The fitting room on Via Gesù runs narrow and bright, three mirrors angled to catch every seam

The fitting room on Via Gesù runs narrow and bright, three mirrors angled to catch every seam. Donatella Versace stands to one side, arms crossed, while a woman in a linen apron circles a model wearing what will become, six weeks later, the gold safety-pin dress that opens the Spring 2024 collection. The woman's name is Lucia Bianchi. She has worked in Versace's atelier for nineteen years. She is the one who engineered the pins.

Not styled them — engineered. Each safety pin, oversized and cast in brass, required a custom clasp strong enough to hold stretch silk-satin under tension without tearing the fabric or popping open mid-runway. Bianchi spent four days with a metalworker in Monza testing spring mechanisms. She rejected the first two batches. The third held.

"Lucia doesn't speak much during fittings," a former studio assistant told Women's Wear Daily in 2019, referring to Bianchi's approach across multiple collections. "But when she does, the whole room stops."

Bianchi is one of roughly thirty-five artisans working full-time in Versace's Milan atelier, a figure that has held steady since the house's acquisition by Capri Holdings in 2018. She is not a designer. She does not sketch. Her title, premiere d'atelier, translates awkwardly — head of the workroom — and fails to capture what she actually does, which is to translate a designer's two-dimensional rendering into a three-dimensional object that will survive a runway, a red carpet, and the inevitable pull of a celebrity stylist's hands.

The Discipline

Bianchi trained at the Istituto Marangoni in the early 1990s, then spent five years at Genny, the Milanese ready-to-wear house, before joining Versace in 2005. She arrived during the period when Donatella was consolidating her vision after Gianni's death, a moment when the house was both honouring its archive and attempting to move past it. The safety pin, originally deployed by Gianni in 1994 on Elizabeth Hurley, had become shorthand for Versace's provocation. Donatella wanted to use it again, but differently — structurally, not decoratively.

Bianchi's first major project was a black column gown for the 2006 Met Gala, worn by Naomi Campbell, in which the pins functioned as closures along the spine. The dress required eighteen pins, each one hand-set and reinforced with an interior grosgrain stay to distribute the weight. The work took sixty-two hours. Campbell wore it for four.

This is the arithmetic of haute craft: effort measured in weeks, visibility measured in minutes. Bianchi does not appear to find this troubling. In a rare 2021 interview with La Repubblica, she described her role as "making the idea possible," which is both modest and technically accurate. A designer's sketch might show a dress held together by pins; Bianchi determines the gauge of the metal, the placement of each closure, the interior architecture required to make the garment wearable. She works in muslin first, then moves to the final fabric. She fits, adjusts, re-fits. She does not improvise.

The Signature

The gold safety-pin dress from Spring 2024 is, in one sense, a reprise. But the construction differs sharply from the 1994 original. Gianni's version used pins as embellishment, stitched onto a stable base. Bianchi's approach makes them load-bearing. The dress has no side seams. It is, essentially, two panels of silk-satin joined at intervals by pins, each one carrying a portion of the garment's weight. The model cannot sit. She can barely raise her arms above shoulder height. This is not a flaw; it is the point.

"We tested it on three different body types," Bianchi told WWD last September. "The pins shift slightly depending on the wearer's frame, but they hold. That was the challenge — making something that looks precarious but isn't."

The dress debuted on the runway in Milan, styled with minimal jewellery and no bag, which allowed the pins to read clearly under the lights. It was subsequently worn by Dua Lipa at the Met Gala, by Zendaya at the Venice Film Festival, and by a dozen other clients whose names Versace declined to release. Each dress is made to order. Each one is fitted by Bianchi or one of her two senior assistants. The house will not say how many have been commissioned, but a spokesperson confirmed that the waiting list, as of March 2024, runs four months.

This is not unusual for Versace's atelier work, which operates on a different timeline than the house's ready-to-wear and diffusion lines. A client orders a gown in January; it arrives in May. The delay is structural. Bianchi's team works on multiple pieces simultaneously, but each one requires fittings, adjustments, and what she calls "stress tests" — wearing the garment for an hour under studio lights to see where it pulls, where it gaps, where the pins begin to strain.

The Hands

Bianchi oversees a team that includes two senior assistants, both of whom have been with Versace for over a decade, and a rotating group of junior artisans, most of them recent graduates of Italian fashion schools. The junior members spend their first year learning the house's internal systems: how to read Donatella's sketches, how to source materials from Versace's preferred suppliers, how to execute the specific techniques — bias-cut silk, chain-mail draping, leather appliqué — that recur across collections.

One of Bianchi's senior assistants is Valentina Rossi, who joined the atelier in 2012 and specialises in embroidery and surface embellishment. Rossi worked on the crystal-mesh bodysuits that appeared in the Autumn 2023 collection, each one requiring approximately eighty hours of hand-beading. Another senior assistant, Marco Tedesco, handles tailoring and outerwear. He constructed the leather trench coats from Spring 2023, which used a technique borrowed from saddle-making to create invisible seams along the sleeves.

These names rarely appear in press materials. Versace, like most major houses, credits the designer and the design team, but not the individual artisans who execute the work. This is standard practice, and not necessarily cynical. A collection is a collaborative effort; isolating one person's contribution risks distorting the process. But it also means that figures like Bianchi, Rossi, and Tedesco remain largely invisible outside the industry.

The Next Iteration

Bianchi is fifty-three. She has no plans to retire, but she is increasingly focused on training her successors. In 2022, Versace launched an internal apprenticeship programme, modelled loosely on the French CAP system, in which junior artisans spend two years rotating through different areas of the atelier before specialising. Bianchi oversees the programme's draping and construction module. She is, by several accounts, a demanding teacher.

"She'll unpick a seam three times if it's not right," a former apprentice told Business of Fashion in 2023. "But she'll also sit with you and show you exactly what's wrong. She doesn't assume you know."

The Spring 2025 collection, shown in September, featured a new iteration of the safety-pin dress, this time in black leather with silver hardware. The construction is similar, but the material required a different approach. Leather does not stretch like silk; the pins had to be placed more strategically to allow for movement. Bianchi worked with a leather specialist in Tuscany to develop a softer, more pliable hide that could withstand the tension. The first prototype tore. The second held.

This is the work: testing, adjusting, testing again. It is not romantic. It is not fast. But it is, on balance, what makes a Versace gown a Versace gown — not the name on the label, but the hands that made the label possible.