The fitting took place in Via Gesù, three days before the autumn/winter 1991 show

The fitting took place in Via Gesù, three days before the autumn/winter 1991 show. Gianni Versace stood behind Linda Evangelista, pinning a column of gold mesh that moved when she breathed. Naomi Campbell waited on the banquette, already dressed. Christy Turlington leaned in the doorway, smoking. One suspects that if you could bottle the voltage in that room and sell it by the ounce, you would not need to show the collection at all.

But Versace did show it. And the three women wore it as though they had invented it themselves.

This was not accidental. Versace built his house on a particular understanding: that a woman in his clothes should look more like herself, not less. The cut, the colour, the unrepentant shine — all of it existed to amplify, not to obscure. He needed women who could hold that charge. Women who understood that beauty, at a certain wattage, is a form of power.

He found them.

The blonde who made excess look disciplined

Linda Evangelista arrived at Versace in the mid-Eighties, when the house was still establishing its vocabulary. She had recently cut her hair — the crop that would become her signature, and one of the most consequential haircuts in fashion history. Versace saw in her something the camera loved: symmetry, yes, but also a kind of architectural discipline. She could wear the most unhinged piece in the collection and make it look like the only possible choice.

Consider the autumn/winter 1991 finale. Evangelista in that gold mesh column, flanked by Campbell and Turlington, all three in variations on the same metallic theme. The image has been reproduced so many times it risks becoming wallpaper. But look again at Evangelista's posture, the way her chin lifts just slightly, the way the dress moves with her and not against her. She is not wearing the dress. She is operating it.

Versace understood this. He gave her the pieces that required the most control: the chainmail, the safety-pin gowns, the Warhol prints that could overwhelm a lesser presence. She made them look easy. In a 1992 Vogue interview, she said she never felt more herself than when she was working. One believes it. The woman in the Versace campaigns — platinum, feline, composed — is not a character. It is a distillation.

The panther

Naomi Campbell met Versace in 1987, at seventeen. He cast her immediately. She would go on to walk more Versace shows than any other model, to close more finales, to wear more of the pieces that would come to define the house's aesthetic. The relationship was, by all accounts, familial. Versace called her his daughter. She called him a genius, which is the sort of thing models say, except that in this case the evidence supports it.

Campbell brought something Versace had not yet fully articulated: a physicality that was both balletic and predatory. She moved like someone who had never doubted her right to be in the room. The famous spring/summer 1992 show — 'Freedom! '90' playing, the supers walking in a pack — is often remembered as a collective moment. But watch Campbell's solo walk in the finale, the black gown with the Medusa buckle at the hip, and you see what Versace was really after. Not elegance. Dominance.

The clothes he made for her were not subtle. Leather corsets. Thigh-high slits. Prints that could be seen from the mezzanine. Campbell wore them as though she had been born in them. She still does. At Donatella's spring/summer 2018 show — the tribute collection, staged six months after Gianni's death had been revisited in the press yet again — Campbell closed in a gold gown that could have been lifted from the 1994 archives. She was forty-seven. She looked inevitable.

The American who brought restraint

Christy Turlington was the counterweight. Where Evangelista was architectural and Campbell was feral, Turlington was composed in a way that bordered on the spiritual. Versace, who was not known for restraint, found in her a reason to exercise it.

She wore the simpler pieces. The slip dresses. The tailoring. The black column gowns that other designers might have put on a coat hanger and called it a night. On Turlington, they became something else. She had a way of standing — weight on one hip, shoulders back, face neutral — that made you look at the garment's construction. The way the silk moved. The way the seam sat on the shoulder. She was not trying to sell you anything. She was simply there, wearing the thing well, and that was enough.

Versace recognised this. In the early Nineties, when maximalism was the house's calling card, he gave Turlington the pieces that relied on facture rather than spectacle. The bias-cut gowns. The tailored trousers. The white shirts that fit like a second skin. She made them look like the smartest thing in the room, which they often were.

There is a photograph from 1993 — Turlington backstage at the Milan shows, wearing a black Versace suit, hair pulled back, no jewellery. She looks like someone who has just concluded a business meeting and won. One suspects that is exactly the point.

What they built

The three of them — Evangelista, Campbell, Turlington — appeared together so often in the early Nineties that they became a kind of shorthand for the era. Versace dressed them. Testino and Meisel photographed them. The images entered the canon.

But the relationship was not simply transactional. Versace was building a language, and he needed fluent speakers. Women who could take a safety-pin dress or a chainmail gown and make it look like something a person might actually wear. Women who understood that fashion, at its best, is a collaboration between maker and wearer.

They gave him that. In return, he gave them some of the most arresting images of their careers.

Donatella, who took over the house after Gianni's death in 1997, has continued the tradition. She brings the supers back for finales. She references the archive. She understands that Versace without its muses is simply expensive fabric. But the original trio — the blonde, the panther, the American — remain the template.

One can see their influence in every casting Donatella makes. In every finale walk. In every campaign that tries, and often fails, to recreate the voltage of that Via Gesù fitting room in 1991. The clothes have changed. The logo has been refreshed. The house has gone public, been sold, been reimagined for a new century.

But the principle remains. A Versace woman is not a blank canvas. She is the entire gallery.