Simone Ashley Is Bringing Back the Bodacious, Body-Con Spirit of the Early Aughts
Simone Ashley goes 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 this second-skin look peaked around 2007, the year then-Queen of the WAGs Victoria Beckham wore a purple and silver Hervé Léger bandage dress to a Marc Jacobs show, and an unknown Cali- girl named Kim Kardashian – herself particularly fond of a body-con mini – appeared on the first season of her family’s new reality TV show.
The seeds for this busty trend were sown in Milan five years earlier, when Donatella Versace sent models, including Amber Valletta, down the spring/summer 2003 runway in graphic, clingy minidresses in snappy neon shades of pink, green, yellow and turquoise. About twenty years later, Bridgerton star Ashley turned up for the house’s pre-fall 2023 extravaganza in Cannes (a collaboration between Donatella and Dua Lipa) with a bold Versace minidress that evoked the spirit of that influential collection.
The star sat out front in a thigh-grazing pink and purple dress with a cheeky cutout detail and lime green straps. While Simone’s dress is from the pre-Fall collection (though not designed by Dua), the influence of the house’s color block spring/summer 2003 runway is evident.
In addition to 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 entire collection,” Tyler Hunter, who styled the video, <a href="https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/beyonce-crazy-in-love-Fashion“>tell 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 tribute to Bey at the ceremony in the same look.
Simone Ashley Is Bringing Back the Bodacious, Body-Con Spirit of the Early Aughts
