas volumes, Medusa heads, vintage Vogue covers, old campaign posters. The first chapter papered the walls with Meisel’s Versace advertisements from 1993 to 2004, which is Meisel photographing Meisel. Luxury Daily described it on 3 August as asking a new cast to live among the artifacts of its past.

Gianni Versace has been dead since 1997. Pieter Mulier arrived as chief creative officer on 1 July. The house put up the parts.

Petrarch saw Laura once. 6 April 1327, the church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon. He never had a conversation with her. He spent the next forty years writing her, and called it Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Fragments. Versace laid its relics out flat on a table and called it Obsessed.

Everyone is writing luxury’s crisis this year. This summer I visited the Houses, ateliers, factories across France and Italy.

Two needles on a single waxed linen thread, going through the same awl hole from opposite sides. One pair of hands takes a bag from the first cut to the last stitch. In the embroidery rooms the Lunéville hook is pushed down through, catches the thread underneath and pulls up a chain.

The work is being done at pace, on the pieces these houses are famous for, the ones the whole idea rests on, by people who are unmistakably where they belong. That is the finding. Belonging. The Hermès bag stamp. The maker is in the object.

Petrarch never met Laura

Luxury is not in crisis. The mass consumer is in crisis, and the marketing addressed to that consumer is in crisis. Luxury went back to the size it was built for.

Miu Miu is 33 years old, not a trend. Retail sales up 2.5 per cent across the first half and 2.6 per cent in the second quarter, measured against 40 per cent growth in the same quarter of 2025 and a 2024 that grew 93 per cent to 1.228 billion euros, with Middle East sales down 24 per cent across the half.

It is Petrarch. The internet takes the fragments. The masses still want. They want something else now.

Brancusi at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s glass box. I watched a run of influencers film themselves walking past the front display. They didn’t go in. American customs refused to admit Brancusi’s Bird in Space as sculpture and charged it 40 per cent as a manufactured metal object. He sued and won in 1928. That is the whole condition. The craft is intact, the ateliers are open, the jewellery is compounding, and the rooms are full of people who belong.

Petrarch never had Laura. Luxury is not the one in trouble here. It is still in the room, working, in centimetres.

Luxury is not in crisis. The mass consumer is in crisis, and the marketing addressed to that consumer is in crisis.

Petrarch never met Laura