The Medusa head gets all the press, but the real tell is the safety pin

The Medusa head gets all the press, but the real tell is the safety pin. Not the oversized Kilt Pin that walked out with Liz Hurley in '94 — that one became tabloid shorthand, which means it stopped being code. The actual tell is the small gold safety pin that used to close the interior pocket of a Versace jacket. Functional, yes, but also stamped with the house logo and finished in a way that suggested someone in the atelier cared how you'd feel when you reached inside for your keys. That pin hasn't appeared in a new piece in over a decade. If you find one now, it's because you bought the jacket secondhand or inherited it from someone who knew.

Versace's visual language is treated, even by people who should know better, as a single sustained note: Baroque, loud, gold, more. And the house has leaned into that reading, especially since Donatella took full creative control after Gianni's death in 1997. But before the logo became the product, before the Medusa was heat-pressed onto everything from slides to iPhone cases, Versace operated a secondary system of signals. Clients who wore the house in the Eighties and early Nineties knew them. People who only came to Versace through Kith collaborations or Dua Lipa's campaign work don't.

The original codes: construction, not decoration

Gianni Versace opened his maison in 1978 with a women's collection that centered on jersey — not the drapey kind favoured by his Milanese peers, but a taut, engineered knit treated almost like leather. He'd worked for years in his mother's dressmaking atelier in Reggio Calabria, and he understood how fabric behaves under tension. The early Versace dress didn't hang; it held. The seams were placed to guide the eye, often asymmetrically, and the hems were finished with a double-turn technique that added weight without bulk. You felt it when you picked the garment up.

The house's first signature wasn't a print. It was a construction method Gianni called tessuto metallico — a mesh of metal and fabric that moved like chainmail but sat flat against the body. He used it for evening dresses that photographed like armour, and the technique required a specific kind of lining (usually silk crêpe de chine, cut on the bias) to keep the metal from catching skin. It was labour-intensive, which meant it was expensive, which meant it stayed relatively quiet. You didn't see it on a billboard. You saw it on someone who'd gone into the Milan flagship and asked what was new.

By the mid-Eighties, Versace had developed a leather treatment he referred to as nappa stretch. It wasn't the first stretch leather — that credit belongs to Caumont, a French tannery — but Versace's version was thinner, almost second-skin, and it allowed him to cut tailored trousers and blazers that moved like knitwear. The finish was matte, not the high-gloss people associate with the house now, and it aged into a soft patina that looked better after five years than it did new. Those pieces didn't carry external branding. The label was inside, and the tell was how the garment moved when you walked.

The Medusa head appeared early — 1980, stamped into the first belt buckles — but it wasn't initially the logo. It was a decorative motif, one of several. Gianni used Greek key borders, Renaissance palmettes, and a recurring treccia (braid) detail that showed up on bag straps and the interior lining of coats. The braid was always done in two tones, usually gold and black or gold and navy, and it was jacquard-woven, not printed. When you ran your thumb across it, you felt the texture shift. That braid is still technically part of the house archive, but it hasn't been used in a mainline collection since 2013.

Donatella's era: louder, faster, less interior

Donatella had been working alongside her brother since the beginning — she handled PR, casting, and increasingly, the advertising image. After Gianni's death, she inherited a house that was commercially successful but creatively unmoored. Her first collections were careful, almost reverent. But by the early 2000s, she'd found a new gear: harder, shinier, more explicitly sexual. The logo, which Gianni had used as punctuation, became the sentence.

This wasn't a betrayal. It was a commercial decision that worked. Versace's revenue grew, the brand opened in Asia, and the Medusa became globally legible in a way the tessuto metallico never could. But the shift required letting go of certain things. The house stopped producing its own textiles in-house around 2005, moving to external suppliers for most fabrics. The safety pin disappeared. The treccia lining was replaced with a simpler logo-print satin. The leather trousers still existed, but the leather was thicker, shinier, more obviously luxury in the way that reads well on Instagram but doesn't improve with wear.

Some of this was inevitable. The fashion system accelerated. Ateliers that could execute Gianni's metallic mesh became harder to justify when you're producing eight collections a year instead of two. But some of it was also a choice about who Versace was speaking to. Donatella's client wasn't the woman who walked into the Milan store and asked about construction. She was the woman who wanted to be seen from across the room, preferably by someone holding a phone.

What remains, barely

There are still pieces, if you know where to look, that carry the older codes. The Virtus bag, introduced in 2018, uses a version of the treccia braid as a handle detail — not jacquard-woven, but embossed into the leather, which is close. The La Medusa loafers, which became a sleeper hit around 2021, have an interior footbed that's actually cork and leather, not foam, and they break in rather than break down. And occasionally, in the tailoring, you'll find a jacket with the old double-turn hem or a pair of trousers cut with the stretch-nappa ease, though the leather itself is no longer matte.

The house is in a strange position now. It's owned by Capri Holdings, which also owns Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo, and the financial pressure is to keep the logo front-facing and the product accessible. But there's also been a recent, quiet shift back toward craft language in the advertising — more shots of hands working leather, fewer shots of models in logo swimsuits on yachts. Whether that translates into actual product is harder to say. The Spring 2024 collection included a few dresses with hand-applied metal mesh, a direct callback to the tessuto metallico era, but they were priced at €15,000 and produced in extremely limited numbers. They weren't meant to sell. They were meant to remind you that the house still knows how.

The safety pin, though, is still gone. And that matters more than it sounds. It was never about the pin. It was about the fact that someone, somewhere in the production chain, had decided that the inside of the jacket mattered as much as the outside. That the client would notice. That noticing was part of the contract.

You can still find those jackets, if you're patient. They show up in vintage stores in Milan, sometimes in Paris, occasionally on Vestiaire if the seller knows what they have. The pin will still be there, small and gold and doing its job. It'll feel like a secret, which is exactly what it was.