Fashion
Olivia Dean Wore 4 New Versace Looks For ‘SNL’
Turns out, the man she needs is Dario Vitale.
It’s a rite of passage for any musician hoping to make waves in America — and on late-night television, specifically — to step to the plate for a live performance on Saturday Night Live. With her new album The Art Of Loving, Olivia Dean has crossed over from indie British fame to a bonafide must-know artist across the pond, and her sultry swing onto the screen at SNL was bolstered by yes, her simmering alto voice, but also a quartet of looks fresh from the Versace runway.
The new look at Versace, under the watchful eye of new designer Dario Vitale, is ‘80s maximalism with dashes of gay Miami Beach and sexy Italian primadonna combining for, as they say via press release, “uncomplicated elegance, unbound by inhibition.” For a promo video, Dean chose a chocolate-brown ruched strapless silk gown that, like her butter-yellow dress at the CFDA Fashion Awards, let her gorgeous skin and hair do the talking. Another promotional teaser saw her switch into another strapless dress, this time in a crinkled white satin. They both fell in line with her current style, which is to say, easy, no-frills fashion that lets her bubbly personality shine through.
Her performance looks, however, brought the dose of subdued glamour we clamor for. To sing “Man I Need,” she wore a minidress version of a gold dress from the runway collection with filigree patterning on the bralette (fashion nerds will recall the same pattern on Addison Rae’s Academy Museum Gala gown and performance looks). It matched the sunny disposition of the song while also showing off her legs as she shimmied onstage. The last look of the evening, for the heartwrenching “Let Alone The One You Love,” saw Dean wrapped in a custom Atelier Versace satin dress and chiffon cape attached to her wrists. For the sailing chorus, she lifted her arms up and appeared to fly.
So, a few key notes from the fashion parade Dean put on in Studio 8H: the New Versace Look is quickly becoming synonymous with the musicians you need to know in 2025 (Rae, Dean, and Lorde among them), and Dean’s breakout year is not only going swimmingly, but providing a fresh take on diva-adjacent style. While her lyrics and sound place her in the firmament of traditional British crooners, her fashion shows she’s not sticking to the past — she’s ready to meet the moment, because she is the moment.
