The Hands That Made the Safety Pin Dress
The atelier sits on Via Gesù, behind a door most Milanese walk past twice a day without noticing. Inside, on a Tuesday afternoon in late September, three women are bent over a mannequin draped in black silk jersey. One of them is holding what appears to be a fistful of oversized gold safety pins. Her name is Carla Brambilla, and she has worked for Versace for thirty-one years.
The dress in question is not the safety pin dress — that one, worn by Elizabeth Hurley in 1994, lives in a climate-controlled archive and has not been touched by human hands in a decade. This is a commission, a private client who saw the original at an exhibition and wanted her own. Brambilla is explaining, in rapid Milanese-inflected Italian, why the pins cannot simply be stitched through the jersey at regular intervals. The fabric is too fine. It will tear. Each pin must be anchored to a hidden silk organza understructure, hand-tacked at four points, then the jersey draped over it so the pins appear to be doing the work they are not, in fact, doing.
"People think it's about the pins," she says, switching to English for my benefit. "It's about what holds the pins."
Atelier Logic
Brambilla came to Versace in 1993, a year before the safety pin dress made its debut. She had trained at the Istituto Marangoni, worked briefly for Krizia, and was hired into what was then a much smaller atelier — twelve people, compared to the forty-three employed today. Gianni Versace was still alive. The house was still operating out of a series of connected apartments rather than the purpose-built complex it occupies now.
Her first task was to hem a pair of trousers. Bias-cut silk, notoriously unstable. She was told to use a slip stitch, invisible from the front, and to let the fabric rest overnight between markings and stitching. "Gianni would come through and look," she recalls. "He didn't say much. But if the hem rippled, you did it again."
The safety pin dress was not, as is often assumed, a stroke of spontaneous genius. It was the fourth iteration of a design Versace had been working on for months. The first version used metal grommets. The second, small gold chains. The third, a series of knotted silk cords that kept slipping. Brambilla was not in the room when Versace finally settled on the pins — that was his sister Donatella, his design assistant at the time, and a patternmaker named Lucia Fabbri who has since retired. But Brambilla was the one who worked out how to make the idea structurally sound.
The dress required an interior scaffold. Brambilla constructed it from multiple layers of silk organza, each cut on a different grain to prevent any single layer from bearing too much tension. The pins were anchored through the organza, not the jersey, and each anchor point was reinforced with a tiny hand-sewn bar tack. The jersey itself was cut in panels and draped wet — an old couture technique — so it would dry into the shape of the body and stay there. The whole process took sixty-eight hours, spread over two weeks.
"It wasn't revolutionary," Brambilla says. "It was logical. You have a problem, you solve it. The problem was that everyone wanted to look at the pins and ignore the engineering."
Division of Labour
Versace's atelier operates on a guild model that has more in common with Renaissance Florence than with the streamlined ateliers of Paris. There are no strict hierarchies. A première d'atelier does not exist in the French sense. Instead, the work is divided by specialism: one team handles tailoring, another does draping, a third works exclusively on embellishment. Brambilla belongs to the latter, though her actual title — responsabile delle lavorazioni speciali — translates awkwardly as 'head of special techniques'.
What that means in practice is that she is called in when a design cannot be executed through standard methods. A dress that requires hand-painting onto silk before it is cut. A jacket with sleeves that must be attached using a technique borrowed from surgical suturing. A gown embroidered with vintage Murano glass beads that can no longer be sourced, requiring each bead to be individually matched from the house's archive and then hand-applied using silk thread fine enough to pass through a hole half a millimetre wide.
She works alongside two other longtime atelier members: Stefania Galli, who has been with Versace since 1989 and specialises in knitwear construction, and Marco Tessari, the only man in the embellishment atelier, who joined in 2001 and handles all metalwork and chain-mail. Tessari trained originally as a jeweller. He can solder, he can rivet, and he can attach a gold-plated ring to a leather strap in such a way that it appears to float.
The three of them rarely work on the same piece, but they share a studio and consult constantly. On the day I visit, Tessari is attaching a series of miniature Medusa heads to a leather harness. Each head is cast in brass, hand-polished, then gilded. He is using a technique he describes as "invisible riveting" — the rivet passes through the leather and is compressed on the reverse side, but the head of the rivet is hidden beneath the Medusa's hair. It is the kind of detail no client will ever notice, which is precisely the point.
"If they notice the rivet, I've failed," he says.
The Question of Signature
Versace does not sign its atelier work the way Hermès does. There is no discreet artisan code stitched into a lining, no hidden mark that identifies Brambilla's hand versus Galli's. The house considers this a matter of principle. The work belongs to Versace, not to the individual who made it.
Brambilla is sanguine about this. "I don't need my name on a dress," she says. "I know which ones I made." She can walk through the Versace archive and point to a sleeve, a seam, a particular method of attaching a zipper, and say with certainty that it came from her hands. That is enough.
Still, there is a tension here that the house does not fully acknowledge. The atelier workers are not, strictly speaking, anonymous. They are named in exhibition catalogues, occasionally quoted in press materials, and photographed for behind-the-scenes content. But their names do not appear on the garments themselves, and they are not credited in the way a chef might be credited for a dish or a cinematographer for a film.
This is not unique to Versace. It is standard practice across the luxury industry. But it raises a question the industry has yet to answer satisfactorily: at what point does the hand that makes a thing have a claim to its authorship?
Brambilla does not frame it in those terms. She is a craftswoman, not a philosopher. But when I ask her whether she considers herself an artist, she pauses for a long time before answering.
"I make things that other people have designed," she says finally. "But I make them in a way that no one else can. So perhaps the question is not whether I am an artist. The question is whether the distinction matters."
What Comes Next
The atelier is training a new generation. Four apprentices, all in their twenties, all hired in the past eighteen months. They are learning the same techniques Brambilla learned thirty years ago: how to hand-sew a buttonhole that will survive a decade of wear, how to attach a sequin so it lies flat, how to read a drape and understand what the fabric is trying to tell you.
Brambilla spends two afternoons a week teaching them. She is not, by her own admission, a natural teacher. She does not explain the theory. She demonstrates the technique, then watches while they replicate it. If they make a mistake, she unpicks it and has them start again. This is how she was taught. This is how, she believes, the work is best transmitted.
"There are no shortcuts," she says. "You cannot learn this from a book. You cannot learn it from a video. You have to do it a thousand times, and then you have to do it a thousand times more."
One of the apprentices, a young woman named Giulia Moretti, is working on a sample piece: a black silk jersey panel with six gold safety pins. It is, unmistakably, a fragment of the 1994 dress. Moretti has been working on it for three days. The pins are in place, but the drape is not quite right. Brambilla leans over, studies it for a moment, then gently pulls the jersey away from the pins and lets it fall again.
"See?" she says. "The fabric has to forget the pins are there."
Moretti nods, unpicks the tacking stitches, and starts again.
Outside, on Via Gesù, tourists are queuing for the Versace flagship store. Inside the atelier, the work continues. A dress is being made. It will take sixty hours, perhaps more. When it is finished, it will carry the Versace label and no other. Brambilla will move on to the next commission. The pins will hold. The name will not appear. The work, as always, will speak for itself.
