The safety pin is still there
The safety pin is still there. Not the Liz Hurley version — that one lives in the archive and on mood boards for brands that weren't there the first time. This one is smaller, worked into the closure of a satin slip dress from Pre-Fall '23, barely visible until you lift the fabric and see how the pin threads through a custom eyelet. It does nothing structural. The dress closes with a concealed zip. But someone in the atelier decided it belonged, and now it's there, doing the work that Versace's loudest codes can't: reminding you the house has always understood that provocation doesn't require volume.
Most people still think of Versace as the Medusa, the baroque print, the safety-pin dress that broke the flash bulb economy in 1994. And those things matter. But if you only see the house through its own greatest hits, you miss the architecture underneath — the tailoring grammar, the specific way a sleeve is set, the material choices that separated Gianni's work from everything else coming out of Milan in the late eighties. The quieter codes are still operational. They're just harder to sell in a fifteen-second reel.
The Gianni era and what actually travelled
Gianni Versace opened his house in 1978 with a collection that leaned into jersey, not because jersey was radical but because he'd spent years working out how to cut it so the body moved through the garment rather than against it. The tailoring came later — those sharp-shouldered blazers, the nipped waists, the trouser that sat just off the natural waist and broke cleanly at the ankle. But the jersey work is what set the template. He understood that if you wanted a dress to read as constructed without looking stiff, you built it in layers: a silk georgette shell over a jersey base, the two fabrics pulling in opposite directions just enough to hold the shape.
The colour blocking came out of that same structural logic. Gianni didn't use colour the way his peers did. He wasn't interested in tonal gradients or safe contrast. He'd run a cobalt blue against a cadmium yellow, split the body vertically down the centre line, and dare you to look away. It wasn't about being loud. It was about using colour as a form of architectural emphasis, the same way you'd use a seam or a dart. The print work — the baroque swirls, the Medusa, the Greek key — came later and louder, but it was always secondary to the construction. The prints were decoration. The blocking was structure.
And then there's the chainmail. Paco Rabanne had done metal years earlier, but Gianni's version in the early nineties was different. He used aluminium mesh, not for armour but for drape. The dresses moved like liquid, which shouldn't have been possible given the material, but he'd worked out the weight distribution so the mesh fell in soft folds rather than stiff planes. It was technically a print collection — the mesh sat over jersey or silk — but it read as pure material innovation. Most of those pieces are unwearable now, not because the concept aged poorly but because aluminium oxidises and the mesh literally disintegrates if you're not careful. The few that survive live in climate-controlled storage and come out once every five years for a retrospective.
What Donatella kept, what she didn't
When Donatella took over in 1997, she had two options: rebuild the house in her own image or become a custodian of Gianni's vision. She did neither. She took the codes that had the most commercial torque — the Medusa, the safety pin as icon, the maximalist print — and turned them into a recognisable brand language. The tailoring softened. The colour blocking mostly disappeared. The chainmail became a reference point for editorials, not something you'd actually produce at scale.
But she also introduced new codes that have quietly become as central to the house as anything Gianni designed. The asymmetric neckline, for one. Donatella's version of the Versace dress almost always breaks the shoulder line — one side sits at the collarbone, the other drops to mid-bicep, and the whole thing is held in place with an internal corset you never see. It's not subtle, but it's not the logo either. It's a structural signature that only works if the rest of the dress is clean.
The other thing she brought in, or maybe just made explicit, is the use of matte jersey in evening. Gianni used jersey for day, silk and satin for night. Donatella started cutting gowns in a double-weight matte jersey that photographs almost like crepe but moves with more weight. It doesn't shine, which means it doesn't compete with the body. The effect is quieter than anything else in the Versace vocabulary, and it's everywhere in the mainline collections now. If you see a Versace gown that isn't dripping in embellishment, it's probably cut from that jersey, and it probably has an asymmetric neckline.
Where the house is now, and what it's willing to lose
Versace is owned by Capri Holdings, which also owns Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo, and if you know anything about conglomerate ownership you know the tension. The business wants consistency. It wants the Medusa on the handbag, the logo print on the sneaker, the baroque swirl on the silk scarf. It wants the codes that move product in duty-free and department store concessions. And Donatella, to her credit, has managed to keep feeding that machine while occasionally reminding people that the house can do more than print management.
The Spring '24 collection had a run of tailored separates — blazers and trousers, mostly — that used a Prince of Wales check in electric blue and black. The check itself is traditional, but the colour shift made it read as pure Versace. The trousers sat high, broke clean, and had a side zip instead of a front closure, which is a small detail but the kind of thing that separates a good trouser from one that just looks good on the hanger. None of it had a logo. None of it had a Medusa. It was just sharp tailoring with a colour sensibility that only Versace would attempt, and it sold poorly compared to the logo bags and the printed silk shirts, because of course it did.
The question isn't whether Versace can still do the quiet work. The question is whether the business model allows for it. The house makes its money on accessories and entry-level logo product. The tailoring, the asymmetric jersey gowns, the colour-blocked separates — those exist to maintain the editorial credibility, to remind buyers and stylists that Versace is still a fashion house and not just a licensing operation. But they're not the profit centre, and everyone inside the company knows it.
The pin, again
There's a dress in the current collection, a slip in black silk charmeuse, that closes with a single safety pin at the shoulder. It's not the safety pin dress. It's not trying to be. The pin is small, functional, almost invisible unless you're standing close enough to see the way it catches the light. It's there because someone in the atelier — maybe Donatella, maybe a pattern-cutter who's been with the house since the nineties — decided it should be. It does nothing the internal structure couldn't handle on its own. But it's there, a small gesture toward a version of Versace that doesn't need to announce itself, that trusts you to notice the details if you're paying attention. Most people won't. But the pin is there anyway, holding something together that was never in danger of coming apart.
