Madonna Stars in New Versace Ad Campaign

Perched on the edge of her chair, fixing the camera with a smoldering gaze, she looks feral, poised for the kill.

She is Madonna, enshrined in a new advertising campaign showcasing Donatella Versace’s spring/summer 2015 collection. Lean and faintly menacing, she appears, at least in the lens of the fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, the image of candid aggression.

She is that and more, said Ms. Versace, whose latest print collaboration with the star (a 12-page portfolio set to break next spring in magazines including Vanity Fair and the American, French and Italian editions of Vogue) is but the latest expression of a running theme.

“Madonna says it best herself: She is unapologetic,” Ms. Versace said the other day. “She is her own woman, a role model who shows other women how we can do what we want, and get what we want, and do so for all of our lives, with no compromise.”

In the new ads, Madonna appears to have obligingly followed the path of past Versace mannequins, among them Amber Valletta, Christina Aguilera and, perhaps most vividly, Lady Gaga, each with a taut frame and a curtain of center-parted silver blond hair — an evident homage to the slight but sinewy, willfully showy Ms. Versace.

Few played the part as persuasively as Lady Gaga. Bandaged in lavender chiffon, and wearing a lacquered perma-tan, she posed this year for the Versace spring/summer 2014 campaign as an idealized Donatella, a way perhaps of returning the designer’s fanlike admiration.

Ms. Versace, after all, had dressed the singer for the “Edge of Glory” video and her “Born This Way” tour. And last year, Lady Gaga returned the compliment with “Donatella,” a single on her “Artpop” album, in which she croons: “She’s so thin. She’s so rich and so blond. She’s so fab, it’s beyond … .”

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