Rainbow-themed Pride Month collections have become par for the course for fashion brands, but Versace‘s latest collaboration is shaking things up with a surprise celebrity. Singer and Oscar-winning actress Cher, a close friend of designer Donatella Versace, has joined forces with the luxury brand on a limited line to raise funds for gender-diverse youth and their communities.
Fittingly titled “Chersace”, the T-shirts, socks and baseball hats feature a colorful version of Versace Bedding Set iconic Medusa logo. The collection’s highlight is a diamante T-shirt, hand-signed by Donatella and Cher and priced at $3,350. Other T-shirts are priced at $425, sporting printed versions of their signatures.
“Donatella and I have been dear friends for a lifetime,” Cher said in a press release. “It just felt right for our very first collaboration to be one about LGBTQ Pride and celebrating a community that means so incredibly much to both of us.”
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Cher has long been considered both an ally and an icon for many in the LGBTQ community, tracing her affinity back to a childhood memory.
“One day I came home and there were these two men in my living room with my mom and my aunt. They were doing their hair and talking, and I was thinking, ‘Why haven’t we ever had these kind of guys around? Because these guys are the coolest,” she recalled in a 2020 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
“That was my (introduction to) the gay world,” she said, adding that “gay people don’t feel like they fit in, and I never felt like I fit in.”
In that same interview she opened up about her son Chaz Bono’s gender identity, saying that it “wasn’t easy” when he announced he was transitioning in 2009.
In a tweet about the Versace collaboration, Cher wrote, “Special (love) 2 amazing son Chaz.”
A portion of sale proceeds from June will go towards Gender Spectrum, a charity which aims to create safe environments and provide support resources for gender-diverse children and teenagers.
Top image caption: Donatella Versace and Cher pose together at a fund-raising gala in December 1997 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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