Versace's artisans, named

The atelier sits on the fourth floor of Via Gesù 12, above the showrooms and the archive vault, in a room that still smells faintly of sizing and steam. On a Tuesday morning in late September, three women are bent over a single dress — ivory silk faille, hand-pleated at the bodice, with a safety-pin trim that will eventually run from shoulder to hem. The pins are gold-plated, each one threaded by hand through a channel of fabric that has been reinforced with horsehair canvas. This takes time.

The eldest of the three is Giuseppina Vismara. She is sixty-one, has worked for Versace since 1989, and is the head of what the house calls its atelier straordinario — the team responsible for one-off pieces, runway prototypes, and anything that requires more than forty hours of handwork. Vismara does not give interviews. She has never been photographed for the maison's campaigns. Her name appears in no press release. But if you have seen a Versace gown that stops you mid-scroll — the kind with a neckline that defies physics, or a drape that seems to move independently of the body beneath it — there is a reasonable chance her hands shaped it.

Beside her is Carlotta Mancini, thirty-four, who joined the atelier in 2015 after six years at Dolce & Gabbana and a brief, unsatisfying stint in ready-to-wear. Mancini specialises in what the trade calls plissé soleil — radial pleating, the kind that fans outward from a single point and holds its shape without topstitching. It is a technique most often associated with Fortuny, though Versace has been using it since the early nineties, particularly in evening wear. Mancini can pleat a metre of silk charmeuse in under two hours. The result is permanent, achieved through a combination of heat, pressure, and a starch mixture she will not name.

The third woman is an intern, twenty-three, recently graduated from Istituto Marangoni. Her role today is to pin the safety-pin trim in place before Vismara begins the actual attachment. She is slow, methodical, and visibly nervous. Vismara does not correct her, but she does re-pin three sections after the intern moves to the next seam.

The Dress in Question

The piece they are working on will appear in Versace's Spring 2025 collection, though at this stage it exists only as a toile and a series of technical drawings annotated in Donatella Versace's hand. The drawings specify the placement of each pin, the depth of each pleat, the exact point at which the silk faille transitions to a lighter-weight georgette at the skirt. What the drawings do not specify is how to make these transitions invisible, how to ensure the pleats fall in the same direction under stage lights and camera flash, or how to keep the pins from snagging the silk as the model walks. These are problems for the atelier to solve.

Vismara's approach is straightforward. She builds the dress in sections — bodice, waist, skirt — and assembles them only after each section has been fitted, pressed, and checked against the original sketch. This is not how most ateliers work. The contemporary method, especially in ready-to-wear, is to construct the garment as a whole and adjust as needed. But Vismara trained under a generation of couturiers who treated each seam as a discrete problem, and she has not seen reason to change.

The safety pins, for instance. Versace has used them as a motif since 1994, when Elizabeth Hurley wore that dress to a film premiere in London. The pins were functional then — they held together panels of black silk that had been slashed and re-pieced in a way that suggested, but did not quite deliver, indecency. The dress became a tabloid fixture, and the pins became a house signature. Thirty years later, they are no longer functional. They are ornament, each one costing more to produce than the silk it appears to fasten.

Mancini's job is to ensure they read as functional. This requires a kind of trompe-l'œil thinking. The pins must sit at an angle that suggests tension, as though they are holding something in place, even when the fabric beneath them is fully seamed and structurally sound. She achieves this by inserting a thin strip of boning beneath each pin, creating a slight ridge that catches the light. The effect is subtle — most viewers will not register it consciously — but it changes the way the dress photographs.

Training and Provenance

Vismara began her career at Krizia, in the late seventies, when the house was still under the direction of Mariuccia Mandelli. She was sixteen, working as a sample machinist, and her primary responsibility was hemming skirts. She did this for two years before she was allowed to touch a bodice. By the time she moved to Versace, she had spent a decade in workrooms across Milan, learning the small, tedious skills that underpin the flashier ones — how to set a sleeve so it doesn't pull, how to interface a lapel so it rolls without creasing, how to make a zip invisible even in a fabric that shows every stitch.

Versace in 1989 was a different house. Gianni was still alive, still designing, and the atelier was smaller, more informal. Vismara recalls working directly with him on a series of leather dresses that required hand-lacing along the side seams. The leather was lambskin, less than a millimetre thick, and the lacing had to be tight enough to shape the garment but loose enough to allow movement. Gianni stood beside her for the better part of an afternoon, adjusting the tension on each lace, until the dress moved the way he wanted it to. She does not describe this as a formative experience, exactly. But she mentions it.

Mancini's path was more conventional. She studied pattern-making at Marangoni, worked her way through a series of mid-tier houses, and applied to Versace after seeing a job listing on a trade board. Her interview consisted of a single task: pleat a half-metre of silk organza using whatever method she preferred, then explain her choices. She chose a knife pleat, heat-set, with a backing of cotton organdie to prevent the pleats from collapsing. She got the job.

What the Atelier Does Not Do

It is worth noting what Vismara and Mancini do not make. They do not work on Versace's ready-to-wear line, which is produced largely in factories outside Novara and, increasingly, in Portugal. They do not make the house's accessories, which are handled by separate ateliers in Tuscany and the Veneto. They do not make the Medusa-head jewellery, the printed silk shirts, or the leather trousers that appear in most of the brand's advertising. What they make are the pieces that cannot be made any other way — the ones that require a level of handwork that is, by contemporary standards, commercially irrational.

The ivory dress, for instance, will take approximately sixty hours to complete. It will be worn once, for roughly ninety seconds, on a runway in Milan. It will then be photographed, archived, and possibly loaned out for editorial shoots or museum exhibitions. It will never be sold. The cost of producing it — materials, labour, overhead — will be absorbed into the collection's overall budget, justified not by direct revenue but by the attention it generates, the editorial placements it secures, the way it reinforces the idea that Versace is still, in some fundamental sense, a house of craft.

Whether this is a sustainable model is a question the atelier does not concern itself with. Vismara's job is to make the dress. Mancini's job is to make the pleats hold. The intern's job is to learn enough, quickly enough, that she might one day do the same.

The Next Piece

By mid-October, the ivory dress will be finished. Vismara will move on to a beaded gown that requires roughly two hundred hours of handwork, most of it spent attaching individual crystals to a base of silk tulle. Mancini will begin work on a series of pleated skirts for the pre-collection, a slightly more commercial venture but one that still requires her particular skill set. The intern, if she is lucky, will be offered a contract. If not, she will move on to another house, another atelier, and the cycle will repeat.

There is no romance in this, or rather, the romance is incidental. What remains is the work itself — the pins advancing through silk, the pleats holding their shape, the dress taking form under hands that have done this a thousand times before. One suspects Vismara prefers it this way.