SO – IL for Versace

A flexible design scheme serves the creative process and shapes Versace’s showroom in New York, where collections stand out on a white background and multiply in the mirrors.

An extension of Versace’s New York offices, which overlook Central Park, the showroom is designed by SO – IL to display the brand’s numerous fashion lines and accommodate its wholesale operations.

The space was envisioned as a highly flexible environment that could be easily reconfigured to highlight the label’s many styles, tones, and material languages.

To realize this vision, SO – IL created a series of three dimensional movable display objects that break the space into smaller realms and pockets. The flexibility of the design scheme serves the creative process, allowing to merchandize their lines freely and to host meetings and collaborative work groups of varying scales. The display structures are guided by flush brass floor tracks, gliding and rotating through the space, and continuously redefining the surroundings and experience. Their movement creates a diversity of spatial relationships that offer a variety of environmental qualities from the intimate, for private meetings, to open, for major shows and events.

The movable display objects are custom designed and fabricated from CNC milled and folded HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) panels – a durable translucent plastic typically found in industrial applications. The plastic is assembled with thousands of brass screws, giving it both a structure and finish. The plastic’s subtle translucency is amplified by the changing daylight from three walls of windows, altering the overall appearance of the space throughout the day and revealing the objects’ skeletal structure and assembly.